Thomas J. West Music

My website has been in existence about six years. For the first three, it was simply a home for my band compositions. Three summers ago, I shifted focus and began writing articles about how modern neurology relates to music learning and sharing my own experience with music pedagogy and practice tips. Having little or no money to spend on advertising, I looked for as many free ways to generate web traffic to my page as possible.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Works, But...

When I first started promoting another money-making opportunity on the web back in 2004, I used Google AdWords to drive traffic to that website. It was extremely effective at doing what it is designed to do - bring visitors from all over the world (or any geographic area you target) to your website. The problem with that is, unless the webpage you are sending them to has a sure-fire way of converting those visits into money in your pocket, you are literally throwing hundreds of dollars away.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) works so well because people search Google for keywords related specifically to your niche (specialized market). People interested in what your webpage is about come directly to you. Depending upon the goals you have for the webpage you are driving traffic to, you may or may not want to invest the money. You can easily burn through $50 USD in just a few hours if you do not limit the settings on your ads.

PPC is the "quick-and-easy" way to get people to look at your website, but it also has its own learning curve. There is terminology to learn (like impressions, CPC, CPM, CTR, and more) and there is a strategy, a science, and an art to choosing your ad text and the keywords you advertise on in order to get the most amount of traffic for the least amount of money spent. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts and advertising professionals literally spend hours analyzing the effectiveness of different combinations of ads, keywords, etc.

Long story short, PPC will work for you, but not without a regular budget and time invested in optimizing your ad results.

Getting Seen Through Article Writing

Without spending a ton on advertising, the quickest way to get people checking out your website is to start writing about what you are passionate about. You don't have to be an "expert" on anything (although if you write enough articles around a certain topic, you can start to build an online reputation as one). Just write about what you are interested in.

Getting exposure at the beginning is the hardest part. One of the first things I did that got me some serious looks was visitng BlogCarnival.Com and submitting my articles to blog carnivals that had a theme or topic related to mine. It was actually through blog carnivals that I started crossing paths with some music educators who were writing about the same things I was writing about. More on that later.

Depending upon your niche, you may also find success with posting at Digg. As a teacher and an "academic musician" rather than a "popular musician", I found few people were looking for what I was talking about there.

You can also submit articles to article ezines and search engines, but I find that practice to be a bit like giving your work away for free in hopes that people click on the "About the Author" link instead of connecting with real people.

For me, article writing led to writing reviews and referrals, which has garnered some interest from many music-related products and services. Those referrals have led to more refferals, and so on.

Social Networking - The True Pot of Gold

You can't get very far in American society today without hearing about Facebook and Twitter, and there's a good reason for that. Both have made it incredibly easy to connect and share content with hundreds, nay thousands of like-minded people - all for free.

I finally joined Facebook in January of 2009 after being talked into it following a college 20 year reunion. I was amazed at how quickly people found me and how I reconnected with people from corners of my life that had transpired 20 years ago! I was also pleasantly surprised that sharing content from my website with these friends and family awarded me with a nice bump in website traffic. It took me a while to figure out how to create a successful and active Facebook Group, but now that I have, every blog post I make or review I write immediately spikes my site traffic for a short time.

The real holy grail in all of social networking, however, has been Twitter. On the surface, Twitter appears to be a phenominal waste of time, and it certainly can be. However, Twitter makes it extremely easy to find and connect with people who are talking about the same things you are talking about. It also has amazing, if sometimes unstable, third party application support. The sheer amount of  "twitter tools" avaiable make Twitter extremely flexible. I joined Twitter in August of 2009, and now nearly a year later I am approaching 1000 followers and have connected with some of the most dynamic and active people in my profession.

Twitter is really the social media "crossroads." It's the one place online where you can easily connect with anyone in any industry and learn from them. It is one of the major professional learning tools of the 21st century.

Growing a website was never easier than opening a Twitter account and begin chatting. In the beginning, I used a tweet scheduler to automatically send music quotes, practice tips, and links to my website. This started attracting music educationally minded people to me, but it wasn't until I started having conversations with those musicians that the power of online learning began to take off. Twitter has really taken my own professional development (and my website traffic) into an upward spiral. It took me about a month to get accustomed to the way Twitter works (as I wrote about in this blog post) and it was well worth the learning curve.

The Key to Success in Building a Website: Building Relationships

In my days as a Network Marketer, I learned a lot about direct marketing and how advertising really works. A typical return on investment for traditional indirect marketing (advertising to the general public, or to a targeted segment of the public) is 1 percent - for every 100 views of your ad, you will get one person interested. Direct marketing (selling to people who know you personally and trust you) has a much higher return - somewhere in the 10 percent range. Coca Cola would absolutely love to directly market to you. Actually, Burger King got called on the carpet for breach of ethics by directly marketing to peasant women in Romania, Greenland, Thailand, and other locations to taste test their burger. The taste tests were made into a commercial campaign called Whopper Virgins.

While the application of direct marketing in this manner brings several questionable ethical issues to the forefront (and more free advertising for Burger King in the process), their advertising model is still based on the effective direct marketing model. As my mentors in direct marketing used to say to me: Build People - People will Build Your Business.

By attracting like-minded people to your website through social networking, you will be presented opportunities to write, share, review, suggest, and collaborate in ways that you could never think of yourself. I quite literally have a potential "to-do" list for my website that is never exhausted. New things pop in all the time, and all the while the focus of the site, while remaining primarily on music learning, has shifted in the past three years from being about neurology applied to music and practice tips to joining a growing number of professional and non-professional music teachers in exploring what music technology can do to bring creativity back into every classroom.

35 Powerful Ways to Get Noticed

This blog article you are reading now was inspired to be written after reading this article that came across the Webs.Com Facebook group a few days ago. It is a list of ways to get your website seen by people. I am happy to report that through my own trial-and-error and observation of successful private websites, I have done or continue to do 21 of these 35 items, and I have plans to do another 5 of them in the near future. If you notice, nearly all of these items are about building relationships with real people, not just gimmicky ways of getting attention (alright, sponsoring a contest is gimmicky, but it apparently works - I've tried offering incentives for my webcam lessons service - didn't work).

Connecting with real people online is the way to grow a website. One of the most powerful tips that this article didn't mention is maintaining a blogroll and links page. Websites get higher rankings in search engines the more websites are linked into yours and vice versa. Collecting useful links that pertain to your site's niche and trading links with other website owners is a very effective way to grow your web traffic. There are link exchanges like this one that can automate the process of collecting links to a certain extent, but again, you are not building relationships this way. Also, these link exchanges tend to create for you monstrous link pages that are not very useful to anyone. Quality over quantity wins every time.

If you have something to share with the world that is worth sharing, promoting a website is a great way for anyone to become a publisher. It's also a great way to meet fantastic people who have similar interests. Good luck with your site, and if you have any questions about how to make something happen, contact me. I can share with you what I've learned from the School of Hard Knocks.

This article (c) 2010 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.