Effective Online Advertising

[PianoMatt]

Hey! First post here!

Breaking the ice, my name is Chelich, I'm 19, and I'm a creative entertainer who does his work through the piano - I'm a pop pianist/performer. Basically, think of any pop song in the past ~5 years that sounds good on piano, or any majorly well known pop song, or classical piece - it's what I play! I love piano performance and being on stage and entertaining people in any way - it's what I love to do, and what I wanna do with my life. If piano was taken from me, I'd switch to a career where I'd be doing something creative and sharing it with other people, and being the best I could at that career.

My major goal right now is to be noticed by somebody who can help me with my dream goal: touring the US, UK, Australia, and Japan with my piano show. (Hey, if I'm gonna dream, gotta shoot for the top!) Flashy, 2 hour concert that's like a Vegas show, only pop music oriented and with a piano - the whole 9 yards. I thought putting everything online would be a good start, so I did - here's all my stuff, so you can see who I am and what I sound like:

• My YouTube account, with all my piano videos;
• My MySpace account, where I'm building a fanbase for my piano entertaining;
• My Website, which is like a portal to everything I have online.

So I know I can put as many videos as I want online and make my things as pretty as possible, but if I get no visitors and I can't share my talent with people, what use is it? I need to brainstorm methods of getting my online content out there. Right now, I can put up 50 videos, but if I only have 4 subscribers... well, it's essentially running around in circles. Great content + no visitors = like I'm throwing my videos into a black hole. I'd be better off not putting up anything.

That's what this post is for! I know a lot of you have blogs and online things, so I thought "why not make a post that's like the encyclopedia of no-cost, effective online advertising?" We can all help each other out by sharing the methods of advertising we found most useful, least useful, and most novel, in hopes of using some of these ways ourselves.

(I don't want to limit this post to just things in a blogging context, since some of us obviously have sites that are not blogs. )

Method #1 - Social Bookmarking Sites

Includes, but is not limited to: Digg, StumbleUpon, Techorati, de.licio.us, etc..

I like social bookmarking sites, in the sense that it can have a snowball effect: one person nominates it, then another, then another, and eventually if it picks up traction, you can get a lot of visitors in an extremely short amount of time. But as far as my experiences and results?

• I've had so-so results with Digg in the past when blogging. Sometimes I'd get a decent handful of visitors, but none of my submissions ever hit the goldmine. So... luck has a lot to do with it.
• I've had a lot better results with StumbleUpon, even after one of my pages of my blog was majorly Stumbled, it gained a lot of visitors in a short amount of time.
• Technorati, no luck... most likely stemming from not having a clue how to use it to get the best results.

Method #2 - Submitting Your Site in Different Places

Includes, but is not limited to: Search engines (and SEO), blog carnivals, article directories

Obviously it makes sense to submit your site to gotta have a website out there for it to get visitors! The only drawback to this is that some sites - like my MySpace, YouTube, and website - can't be SEO-ified. It just has to gain traction via word of mouth (which makes it all about content, content, content!)

And of course, blog carnivals if you're a blogger. I had decent luck with carnivals before - throw in as many relevant submissions I could a week, and then keep writing fresh articles to keep the visitors. I've never tried article directories, but I've heard of stories (through the grapevine) about duplicate content being a problem.


Method #3 - Posting Around the Web

Includes, but is not limited to: Commenting on blogs, websites, videos, and so on, forum posts, sites like Yahoo! Answers.

My experiences?

• I never had much luck with blog comments. I think it's a way to get links back to your site, but I never could get a decent traffic flowing back to my site... no matter how many blogs I tried to comment.
• Forum posts = incredibly effective. *points to this post* Throwaway posts are never good, /always/ posts that are insightful and entertaining. Builds up credibility, and people are fond of people who help them out.
• I've never tried commenting on videos yet, so the verdict is out on that. So is Yahoo! Answers and related sites, have any of you had luck with that?

Method #4 - Offline Advertising for Your Online Websites

Includes, but is not limited to: business cards, buying ads in the paper, getting written up in the newspaper for your site/endeavor, throwing a party for the web-business people in your area, etc..

I have /no/ experience in this area, but I'm trying to think outside of the box. It's worth throwing out there - the more people who know about your site, products, and what you've created, the better.

And that's all! The ball is in your court - what methods of advertising do you find the most effective? Least effective? If you could choose one or two ways of advertising, and ONLY do those for three months, what would you choose and why? Also, do you have any advertising methods that weren't mentioned in this main post that you'd like to share?

(And, feel free to share my music with anybody you know who likes it! *points to signature*)

[4Mind4Life]

Thank you for sharing your knowledge! Great post!

[Brutha]

We do you only upload them to youtube and not also to the other video sites?

[ellie]

Personally I think you need more than just playing the piano. You need to add your own personality by interacting with the audience more. Maybe talk to them more, let the audience know a little bit more about you each time.

Unforunatly the quality of the sound on youtube and your myspace page isn't that great. I know that you can't do anything about that really, but because of that I'm not going to sit and listen to your playing, because...well I could just get a better quality version somewhere else.

Have a look at vimeo.com there's a lot of social interacting going on there, compared to youtube. Plus you can have videos in HD. I find vimeo very captivating. See what they're doing on there, they do simple stuff, like lip dubbing and people love it. It's all about adding personality.

[skye]

thanks for the great article. i have trouble getting traffic on stumbleupon.