You can see the obvious trend in this graph. Moderate growth until 2008, then everything just skyrocketed. Then I pared back and realized I needed to focus on good, targeted traffic and not just traffic generally - to get the right kinds of visitors, the sort who become repeat visitors and are really interested in the site.
I used a variety of marketing/advertising techniques to do this.
I'm not a professional internet marketer, and I don't want to be - it's not my strength, it's not my interest, I'm an artist and movie director. Marketing and sales, for me, is a way of making people aware of my media work, and funding the continuing creation of said media content.
I've learned, and made some mistakes along the way, and I'll describe some of the free and cheap methods I've used to promote Hornbostel Media, so that you can use them too to promote your websites or whatever it is you feel like marketing. I can't guarantee these methods will work for you, I can only say that (to varying extents) the ones I'm listing below have all worked for me.
The single best advertising method is word of mouth. If people like your website they'll tell others and you get free advertising. And then they, in turn, tell more people and your traffic multiplies organically.
So what that means is CONTENT is important, you can pour a fortune into advertising a site but if the site is total garbage and has nothing of interest on it then your ad dollars are wasted. So the most important factor, is making sure you have a good website with good content, that people will want to tell others about. That will multiply the effect of any ad campaign you run.
The top 4 search engines, as of 2008:
GOOGLE (66% of search traffic)
YAHOO (20% of search traffic)
MSN (7% of search traffic)
ASK (4% of search traffic)
Just those four engines account for around 97% of all internet search engine traffic.
Note that if you want one of your pages to rank higher in search results for a given keyword, make sure that that keyword is in the text of the page (maybe several times) and in other pages connected to that page. Increasing traffic and the number of links to that page helps - even if those links are from other pages on the same website. So do keyword-rich ALT tags for images, they're far more effective than HTML META tags, as I've discovered through trial and error. Do all of that, and it'll help you in search rankings.
Works for me - if you search Google for my last name, "Hornbostel", this website (as of this writing) ranks #8 out of 257,000 search results, and it's been moving steadily upwards over time.
You can buy Google or Yahoo search credits (PPC advertising). I tend to do better with banner adverts but Google and Yahoo PPC works well. Here's Google's: AdWords/AdSense
Obviously this is where you get somebody to link to your website, and you link to theirs. Creates some traffic flow. It works best with other websites that have a similar topic to yours. For instance, I have a reciprocal link with Detonation Films. I also link all the websites I run together, with the biggest one (this one, Hornbostel Media) as the main hub.
There are also some banner exchange systems out there. Many of them work quite well.
If there's a web forum you frequent, you can load in a "sig" (signature) with a link to your website, similarly you can have an email sig. I am NOT advising you to spam, you should be a contributing member of the community. But this can be a good way to make sure that links to your website are out there on the web. I did this with the Myst/Uru fanboards, which I was already a member of anyway.
Simple and obvious. They're your most likely visitors. You may even want to print out business cards to distribute, so they can remember your web address. I ordered a pack of 500 business cards and I still use them now and then.
You can put ads in print reasonably cheaply, and people respect printed ads more. The bigger the ad spot, the more often it runs, and the larger the circulation of the publication, the more it costs - and the more response it generates.
Some good places to buy print ad space: Nationwide Advertising and Google Print Ads .
You can also buy ad space in ezines, which are email newsletters. This is NOT spamming, I don't endorse spamming. This is more like the online equivalent of publishing in a newspaper or magazine. The upside is, if they like your ad, they can just click the hyperlink, as opposed to turning on the computer, etc. Web advertising is often preferable when advertising a website! The other upside is you're not paying for physical paper and ink. I haven't done ezines much so I can't give you reliable guidance beyond that.
Google's search advertising works fairly well, with adWords you pay to have your ads clicked (PPC - pay per click advertising) and in AdSense you get paid when people click ads that are put on your website. Both are, of course, well-targeted. Transaction is about 15-20 cents per click. It can be as low as 8 cents, if you target relevant keyword combos that nobody else in interested in.
Project Wonderful is an advertising system based on bids, sort of like an eBay for ad space. You can buy ad space or sell it, and it's not PPC - you pay for exposure, which means you pay (or earn) the same regardless of how many people actually click the ad. If you advertise with PW, your best bet is to make your ad graphic as good as possible and targeted as well as possible, to maximize clicks. You can pull in semi-targeted, voluntary traffic at about 1 cent per visitor if your ad banner is good enough. This is an excellent advertising method and strongly recommended.
These are questionable from an ethical standpoint, I've messed with them some in the past but have rejected them since.
Have you ever been to a dead website and been automatically linked somewhere else? Or closed the site you're viewing and found another website loaded under it? If so, you've been exposed to redirects and pop-unders. You can pay to have targeted or untargeted traffic dumped onto your website through some services that deal in these.
Here's a typical example of this kind of system. Beware of scams and deals that promise colossal traffic for minimal cost because there are some sites that send you "hits" that aren't real people. Some Google searching for "redirects" or "pop-unders" will get you other websites that sell this type of traffic. Note that the cheapest you'll find this traffic is $10-$12 per 10,000 visitors, if those visitors are totally untargeted (i.e. 70% are not English speakers and the topics of the websites they come from are totally random) or about $30-$45 per 10,000 for English-speaking visitors that fall into a general category. If one of these sites is offering you a much better deal than that, you should strongly suspect it's a scam. I know because I've been burned by cautiously investing small sums of money in redirect services that turned out to be dealing in imaginary visitors.
The one I linked to earlier is one that gives targeted traffic, but look carefully while you sign up because there's a difference between asking for a one-time batch of visitors and a monthly stream (for which you are charged each month). These visitors are being dumped onto the website, they didn't choose or click to come here. That fact is why I've stopped using redirect and pop-under services. They annoy people and the quality of traffic you get from them is pretty bad. Plus it's just wrong.
These are systems that give you either traffic, at the expense of your time instead of your money. But you can usually buy exposure on traffic exchanges instead if you want to.
TRAFFIC SWARM is the biggest and likely best of these. Basically, as you visit their members' sites, you get ad credits that can be used to make others visit your website.
Another good one is TRAFFICG I used these two traffic networks to drive 1000+ visitors to my website in under two weeks.
Another one is EasyHits4U. It's just a solid all-around traffic exchange. They have a better-than-usual rate for purchased traffic credits.
Also, TrafficSplash, HitSafari, and so on. I've gotten thousands of visitors through traffic exchanges, not always through manual surfing but often by buying clicks.
Also, beware of pyramid schemes and unsavory get-rich-quick scams on traffic exchanges. A lot of people on these exchanges use them to try to make money using business offers - some of which are legit, some not. Be careful. By this point, IMO, I'm completely sick of seeing MLMs and garbage like that. They're immoral. And quite frankly, the traffic exchange people are not the kind of people you want on your website unless you want to be spammed a lot. I've gotten kind of sick of traffic exchanges. They get you traffic, yes, but it's mostly not the kind of traffic I really want. I've been shifting away from traffic exchanges lately.
Remember though, your website must be good, if there's nothing of value on it, you can advertise it like crazy and gain nothing - some websites are like Teflon, nothing sticks to them. Mine, BTW, have many people bookmarking them every day now, which of course means that when people come here, many of them like the site and plan to return later.
Anyway, try to make your website and business GOOD, to whatever extent you are able to. Good websites, and good businesses, have longevity. Anyway, I've benefited from the systems mentioned above but also have become increasingly cynical about many of them. Marketing isn't particularly enjoyable and I am moving away from it generally, except for the banner ads.
Just like my site benefits when you click ads on it (but I DO NOT want you to click ads just because that makes me money -- that's called CLICK FRAUD. Click only if you're actually interested in the ad.) or when you buy low-cost stuff in the store - all that helps me advertise the site further and make more movies, games, etc, most of which you people will get to enjoy FREE.
My aim here is to (in effect) harness an assortment of methods, both advertising and word of mouth ("Hey, check out "Duel 2030", or "There's this really crazy adventure game, "Traveler's Enigma", on this website...") to boost Hornbostel Media's traffic exponentially. Key to this will be taking whatever cash I can scrounge together and make the best content I can with it. Better and better movies and games, drawing more and more visitors and more and more cash so I can make EVEN better content. You know the drill. And as usual, 40+% of my income on this website goes to charity. Which makes the whole process that much trickier.
I also will mention that there are some PTCs out there. PTCs are junk, the more I think about it, so I don't recommend them. The payments are pretty pathetic but I thought for a while that by rotating them (running several simultaneously) you could do OK. But you can't. Even with the best PTCs you can't make much money.
So again, I'd like to remind everyone that yeah, I do make money off of this site but I need to because the site costs me money too. It costs $10/month in hosting, plus advertising costs, plus the cost of making movies ("Duel 2030", for instance, is costing me $550 or so to make)
My objective is NOT to maximize my profit, I'm actually losing money on this business fairly consistently so far. My objective is to give people free entertainment, to make movies and art and games and comics, and also to give whatever cash I can spare to places where it will make a difference in the world and save lives. I give away 45% or so of my income to charity.
I feel... uncomfortable... talking about all these advertising venues, and the business side of things. I feel weird admitting that I changed the color of the store section because of color psychology (black backgrounds subconsciously suggest darkness and make visitors distrusting of the vendor.), and that I optimized some of the ad placement and targeting to increase my horrible CTR.
Dealing with financial concepts is an unpleasant but necessary part of running a "media studio" because whether I like it or not, it costs money to create art, and you have to earn money to give it!
I'd love to see more people who are business-savvy and successful in their work, use that success and money to do good. More like Bill Gates (who, despite having some undesirable business tactics, does fortunately give away billions to help the poor and sick) than the Waltons who own Wal-mart (who are all billionaires and yet only give a few thousand dollars a year to charity, and keep all their employees' wages pathetically low to line their own pockets.)
So if you agree with Jesus' statement to "Love your neighbor as yourself" (as I do) and see that as a personal ideal to aim for in your own life, then I wish you the best of luck and I hope you succeed in the world because I'd rather see compassionate, loving, altruistic people in positions of power, wealth, and influence than the corrupt leaders who too often seem to wind up in charge of governments and corporations.
If you keep everything for yourself and exploit everyone for your own financial gain, you may become rich, but you won't be admired or loved or happy, and you won't have a lot of friends. (Psych studies indicate that people who give time and money to help others are usually happier than people who don't. I'm an exception, I'm mentally ill so I'll struggle with nasty emotions regardless of how much good I try to do.)
So I'm just going to advise you on that right now - go ahead and market your business, market your site, your message, whatever, use any or none of the simple marketing ideas I listed on this page, be clever and make money, but try to make your business an honest business that provides something of value to people. Don't scam or cheat your customers. Don't lie about what you're doing or make false promises. Don't mistreat your staff. Dishonesty and selfishness may result in short-term gain but it will tarnish your business's reputation and destroy it in the long run as your customers and employees leave you to make deals with someone else that they actually trust. Instead, be a force of good in the world and if you succeed, use your success in a way that will make history remember you as someone who (in some way) used your God-given abilities to make the world a better place.
A good example of who NOT to emulate in your business practices? My previous hosting company, IPowerWeb. Their customer support was very poor, their system bug-ridden, if you host your site with them, they may cause it to go down for extended periods of time for no reason. They also issued imaginary "upgrades" which gave nothing to their customers except an excuse for why their sites were going down temporarily. They used to be good, but somewhere down the line they became incompetent and greedy; now their userbase is imploding, their customers are leaving in droves and telling everyone how bad their company is, and some of those angry former customers have actually organized a class-action lawsuit against them. (!) If you visited my site sometime around April 2008, and you got an IPower DNS error message (as nearly half of my visitors did), I'm sorry about that, it's a result of the staggering incompetence and mediocre quality of IPowerWeb as a hosting company. I left IPowerWeb, and much prefer my current, much better, more reliable (and somewhat more expensive) hosting service with HostGator.
Well, anyway, go out there and become successful, work hard and be honest and do good, love God, and love others, and your life will be much richer as a result. I've tried both honesty and dishonesty, and in my experience, honesty works a whole lot better. I've tried to teach you a little bit about marketing, hope you use that knowledge wisely and run a good, honest business.
-Matthew Hornbostel