How you can publicize Philip Goddard's websites…

The background of this publicity move

In producing the publicity material I'm making available here, I've been particularly mindful that my Clarity of Being site is a particularly challenging one that presents a pioneering, rationally-based working model of human function and dysfunction, and a whole new methodology based on that, and that the site is enabling people to turn their lives around (including actually saving their lives) in a way that no tradition- or belief-based modality could ever do. It also has gained a huge amount of opposition because of its exposing and cutting through widely held beliefs.

It has been particularly the demise of most of the Clarity of Being site's traffic (meaning far fewer lives being turned around or indeed saved now), that has prompted me to produce a flyer promoting that site. I've also now added a business card promotion of that site to the business card that I'd been using to promote the CDs of my natural soundscape recordings.

In fact not only those sites need promotion, but those for my music and literary works too.

Let's look briefly at the sort of traffic levels I'm talking about. Here's an adaptation of an update note that I put in the Clarity of Being site's What's New page just after Christmas 2018, which gives an idea of the loss of traffic. This reports in context the number of human visits (not page hits) on successive Christmas Days. That date has traditionally got me the lowest daily traffic count of each year.

• 2015 — 403: a gut-churningly low figure in relation to the normal 600s and sometimes into the 700s!

• 2016 — 270: a similarly gut-wrenchingly low figure; over the previous month or so the normal figure had been in the 400s and occasionally topping 500.

• 2017 — 256: a smaller drop, from the upper 200s (often poking into the 300s).

• And now, wait for it…
  2018 — 85. This was actually NOT identifiable as a Christmas dip at all, because that was within the range of variation of the level already established from early-to-mid-November after an increasingly rapid decline since August that year. At least the nosedive appeared to have bottomed out — but with no sign of any upward trend starting.
  

  That might look still pretty good to some people — except that most of that traffic would be returning visitors, bots pretending to be human visitors, and of course the majority of any new visitors arriving on the site finding it too challenging to their beliefs so that they promptly left the site again.

  Although of course those are most welcome and indeed wanted (except the sneaky bots), the problem is that there would now be a much smaller proportion of new visitors, and thus of new people whose lives could potentially be positively changed — and also, who potentially could donate to help support these sites and my work in general.

  Update, 30 December 2019
  From mid-March 2019 a further fall started, taking the average per day down to the region of 75–80, with only rare peaks to 100 or just above. The lowest daily figure so far was 47, on 2 April.
  

  But then, it appears that something significantly positive happened on 25 October. I don't know what the cause was, but on that date suddenly a relatively rapid rise over a week or two took the level of human visits per day up to a fluctuating level in the lower to mid 200s — and so it stayed, with just a two-day dip a bit below 200 at Christmas 2019. But then in May 2020 it dropped again to fluctuating around 75–80 and stayed there.

  The daily number of Google.com search requests has always changed correspondingly.

  So clearly the site isn't by any means a lost cause with regard to traffic, but it does appear to be worryingly dependent on the whims of Google, so I remain very muted about rejoicing in any traffic increase, as the traffic could collapse again at any time.

  Further updates…
  

  In October 2020 a further fall started, so that into 2021 the daily human visits were fluctuating mostly within the range 37–60 but still gradually declining. By July 2021 the normal fluctuating range of human visits was 33 to 53 — actually any incursions into the 50s at all having become quite uncommon, and the lowest daily figure so far recorded was 29 (8 July 2021).

  By late autumn 2021 the trend appeared at least for the time being to have bottomed out — this situation continuing into January 2022.

Now, you might be thinking that all I need to do is ‘some SEO (search engine optimization) work’, and all would be more or less hunky dory. But, dear friends, I've spent a major part of this year (2018), on and off, doing a succession of stages of intensive SEO work on all the sites — especially the Self-Realization one — and yet the overall site traffic had continued downwards.

Despite that overall decline, there are actually signs that a few pages on that site have probably been benefiting to a certain extent from the SEO work. Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way in particular was hardly ever getting more than 5 human visits a day, and not uncommonly even none, even during the heady days of 2015 (see the list above). Yet nowadays, when the overall downward slide should have meant it would have dropped off the bottom of my site statistics for most days, it's almost always in each day's traffic list, commonly about 5–9 (rarely peaking towards 15).

Similarly, the somewhat more recent page Hearing Voices — The Real Way to Stop Them got just ones and twos from its birth in late 2015, and beyond 2016 it showed only the odd one or two very occasional human visits. Yet during this year it's usually been in each day's traffic list, albeit getting less visits than the Crisis page. A few other pages with low traffic have also held their own instead of dropping off the bottom of the daily traffic lists.

Meanwhile, traffic to my personal site (i.e., this one), which was always pretty low, gradually fell from about 30 human visits to the current* hovering around 10, and my Literary and Music works sites, which were getting a handful of visitors most days, say around 2015, nowadays get none (i.e., only bots) on most days, with only a very occasional one or two human visitors (less than one in a week).

Ideally, I'd have been flitting around in the various social media, posting, tweeting, ‘liking’ and all that. The only trouble is that I'm only one man, with a hell of a lot of work to do, and with various lines of activity, and I have neither time nor stomach for the banality and insincerity of all the social media promotion work — for example, having to go around ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ lots of people's posts and sites so that they'd then reciprocate. It's hardly at all about genuine liking and everything about pathetic social game-playing — a real ‘sheep’ pursuit of people who are at least largely failing to get on with really worthwhile pursuits in their lives.

I know various people seek to lecture me about the need for promotion of my sites on social media, but I'm not the man for it, being already overloaded with site work, and not being a ‘sheep’ myself and so not fitting properly in the social media world.

It's therefore up to site visitors who value any of my sites to take action themselves to promote them if they want other people to find them, because the search engines are now failing to achieve that very much at all.

• If you spend time on any social media, please periodically (not just once) ‘share’ pages you value on the respective social media, and seek to post or get posted links to the pages / sites on other websites.
• Please give positive ratings and reviews at MyWOT, where the belief-driven ‘sheep’ majority have ensured that my Clarity of Being site has an overall ‘middling to unsatisfactory’ rating, and on other website rating / review sites.
• Please feel free to use any of the publicity material I give below.
• Display ads!
  One potentially really effective way to use said publicity material (obviously only for anyone who has the funds to do this) would be to place a regularly-appearing display ad in one or more local or even national newspapers and Internet equivalents, and other such outlets. Such ads could still be pretty small — for example, my business card designs — or on request I could work out a design to fit a certain pair of dimensions, if different from my business card dimensions. Please don't try to fit one of my business card designs into even a slightly smaller space, for any reduction would make it too unclear.

Publicity Material

I've been producing for my own use some flyers and business cards — but I haven't either funds or space in my small flat to store stocks of more than one version of leaflet and business card. However, I've prepared leaflets and business card designs to cover all the main ‘content’ sites (i.e., not focusing on this site, apart from the CD and Book stores, which are on this site).

Please feel free either to print the odd copies for small-scale use or / and to have a commercial print job done for larger-scale promotion. By making print-ready artwork available here I've sought to make it as easy as possible for you to do.

These are print-ready jpg image files, produced with the trim margin specified by VistaPrint, who I'm using for printing my own materials — so each image is deliberately slightly larger than the intended trim size. They must therefore NOT be reduced to the size of the final printed / trimmed size, or there could be unsightly bits of white margin showing (that's of course the whole point of having a trim margin).

The colours are NOT optimized for CMYK-mode printing, though so far I've not had an issue about this with VistaPrint; the colours convert surprisingly well from the RGB-mode colours of my submitted artwork. However, I've so far found printed work to tend to look duller than the artwork seen on-screen. I expect most of that comes down simply to the brightness range, which is more from a good computer screen than from printed material.

Just prior to my starting to prepare this page and the artwork for putting here, I tried using a local printer instead of VistaPrint. While they worked out cheaper for significant quantities, and sought to be really helpful, basically they were not used to accommodating ‘serious amateurs’ without dedicated heavyweight design software, and it all got a bit complicated for me, with not altogether satisfactory end results.

So I came to the conclusion that VistaPrint, although more expensive and having very tiresome and underhand sales tactics, were much simpler and more reliable for me to get further work done. And they do boast a ‘Total Satisfaction’ guarantee, with refund or replacement regardless of reason for the dissatisfaction. By contrast, the local printer gave me a repeated string of warnings about things in my artwork that might not print well, and thus left me without any basis for getting refund / replacement apart from gross printer errors.

All my designs are liable to revisions.

Flyers

Clarity of Being site 1

Clarity of Being site 2.

(The above two can be used single-sided or combined in a double-sided leaflet)

Music Compositions

Literary Works

(The above two can be used single-sided or combined in a double-sided leaflet)

Business Cards

N.B. The trim size is 8.5 x 5.5cm.

CD-quality downloads of natural soundscapes

Clarity of Being site

(I myself am using the above two combined on a double-sided card, but either works fine single-sided)

Music Compositions

Literary Works

My thanks in advance to anyone who does distribute any of this publicity material!