The solution came easily and with nearly zero effort.

Step 1: Register at Dropbox for a new account.  New accounts come with a couple of gigs of storage space.  If this new account is simply for hosting large files for  your website, then don’t bother installing the Dropbox software.  Instead, click on the login button without entering any credentials. You will be brought to another login page that also has a “Create an Account” tab.  Use that to create a new account.

Step 2: Login to your new account through the website.  Navigate to your public folder and upload the audio clips there.  Your public folder is automatically shared and publicly visible.

Step 3: Install the WordPress Audio Player plugin.  This thing has a swanky minimalist design.  Login to your WordPress account and navigate to the Plugins menu on the left and click “Add New”.  In the search box, type in “Audio Player” and click search.  I’m fairly confident that the first or second plugin will be the one we’re after. It’s the one by Martin Laine.  Select the plugin and click the Install Now button. Activate the plugin after installed.  Even if the plugin installation warns that it doesn’t support WP 3 (and you’re using version 3, right??) it does. The WordPress plugin installation process is awesome. WordPress is awesome.

Step 4: Back in Dropbox, click the arrow to the right of the mp3 you’d like to use in your post.  A menu will show with a link to “Copy public URL”.  Click that and copy the public URL (CTRL-C or click the copy to clipboard button).

Step 5: In a WordPress post, use the following, where <url> is the copied url of the file and <sound file title> is the name or title that you would like to use for the audio clip.

[audio:<url>|titles=<audio clip title>]

And that’s it!

You can further customize the FLASH mp3 player via WordPress under the plugins menu, but personally I like the basic slick version that’s available by default.

The term “Social Networking” isn’t necessarily easy to describe. In the context of the web, technically I suppose it could be defined as building and interacting with individuals online. But by this definition, social networking isn’t something recently new. Blogging, forums, IRC could all be considered social networking. Some of these I discussed as traffic generation sources in part 1 of this series about creating backlinks.  But when we think of “Social Networking”, these days that encompases things like Facebook and Twitter.  Perhaps Youtube or Google Wave even (Google wha?). These are the “social networking” sources that I will discuss in this post – part 2 in a series about website traffic generation.

Social Bookmarking

In the last few years, hundreds of “Social Bookmarking” websites have sprung up. Social bookmarking sites are sites that share links to resources which are seen by the thousands of readers of the bookmarking site. Generally users can vote a link up and down. The popularity of the link affects the link’s position in lists of “most viewed”, “most popular, “highest rated” or “most commented on”.

Slashdot and Digg.com were arguably the first sites that did this sort of link submission and ranking.  Furl, Reddit, del.ic.io.us, Newsvine and a host of others have since followed.

On some of these sites, a high ranking link has driven massive amounts of traffic to websites, ultimately bringing down the host web servers. The terms, “Slashdotted“, the “Slashdot effect” and the “Digg effect” were all coined for server outages due to links becoming popular on the respecitve sites.

Using social bookmarking in an attempt to gain website traffic may seem spammy, but you could say the same for any other traffic generation technique outside the scope of basic SEO and ultimately for the vast majority of content publishers and website owners, traffic generation techniques such as exploiting social bookmarking are necessity in order to be competetive.

Compared to the effort involved in social bookmarking, the benefit is indeed minimal. However, there are some tools available to assist in littering the web with your social bookmarks making the process marginally less effortful.  I’ve used a couple, including socialposter and socialmarker.  Both do relatively the same thing – attempting to make the social bookmarking process a tiny bit less painstaking.

Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook is quickly becoming the Web within the Web. Amazingly enough, Already, loads of commercials (from big companies) display their Facebook Fan Page along with their logo. Building a Facebook Fan Page isn’t enough though.  You also need to get people to “Like” it. If you already have a Facebook account, then you can at least start there by “Liking” your own Fan Page. Your friends will probably see that you’ve “Liked” it and there’s a possibility that they may as well.  On your website, include a link to the Fan Page.  People who visit your site may then “Like” the Fan Page and their friends will in turn see the “Like” notification and could possibly “Like” it themselves and the snowball effect continues.

You can also use your Facebook account (or create a new account) to gain fan page “followers”.  You can do this by finding Facebook people with a thousand or more Friends.  Friend them, yourself, and they will likely confirm your friendship.  Anyone with a thousand “Friends” indicates that in reality they just confirm whomever Friends them.  Once you amass a large following, you can post links to your Fan Page, or even better, hook your Twitter feed up to your Facebook profile and Fan Page and whenever you post to Twitter, you create content on your Facebook profile/Fan Page.

Your Fan Page is more or less a gateway to your website. Content is still King, of course, but you want your Fan Page to generate leads and hits to your website (and then hopefully generate a conversion and the sound of coins dropping into your piggy bank).

Facebook recently released the iLike button that can be used with blog posts.  Make sure to add this button to your blog posts.

Twitter

Although I’m fairly certain that 99% of Twitter users are marketers in one form or another, it doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t a goldmine for targeted website traffic. A key Twitter technique for building up website traffic from scratch is to take advantage of Twitter’s huge visibility. It is incredibly easy to build up a group of Twitter accounts. Use one of the accounts to tweet links (with good descriptions) to your website.  Use the other accounts to “retweet” the tweet.  Use an application such as Twitterel (http://www.twitterel.com) to find Twitter users that have specific interests and therefore could turn into potential leads and follow those individuals.  Comment on their tweets as well.

To make Twitter a successful tool, two way interaction is required. Nobody on Twitter gains followers by making only one way tweets.  You need to engage your community. Make replies often to individuals who share the same interests.

Ultimately to take full advantage of Twitter, you need to build your follower list.  There are many ways to do this, but you’re best off if your follower list is made up of quality targeted individuals (rather than a bunch of other Twitters simply looking for reciprical followers – an odd waste of time imho).  Treat your Twitter account like you would a website. Build up traffic to your Twitter account by placing backlinks to your Twitter profile on various websites – again, forums, blog comments, your websites etc…  Guaranteed that if you make a good comment on a forum or blog post and use your Twitter account as your website, you will get good Twitter followers.

For a quick following on a new account, I recommend the HitFollow service.  You can get an easy 100 followers for free, or for a small fee, get thousands.  No work on your part required.  Note, however, that people who have only 1 or 2 tweets but thousands of followers (and are, themselves, following thousands of tweeps) have a low Twitter clout.  In other words, although you have a huge following, you probably have a low likelihood of getting website hits from Twitter posts.

Something else that Twitter has that is waiting to be taken advantage of is the vast number of Twitter supplemental websites.  TwitPic, for example, has a huge amount of visibility.  Place an interesting pic on TwitPic (or any of the Twitter photo uploading sites) and you’re bound to get followers and a high number of views.  The associated tweets are also a goldmine for targeted website hits.

Youtube

Youtube can be a great resource for targeted website traffic.  Create an account, upload some clips.  Customize your channel so that it looks semi-professional with a custom background.  Make sure that you have an interesting avatar or profile pic (this is huge).  Also make sure that the thumbnail for your videos is an interesting part of the video clip.

Ultimately, the quality of your presentation is only half the activity of Youtube.  The other half is attracting subscribers, friends and hits.  Make loads of comments on related video content.  Subscribe to other related channels and Friend the users as well.  Making video responses to related content that receives high view counts is also gold for getting channel and profile views and increasing your Youtube subscriber count. All of this is work that results in more views on your own Youtube channel or profile.  Make sure that your website link is visible on your channel and profile in order to turn those views into website hits and leads.

This was part 2 in my Website Traffic Generation series of articles.  Stay tuned for part 3 where I will discuss traffic generation through widget or app creation.

One small obsession that I’ve had over the last few years has been with the sound effects choice for the big night. I’ve spent previous years scouring the web for choice mixes – most containing the usual fare – dragging chains, witch cackles, horrific screams, other ghostly sounds… This year, however, I thought to approach things a little differently.

October 26th, just 5 days before Halloween, I decided I’d try and capitalize on the big night. Having been interested in electronic music creation quite some time and being familiar with some audio programs such as Audacity, Jeskola Buzz, Impulse Tracker and FastTracker and having acquired a fare share of sound samples over the years, I thought I’d try to put together my own Halloween sound effects mix and sell it online. I knew I had only a few days to pull it off, but decided that it would be a fun project. So I set the goal. Put together a half hour mix of Halloween sound effects, put up a website and figure out how to sell it online. Get it done by Halloween. Simple enough.

The next three days I spent most of my evenings creating or finding sound samples (many were public domain or under a free use kind of license – I didn’t spend a cent on samples). I had a fairly good mic and water dripping sounds or howling winds are incredibly simple to make. I also have an old Korg M1 and other musical devices that I’ve acquired through the years. Once I had a nice collection of sounds, I started arranging them with Audacity.

Audacity is an open source multi-track audio program. It has a number of built-in effects (reverb, chorus, flange, etc) and supports VST effects. Audacity also can output to a number of audio formats including mp3 and ogg. I also used Jeskola Buzz to create some loops. Buzz is a free modular “sound studio”. You can string synth machines, sound generators, or simple trackers and run them through a multitude of various effect modules (again like reverb or chorus), but allows for real-time effect mixing similar to Ableton (although no where near as complete). Fortunately when mixing Halloween sounds, very little musical effort is required. Recording a few seconds of a Spanish quote from my Spanish 101 university textbook, modifying the pitch, reversing the sample and then adding some chorus and reverb can produce a pretty trippy, messed up sample, perfect for a Halloween mix.

It was really fun to mix all the samples and within a couple of days I had a 27 minute track that was pretty spooky. In fact, Sonya told me that it was possibly too scary for really little kids and warned me that I should probably wait until the tiny ones were done trick or treating and the older kids were coming out, if we were going to use the mix during Halloween. Personally, I thought it was pretty much right on.

Unfortunately by the time I was 90% good with the mix, it was only two days before Halloween. Two days isn’t a very long time to get something out there, market it and get people to buy in.

On the evening of the 29th, I rendered the final mp3 file. It was then time to figure out how to sell it.

My first thought was to throw the mix up on Reverbnation. I created an account, but free accounts only allow 8MB audio file uploads. I then found Tradebit – a website that allows you to sell files online, be them audio files, pdf documents, photos, etc. Tradebit gives you a free account, unlimited file sizes and bandwidth. You upload the file, enter a description and other information about the file, upload an image to represent the file and then set a price. I chose $4.99.

Tradebit uses Paypal as the payment system, which is perfect. A customer clicks on the item, clicks purchase and gets redirected directly to Paypal where the transaction can be processed. After payment, the customer is redirected to the file download, which is available for some time after the payment has been completed. Tradebit also has a search feature allowing potential customers to search and fine items for sale on their site. The file was roughly 30MB so it had to be uploaded via FTP. I used trusty Filezilla to do that. The process was incredibly straight forward.

Ok- the file was up and officially for sale. At this point it was around 9pm on the Thursday. I had spent about 2.5 hours looking for an online shop to sell the mp3.

Next, I wanted a “CD cover” image. Although no physical CD’s were going to be distributed, I figured having a CD cover was necessary as most music, digital download or not, has one. It was getting late though and I needed to do something quickly. I remembered a neat trick I learned in a Photoshop course I took years ago that produced instantly creepy images. I powered up my scanner and proceeded to scan my face and hand (eyes tightly shut of course – those things can seriously blind you otherwise). I opened the resulting image in The Gimp, modified the contrast and played with the burn tool. I then used a creepy looking font and gave it a title and voila – the 10 minute CD cover was born.

I then logged on to my Dreamhost account and saw that I had a free .com domain registration available and after various combinations of words, found that www.wickedcreep.com was available. I registered it and hosted it on Dreamhost in a matter of minutes. I then uploaded the CD cover pic and wrote up a super quick description and sales pitch in an html file. I included a link provided by Tradebit in a couple of spots on the web page. At this point, it was nearly midnight, but for the most part it was up and available. All that was needed was some marketing. Otherwise nobody was ever going to find the page, let alone purchase the mp3 before Halloween and I knew that after the 31st I could expect 0 sales.

I decided at this point that I needed to make it highly visible. I figured I’d offer the track for free streaming on Youtube or something. I opened up Windows Movie Maker, dragged in the CD cover image and the audio file and 10 minutes later was uploading a .wmv video file to Vimeo (which allows larger files to be uploaded than Youtube). As part of the description I linked back to wickedcreep.com. Within minutes, view counts were increasing on the Vimeo page. I also decided to embed a video player on the wickedcreep.com website.

I then created a wickedcreep Twitter account and followed a few people. I also joined some Halloween ning.com social networks under the wickedcreep user id and made some postings, attempting to promote the track (the following day I’d find out that most of the moderators of these social networking sites were to delete my account as they didn’t take too kindly to people promoting things for sale).

But after trying to spread the word for a few hours, I eventually called it a night at 2am. I had more or less succeeded in creating a product and making it available online. Of course, it was just two days before the product would not see any interest, but it was fun regardless.

As the next 48 hours went by, I received about 6 sales. I had reduced the price to $1.99 per download so after Tradebit took their 25%, I was left with about $9 in sales. That’s all I saw from it. I had spent countless hours that week to make only $9. But having spent nothing besides my free time on the project, it was still profit. And despite the dismal profit that it was, I was super stoked.

I figure that while the Wicked Creep 2009 Halloween mix didn’t do incredibly well, with a bit more time and promotion, the 2010 remix is going to absolutely kill it.

Check out the wicked creep website here: www.wickedcreep.com.

The solution?  Unfortunately there isn’t a silver bullet.  Turning to a primarily online format is an obvious direction, but in the world where online information is already expected to be free, publishers will be constrained to a business model that relies strictly on advertising revenue.  Relying strictly on advertising revenue is a high risk strategy for large content providers.  These large content providers are looking for other ways to monetize their online content.

Another solution?  Micro payments in an Apple iTunes sort of model.  But would such a solution actually be viable?

Check out the below clip where Charlie Rose leads a conversation with Walter Isaacson of “Time,” Robert Thomson of “Wall Street Journal” and Mort Zuckerman of “The New York Daily News” on the struggle of newspapers in the era of online content.

A great quote at around the 37 minute mark from Isaacson : “Google devalues everything it touches…  Google is great for Google, but terrible for content providers”.  Do you agree?

(Note that the discussion starts at around 27 minutes into the clip)