One of the best ways to drive traffic to a new blog is to offer something free that your readers can download. These freebies could be educational materials like a free eBook, useful graphics like Photoshop brushes, or even small programs or snipits of code. These are the types of fun downloads that readers love to find and will keep your fans coming back for more. In this tutorial, I am going to describe how to host a free download from your blog.
Presentation is important. Presentation is even more important in blogs than elsewhere because the competition is fierce for readership. Since you have spent time and effort creating your free download, we want to make sure that the downloading process works seamlessly. This will ensure your blog is presented in the best light. Here’s how it’s done:
Create a ‘download’ directory in the root directory of your site
To accomplish this, you will need to have FTP access to server that your blog is hosted on, or access through the cPanel provided by your host. If you choose to use an FTP client, I recommend FileZilla. It’s a free download and is simple to use.
Navigate to the root directory of your blog. This is the top level directory where you will see folders like wp-admin, wp-content and wp-include. Right click on this directory and choose Create new folder or select the Add new folder option within your client and name this folder download. This is the directory where you will dump your freebie downloads.
Zip your freebie download
I think it is always a good practice to compress the files that you plan on offering as free downloads. There are two reasons for this. First, if your download consists of multiple files housed within a folder, you must zip it. If you do not, selecting the download link will display the contents of the directory but not initiate a download. Secondly, even if your offering is small and only a single file, adding additional downloads over time will begin to draw upon your server, slowing down your blog.
You will need a file compression program to create.zipfiles. Because I primarily work on a PC (I’m sure that Apple is going to send me a laptop for review any day now), I use a small free program called 7-zip. I will be using 7-zip for this example and recommend it to anyone who needs a file compression application.
On your computer, navigate to the file or folder that you are offering as a freebie. Right click on the icon and look for the menu item 7-zip with an expanded menu item Add to “your file.zip”. This command will create a zipped version of this file or directory at the same location as the original. You will know it by its file extension, .zip.
Upload your freebie onto your blog
Again we will want to access your blog using either a FTP client like FileZilla, or the cPanel provided by your host. This time you will need to navigate to the new folder that we created earlier. In this folder, deposit the zipped file or folder you will be offering for free.
Post a link to your new freebie
The last thing we need to accomplish before your adoring fans can begin downloading your new freebie is to create the download link. Creating a download link is almost identical to creating a link to a web page, with the exception that we are ending our URI with the zipped file name rather than a directory or html/php file. Let’s take a look at the format this link will take:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/download/your-freebie.zip">your anchor text</a>If you look closely, the only thing differentiating this link from any other link is that the final element in the URI is a zipped file. If you are not comfortable with inserting this link using the code editor, you can use the link button in the visual editor and load just the address (http://www.yoursite.com/download/your-freebie.zip) into the text field.
Test your link before posting
It is always a good idea to test new download links on your blog before publishing. When you select the anchor text from your download link, you should be offered an option to save the file. If this takes place, your download is ready to be offered to the world. If something else happens, look back over the steps, making sure that the file name and path from your link match the location of the file on your server. Nine times out of ten, the issue will be a small error in the link path.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?