Freebies: do they work?

One of the ways many businesses create “buzz” and try to get new customers is by doing giveaways or “freebies.”

On the one hand, freebies can introduce your work through word of mouth buzz, thereby introducing it to many people who may never have heard of you before or seen your work. On the other hand, people tend to devalue what they can get for free, (it’s not just men who are guilty of that, it’s a human trait) and they may never have been your customer anyway. So is it in your best interest to give away freebies? You decide.

Let me tell you a story.

My web design site was a freebie site for years. Online since 1999, my website was a banquet for those seeking freebie graphics for their own websites or web projects. I gave away free desktop wallpaper, free web ornaments and jewels, free banners, free linkware web set templates, free BladePro presets. I had a few CDROM’s which I sold online, as well, like my screensavers and special high resolution graphics, better web templates and desktop wallpaper. Needless to say, after I had developed a following, my traffic went through the roof. My server used to crash every other day. I sold some screensavers, but not very many. I sold some high resolution art discs, but not very many. I was content that so many people loved my work that they were downloading in huge numbers, sucking up bandwidth like hungry vampires. The emails poured in like barrels of honey: thank you so much for this wonderful free art! My desktop is now beautiful! I love my new web set! I told all my friends about you! And so on.

Even though the terms were clearly stated—for personal, non-commercial use only, and I begged people not to hotlink–my requests were blatantly ignored, more often than not. I had to password the directories to stop the hotlinking, and chasing down the terms violators was a tiring, depressing business. Then there was theft, where my work was printed and sold…but that’s another post for another time.

Little by little, I started to become sought after for web design and commissioned art pieces. I developed a reputation, and a client base. I sold a couple of screensavers a month, and every once in a while, I was hired to do a website.

One day my husband sat down and said, “we need to have a little talk.” Money was very tight, and we needed to find more ways to bring in income. Our web bills were huge; the bandwidth kept going up and up. The sales weren’t really covering the costs, and the commissioned art pieces and web designs were too spotty to be depended upon. We decided to remove the freebies and let my work stand on its own merit.

I removed all the free wallpapers, ornaments, linkware, banners, etc. I made my art site a professional online portfolio to display my work. And something amazing happened. I started to get hired. A lot. Serious buyers began to write to me for quotes on their websites or to create commissioned art pieces. They started to buy prints. They started to pay for the screensavers. And the hatemail piled up in my Eudora mailbox like black poison. Some people cursed me to hell for removing the freebies. I was threatened. I was told I would never sell anything because they would no longer recommend me or promote my work. Some emails were more plaintive. They begged me to keep the freebies online, or pleaded to make it available just for them because they were such loyal “fans.” The emails continued for about two years, warning me I’d ruined my reputation and that nobody would know about me any more because their co-workers wouldn’t see my beautiful work as they passed by their desktops.

My husband encapsulated it very simply: “the complainers were *never* your customers, and were never going to be your customers.” He was right.

That’s the day I started to make a living from my work. And I still get an email once in a while from someone looking for free desktop wallpaper. Some of them are whiny, some of them are nasty. When I do decide to answer them, I blithely tell them that I love my cats, and that I’d rather feed them Fancy Feast than Nine Lives. Or I ask them what they do for a living. When they tell me what they do—”accountant”–I ask them if they give their accounting skills away for free. That usually ends the discussion.

There is a happy medium between offering freebies and paid work. A smart website owner artist will have a little taste of the former to support the latter. It can be argued that I wouldn’t have had the traffic and buzz if I hadn’t offered all that free stuff for so many years. Perhaps that is true, and the free stuff is behind my healthy, sizeable, repeat customer base.

Moral of the story? By all means offer freebies. But make it a little piece of chocolate, not the whole box. When you value your work, you value yourself. And people follow your lead.

Splash pages and Flash-lose ‘em.

I love designing beautiful splash pages. Splash pages are “entry” pages for websites. They are usually very graphic heavy, have no text, and you click a beautiful piece of art to enter the site. Yes, they are beautiful. But they are hell on your search engine rating aspirations. The reason for this is that there is no text on them, and remember, text is “food” for the search engines. With a splash page, you are giving the search engines nothing to spider when they land on your site. Therefore, as beautiful as they are, don’t have a splash page. The first page a search engine should “see” should be rich in meta tags and keywords….lots of information and text to spider.

People who have to wait for a Flash splash page to load, or even a splash navigation system, are hurting themselves in a few ways. First, surfers are impatient creatures and hate waiting unless they have chosen to click on something to view it. If they are forced to wait for a navigation bar to load, or a splash page to run, they will get annoyed and click off. Secondly, the search engines cannot spider Flash code. They can’t read it. They are working on the issue, but it’s not a priority since Flash has lost a goodly part of its appeal since it first appeared. Today, most web designers are staying away from it because it is becoming passe.

I am not against Flash altogether, it has its place if used sparingly and creatively. For example, Flash photo galleries and slideshows can be a beautiful and effective way to display your artwork. However, make sure you *also* have plain text on any page you have Flash for the search engines to read. And keep your Flash OFF your index page. It will hurt you.

SITEMAPS: YES.
A sitemap is a page that has a listing of links that comprise every page of your website. A sitemap is really not for your visitors; it’s mostly for the search engines and specifically Google. Sitemaps are extremely valuable in helping search engines index every page of your site effectively. There are even software programs that can make you a sitemap by clicking a few buttons, one of my favorites is by Coffee Cup Software, and it’s called Sitemapper. Not very expensive, and I highly recommend it. A text link to your sitemap should be on every page ideally, but most importantly on your index.html page.

Once you have your sitemap created, open an account with Google. The easiest way is to open an email account with Gmail, Google’s web-based email. Once you have a Google account, you will see a link for webmaster tools. In this section, you can submit your Google Sitemap so they will validate your site. You can also read tons of cool traffic statistics once Google validates your sitemap. For more information about Google sitemaps, take out a Google account and read up on it or feel free to ask me.

ROBOTS.TXT: YES.
A robots.txt file is a straight text file you upload to your root directory. This is an important file because a search engine will look for this file automatically as soon as they land on your domain. If they find it, the chances are they will spider your site regularly and effectively increases threefold. How do you get a robots.txt file made? Simple. Either Google “robots.txt generator” or you can get one here. Just do the wizard and download your text file, then upload it to your root directory.

Protecting your art online.

If you are posting images–even if they are not high resolution images—online, do you know that they can be easily reproduced and stolen? Did you know that even a 500 x 500 pixel, low resolution jpg (72 dpi) can be scanned, printed and sold?

They can. Very, very easily. It has happened to me. More than once.

Granted, the reproduction will not be as fine or high quality than if it was printed from the original, but a thief can get very usable print indeed. And then he/she can resell it–as posters, postcards, greeting cards, you name it.

Do I have your attention? Good.

When you post your work online, remember this: anybody can steal it. And most likely, someday, somebody will. You can put in a no-right click script, jumble your code, etc., but a simple little screenshot can grab it. It can end up as a greeting card or on millions of desktops as wallpaper or even as a poster print somewhere, and you will have not seen a dime from it.

The very worst thing you can do is to post high resolution artwork online. Even if you have it residing on your server, Google can find it if you don’t know how to configure your robots.txt file on your website. So…NEVER upload high resolution, printing-ready images unless they are in a locked directory and not displayed online.

So how do you protect yourself?

There is only one way: by watermarking. Digital watermarking, to be effective, needs to be visible. A watermark is your name, website url, copyright, etc, printed across the image in diminished opacity. Few thieves will want to bother with the extensive retouching required to remove it.

There are a few ways to watermark your images. There is watermarking software available (Google “watermarking software”) or do it yourself in Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, Photo Impact, Elements, etc. I believe even Picasa has a watermarking feature.

To do it yourself, open the image you want to watermark. Create a new type layer. Type your name, “sample”, or whatever you want on it. Make the text white if the image is dark, and black if the image is light. Diminish the layer’s opacity to about 20-30 percent, you decide which looks best.

For beveled watermarks that are transparent, make the type layer in “multiply” mode. Go to your layers palette with the layer selected, and click on “bevel emboss.”