I just got a facebook account. I’ve been meaning to get one for the longest time. All I knew about it before signing up was: You could upload photos, and a lot of people where on it. THAT’S IT! Wow, I was a little surprised to find that it has a much as it does. I’m all ready using a few apps, slinging comments all over people’s walls, and trying to snag as many friends as I can (of course all people that I actually know/knew… for now).

Now, why the heck does this matter to anyone?

Well, I’m working on an experiment. I’ve heard that facebook is a great way to drive traffic to websites, if done properly. I’ve got little blurbs about this and my other two sites up there at the moment. I also uploaded several pieces of my artwork and posted a link to this in the gallery description saying that I’ve got more here. On top of that, the items that I sell on t-shirts, I’ve got links to their product pages.

Facebook Seems like it was
practically made for artists!

I knew facebook was popular but I had no idea. I can totally see how much potential it has for connecting people. Because of the way it works, it’s perfect for visual artists. I’ve said it once, and I’ll probably say it a thousand times: getting traffic to your site (and eyeballs on your art) is all about increasing your presence on the web. People can only view your work if they know you’re there! Facebook looks to me like a great way to get exposure. At the very least, it will keep you in touch with your friends, and your friends in touch with you… and your art. Some of my best customers (and by that I mean they buy a lot of stuff ^_^) are friends and family. Let’s face it, we could all use more friends.

Let’s recap

As an artist you can build your traffic very simply by getting a facebook account, staying in touch with friends and family, uploading samples of your artwork with links back to your website (for if they want to see more).

Question for the artistic masses:

“Do you use Facebook? Do you use it to build you traffic for your site and get eyeballs on your art? If so, how successful is it?”
I’m very interested to see how others are doing with this. I’ll keep everyone updated on my results with facebook advertising.

Hope that was helpful,
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

As we all know, the internet is a great place to expose your art to the global community. It’s cheap and easy to set up a simple gallery of your work. In fact, it might only take a couple minutes to a few days at most. However, if even if your artwork is the most amazing, revolutionary, and inspired stuff out there… you won’t get any actual eyeballs on your art unless people know you exist.

So how do you attract these eyeballs? There are a vast array of methods that are free, fast, and easy to set up. The first I’m going to mention is social art gallery sites. Here are a few that work very well for not only generating traffic but for also serving as your main gallery website:

www.elfwood.com is a fantasy and science fiction specific gallery community for both artists and writers. There are also a great deal of tutorial pages and a host of communities built around elfwood. The main thing people have a problem with is the genre restriction. However, it’s still a very awesome community and well worth your time if your particular genre of interest happens to be fantasy or science fiction.

www.deviantart.com is a site for artists from every genre. They also have a nice feature where you can pay a monthly fee and be able to sell relatively high quality prints of your work. They’re also HUGE, so you can get a lot of organic traffic through them.

www.flickr.com isn’t specifically for artists, but I have seen artists use them specifically because of the high amount of traffic that runs through flickr.

Now, I’m sure your asking “Why the heck should I use all these different gallery sites when I’ve got a gallery of my own?”… Well, do a quick search for “Nathaniel Summers” on google and you’ll find that this site isn’t listed in the top few pages. However, the #1 result is my elfwood gallery. (huh… I guess I need to brand my name a bit better here. :P )

These sites allow you to increase your web “footprint” such that you’re MUCH more visible on the web. They also allow you to get feedback on your work through comprehensive commenting systems. This makes these galleries as much about community as they are about the art.

Indeed, using community sites to build traffic is a time-tested technique that works every time to generate organic, targeted, and absolutely real traffic.

the best advice that I have for anyone trying to increase traffic on any website is to get out there and participate in the online community as a whole. Going and commenting on blogs, people’s art galleries, their myspace photos, just about anything. You can’t lose. Now, I’m not saying that you should spam, just get out there, be present and participate. You’ll gain a lot of nice targeted organic traffic this way.

My question for my readers today is: “What is your most successful method for generating traffic for an art-related site?”

What is trafficjam? It’s a content rating site much like Digg and Stumbleupon. However, the rankings are figured out by a combination of the click-through rate of posts in the BlogRush widget and the amount of time they spend on that page. Apparently it’s a big complicated algorithm that figures out just how popular an article is. What is means is that these little blogs can pull in traffic like the big guys.

Trafficjam has just launched and it’s getting MASSIVE amounts of traffic already. This traffic is then being funneled to the most popular blog entries from BlogRush users all over the planet. BlogRush not only gives you the ability to increase your exposure by putting links to your content all over the web, If you’re content is popular, it could potentially expose it to thousands every day! BlogRush has never looked better. If you’re a blog owner, there is NO REASON not to join.

Join BlogRush today, and start driving targeted traffic to your blog TODAY!

Also, bookmark trafficjam.com and view it often. Why? Because you can see very quickly what headlines are generating clickthroughs and what topics are hot. Write an article about a similar topic, link to hot posts, use similar headline strategies and you could drastically increase your clickthrough rates and your subscribers. TrafficJam is a priceless headline, content, and keyword research tool.

Now users can actually see the various free traffic services and rate them according to their own personal experience with them. They can also suggest new free traffic generating services for us to rate and to advertise for. On top of that every user can leverage the ENTIRE SITE to display their affiliate links. That’s right, when users advertise their FTW affiliate link, those that surf the site from their links will see that user’s affiliate links for those services. Even if they visit the site and come back to it weeks later, they will still see that user’s affiliate links.

It’s a powerful system with great potential. The best part is, there is MUCH more to come. I also intend to monetize the site so that users can not only use the site to advertise for them, but to also generate them actual affiliate sales to earn them money! And it’s all free, forever, I’ll never charge a dime.

Go on, check it out, it won’t hurt to take a peek. Free Traffic Works and it can work for you.

I really have big hopes for this site. I know it has great potential as a downline builder and that’s show I’m going to market it. It isn’t receiving much traffic yet, but I expect it to start building up fairly soon. I do want to add more features to it as I go which include but are not limited to:

1. The ability to submit new free traffic sites for people to advertise.
2. The ability of members to rank these free services and only display the top ranking services on the ad page.
3. An online community devoted completely to helping others gain traffic for free.
4. Add revenue generating affiliate ads that can turn members’ FTW ad pages into sales pages as well.
5. Add a linkback section that displays links back to members’ sites to help them with search engine ranking.

I think I’m having way too much fun creating new websites. I’m serious, it’s like a sickness. I’ve created 3 new websites in the last 3 months! Hopefully, these sites will keep me too busy to create any more for a while… although there is that one that I have been thinking about starting… a community site for local DFW Art Institute Online students who want to create games in order to include them in their resumes when applying to local game production companies… but I think I’ll put that one off until I’m actually able to create a game worth playing.

Seriously, web authoring is addictive! I guess I just need to work on generating content for these sites for now. I can create new projects later… let these grow a bit.

It is dedicated to increasing the quantity and quality of comments on Elfwood and Deviantart galleries. If demand exists for it, I will extend the use to blogs as well.

It’s actually a very unique and powerful idea. I took what I know about traffic exchanges and created an online community that helps get amateur artists what they need the most, comments and critiques. It’s a powerufl traffic generating tool. If I extend it for use on blogs as well… it will really open things up.

For now there are no ads or anything. If the traffic is substantial I may add some adsense and/or banners to either make me some money or drive traffic back to my other sites. For now though, completely ad free.

If you’re an Elfwood or Deviantart artist, check it out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. If I extend this for use on blogs, i’ll let everyone know.

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

I’m sure you all know by now that I am really insistant that commenting creates traffic. It just does. You leave comments on other people’s blog and they (and often their readers) will come and check you out. If you leave something particularly useful/interesting that is. In the mean time, you’re building links back to your site which drastically improves search engine ranking.

I’m currently using Mozilla Firefox, which I adore by the way, and a plugin that scrolls my RSS feeds randomly across the bottom of the browser. This way, I can easily find interesting articles from the… many blogs that I subscribe to. From there I am able to comment the heck out of these very deserving bloggers and… in the process I get links back to my site and possibly get a few people interested in following those links.

Now, that being said, I do not comment simply to get traffic. The real reason is that I’m just bored out of my mind… and it takes up some of my time. I figure, if I’m going to just being blowing my time surfing the net, then I might as well get out there, read some interesting articles, comment on them, and perhaps generate a little bit of traffic for myself while I’m at it.

As has been said before. If you want to be part of the internet community, get out there are participate!

This info is not really all that important, but I figured that everyone should at least know that for all the touting of free traffic exchanges that I make, that they know that using them with adsense is a no-no… unless they can set it up such that the ads are not displayed under certain circumstances.

Here’s the code I use:

First I define a variable early on in the page:
<?php $adsensecount = 0; ?>

Then I insert a little simple bit of code to tell whether or not the ad has been shown more than 3 times or has been sent from a traffic exchange:
<?php if ($_GET['te']!=”")
{
$adsensecount = 3;
} ?>
<?php if ($adsensecount <3) : ?>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “youradsenseaccnt#”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468x60_as”;
google_ad_type = “text_image”;
google_ad_channel = “”;
google_color_border = “adddff”;
google_color_bg = “000000″;
google_color_link = “adddff”;
google_color_text = “ffffff”;
google_color_url = “008000″;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
<br />
<?php $adsensecount++; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

And that’s it. Keeps me from getting in trouble, keeps my ads showing otherwise.

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

However, I did eventually get an account simply to find an old friend (which I did). The cool thing was that I discovered how important social networking sites are for targeted traffic generation… at least for personal sites. This website is full of my artwork and opinions. Thusly, it is something that many of my friends may be interested in. Admitedly, I don’t have much of a social life and I find social networking sites like MySpace, Elftown, and Zaadz to be great ways to make friends online.

Now, that being said, don’t spam your friends. They don’t appreciate it. I post information in relevent forums and I also post bullitns/blog entries that my friends can see. That’s it. Still, it starts you off with a decent visitor base to work from.

For artists, I would definately suggest getting Elfwood and Deviantart accounts. These sites are ranked very highly in the search engines. Getting accounts with them and posting a few “teaser” pieces can only increase your traffic. However, you have to stay active. You have to get out there and comment on people’s artwork. You have to respond to comments on yours. Get out there and get involved, it’s fun and it is very rewarding.

For bloggers it is important that you visit other blogs and comment on them. Every comment you leave provides a link back to you. This is important because it not only increases search engine ranking but also, if your comment is provocative enough, will prompt people to come visit your blog. BlogRush is also useful in this capacity. Read this article to find out how.

My advice boils down to this:
Get out there and get involved. Make your presence known in the web community. At the same time, don’t spam. I happen to think Spam tastes good in person… but I hate it online. If you are an unknown on the web, your website will also remain unknown. I see far too many blogs with no comments in them. I try to make a point to try and comment on something.

An invitation to all bloggers!

If you have a blog and no comments, comment on this post here and I will be more than happy to drop you a line. Feel free to look around my site in the meantime. I’ve got ADD pretty bad, and if I could sit down long enough write out all of this stuff, you shouldn’t be too bored reading through it.

Get out there, mix it up, have some fun. That’s what this is all about anyway. Oh… and I wouldn’t mind selling a few T-shirts while I’m at it. :P

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

The fun part is, if You’re also advertising your BannersGoMLM and BlogRush affiliate links then you can get people to sign up under you and build up your downline that can bring you even more traffic. In fact, even TrafficSwarm is set up so that you can earn credits from your downline. I know that MLM is considered shady in the eyes of most. It mostly just gets really bad PR. But that’s beside the point. All the free traffic programs I’ve chosen have MLM aspects, but they can all work fairly well without any recruiting. In other words, you can just do what you do and earn some traffic, or you can recruit some more people and earn a bit more.

Essentially what this article is about, is overcoming the shortcomings of traffic exchanges. Using this method in combination with traffic exchanges is very powerful. It’s at least worth a shot. The cool thing about banner exchanges and BlogRush is that they’re essentially “set and forget” traffic builders. You don’t really have to do anything after you’ve installed their scripts.

Hope this helps anyone interested in free traffic,
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel