Tip for beginners on getting traffic using FREE stuff

Okay, many of the people in these boards already know the impact of using word FREE for attracting traffic (or sales), but since there's so many people asking "how to get traffic" I thought to remind about this - I believe there are some newcomers who perhaps would appreciate this story. And never know if some more experienced get reminded about this.

Basically, several months ago I created really fast a free mini-game called Highpiled. For me it was just a simple way to "refresh" my brain by doing something small & simple. Big game projects take time, but this specific game was produced in just 21 hours (bearing in mind that I outsourced art, music, engine, physics - and programmed only the core game play).

Anyway - I actually got a publishing request (they would have wanted more features) from one company but I thought to keep the game free & simple.

Without advertising the product (besides mentioning it in my main blog a few times) Highpiled got 254 visits in February, 350 month after that, 502 the month after that and now 991 visits in May. I did absolutely nothing (besides mentioning it a few times in my blog, and having link in one forum signature) to advertise the product - yet it has got visitors.

I stuck an affiliate banners ("get free games") to the site, but haven't done anything yet to monetize the game (and have no plans at the moment). What I would say, that even simple free stuff (such a fun little game) can pull some pretty nice traffic - compared the amount of promoting the site.

I saw the same thing happen to my newsletter subscribers: roughly the day I published a "free ebook on game production" my subscriber amount doubled from 200 to 400.

Bottom line:
FREE is good. It's pretty obvious, but if you have some free stuff you can give - consider using that to drive traffic to your site. We all like everything that's free.

 

Nice one, the game looks Cool

 

Yes, giving away freebies has definitely been the most effective way to build my list.

 

Simmilar thing happened to me, I wanted to refresh some of my PHP knowledge, so I created this simple CMS simpcms, published it on hotscripts and some others and now I'm getting more and more visitors each month + some people are already using the script for blogs

 

That's one of the keys to long term sustainable growth in regards to online marketing. PROVIDING SOMETHING THAT IS OF ACTUAL USE. That could be content, a service, or such in your case a unique game.

 

Yes, sure its a good way but very few people utilize it.

 

You are totally right, John Chow recently released a free ebook and I think his subscribers went up quite abit. Great post!

 

Fun game, learned something.