Social Bookmarking is a good technique for building a large amount of backlinks to your website however, there is a very real danger of it having a very negative effect on your StumbleUpon profile resulting in a loss of traffic or even an account ban!
Automated Social Bookmarking
One of my most popular posts on this blog is my list of do-follow social bookmarking sites and in that post I describe several tools that automate the bookmarking process to allow you to bookmark your content at several of the sites at once with the click of a button. Social Marker and Social Poster are two such services and a similar tool is going to be released to all Thirty Day Challenge members shortly.
All of these services include StumbleUpon in their list of ‘bookmarking’ sites and therein lies the problem. There are many sites in the world of web 2.0 that allow you to bookmark and share content with others and these sites take various forms. Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg are three examples of very different sites that all tend to get lumped together.
In an earlier post I talked about the differences between social bookmarking and story submission and I want to elaborate on that a little bit more particularly in the context of StumbleUpon and explain how thinking of it in the wrong way can hurt you.
Understanding Content Sharing
The majority of web 2.0 sites encourage users to share content that they feel would be enjoyed by other users and as such they tend to have mechanisms to allow other users to vote for content that they like. StumbleUpon does this with the thumbs-up button amongst other things. The trouble with this is that when submitted content gets voted up and becomes popular, these sites cab deliver floods of traffic.
Getting on the Digg front page, the Delicious popular page or the StumbleUpon buzz page can drive thousands of visitors to the website in question. Why is this a problem? Because of course us marketers and website owners immediately jump on the bandwagon and try to find out how to maximise our chances of making our content popular in this way. Some people even go as far as writing entire courses on the subject ;-)
You still might not be seeing the problem…
The problem is that the people behind StumbleUpon want to ensure that their system is kept free from spammers. They want to ensure that any content that ends up on their buzz page has been put there because the users genuinely like it. They want to ensure that people aren’t just voting up their own content for their own self-serving needs.
A Classic StumbleUpon Mistake
The way in which StumbleUpon drives traffic to your site is simply that when a page from your site gets stumbled and other people give it the thumbs up, StumbleUpon continues to send visitors to that page. Unlike sites such as Digg where you need hundreds of votes to have any effect, even a handful of thumbs up can deliver many hundreds of visitors.
So of course the first thing that many website owners do is that as soon as they realise the potential that StumbleUpon has to drive traffic to their site they go crazy and submit every one of their pages, blog posts etc to SU. This is a mistake because StumbleUpon expressly forbids the system to be used primarily for self-promotion. They have various mechanisms in place to prevent this and I describe those in more detail in Stumble Rush.
Don’t Automate StumbleUpon
Real social bookmarking sites like delicious differ from content sharing sites such as StumbleUpon because the users of delicious are not submitting bookmarks for other people to vote on. In delicious you are free to bookmark any web page that you like and if you want to bookmark every post from a single website it doesn’t matter because you are not asking other people to vote for it.
The trouble with the automated tools mentioned above is that they don’t differentiate between real bookmarking sites and all of the other kinds of content sharing sites so of course most people simply submit to all of them without a second thought.
If you use social bookmarking as part of your link building strategy make sure that you don’t include StumbleUpon. Both the tools above allow you to choose which sites to use so make sure you uncheck the box for StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is a sensitive beast. You need to be gentle with it and not abuse it!
If you are interested in learning how StumbleUpon can be used to drive traffic to your website then check out my course, Stumble Rush. You can enroll now to receive 10 completely free lessons due for release in July 2008.
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I’m developing an email based course on the usage of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website. This project is the account of my progress in developing and marketing that course. The course is now almost ready to launch, is called Stumble Rush and you can enroll right now at http://www.stumblerush.com/.
After many months of work, the time has finally come to launch Stumble Rush! I’m getting very excited now :-) I’ve decided on next Thursday 10th July as the launch date. In today’s post I want to answer some of the questions that you may have.
Click here to enroll for your free Stumble Rush lessons now
What Does the Course Involve?
The primary aim of Stumble Rush is to teach you in a step-by-step manner how to use StumbleUpon to drive lots of traffic to your website. One caveat - there’s work involved! There are no tricks, no secrets, no underground programs, no dodgy little hacks, no exclusive membership sites to join - just good, honest use of StumbleUpon to the benefit of your website and the StumbleUpon community at large.
Each lesson is fairly long and most have a video associated with it, a couple have two videos. I would allow around 30-60 minutes for the study of the material itself in each lesson. However, studying alone will not drive a single visitor to your website. For you to get any value out of the course whatsoever you will also want to follow along with the action steps that I provide at the end of each one.
These vary in nature. One thing that I encourage you to do from day one is to spend some time stumbling every day and as the course develops I go into more and more detail about how to do that effectively. Some tasks will be more one-off and take more time but overall I would expect you to allow around 10-30 minutes a day for your stumbling activity plus perhaps a couple of hours per lesson to work on the content for your website.
How Are the Lessons Delivered?
When you first enroll on the course you will join the class for the basic lessons. These will be delivered every 3 days so with 10 free lessons, that part of the course will take 30 days to complete. You will be sent an email containing a link to the lesson so that you can read it online.
For those of you who choose to purchase the advanced lessons, which you can do at any time, you will be sent a link to download the entire 20-part course as one complete download containing all lessons and videos. Then you are free to work through this at your own pace and are not restricted to any schedule that I set.
How Much Will Stumble Rush Cost?
The basic lessons are completely free, and will probably remain free for the foreseable future. The standard price for the whole course including the advanced lessons will be $47. It irks me somewhat to use the now standard number 7 in my pricing but everybody tells me it works and I’m far too lazy to do my own testing so what the heck!
However, as this is my first ever paid product (and I don’t have a clue what I’m doing!) I’m going to run a launch discount. Those that purchase within the first week of the launch date will be able to buy the full course at just $27. After that you can still buy it but at the full price.
Click here to enroll for your free Stumble Rush lessons now
Will This Be Open To Affiliates?
Yes, but not right away. As I have not launched a paid product before I do not want to use affiliates as guinea pigs! Only after I am sure that everything works will I open it up to affiliates. I am hoping that this will be one week after launch but I might delay it slightly if I get any technical problems.
I indend to use eJunkie as my sales and affiliate management system. I have used them both as a consumer and as an affiliate for other people and have been happy from that point of view and they seem to offer everything that I need.
I will be offering a 50% commission rate to affiliates.
Will Stumble Rush Be Put On Clickbank?
No. Clickbank has an inherent problem in that when making a purchase, the link used contains the ID of the clickbank account to credit it with the commission. This ID is not encrypted in any way and as a result many unethical marketers will replace the ID with their own ID when purchasing a product. This is not a problem if you are selling something in many niche markets such as trout fishing because most trout fishermen are not Internet Marketers so they don’t have clickbank accounts.
However, as this is an Internet Marketeing product, it is quite possible that a large chunk of the target market would have Clickbank accounts and thus would be able to abuse it. This makes no difference to the product owner because they always get their cut - but it is the affiliate who suffers. The affiliate puts in the hard work of promoting the product to their own audience and then their commission is stolen by their own customers.
That is why I do not intend to put Stumble Rush on Clickbank. Perhaps I might put it on there at some point way into the future once the initial interest has died down but for the first six month at least I want to protect the interest of my affiliates.
Any Questions?
If there is anything you would like to know about the course, it’s content, technical details, StumbleUpon in general or whatever then please ask in the comments below. I’ll either respond in the comments or perhaps with a follow up post.
Click here to enroll for your free Stumble Rush lessons now
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May was a bad month for me on a personal level but thankfully June has been much better and I am now back to work as I would like. Stumble Rush is almost finished and I’m getting really excited now and hope to release very shortly! Due to the emphasis on developing content for that I haven’t done anything to generate any other income so once again any income reported here is from work done many months ago, gotta love that!
Income
Total income earned during June 2008: $808.36
Newsletter Subscribers
New subscribers seem to trickle in every day, just a few here and there. May ended with 178 subscribed people and today there were 257. I’ve had some feedback about the sign-up box and it could do with some tweaking but that means re-doing all the graphics which is a pain in the back-side but something I should really try out.
RSS Subscribers
I’ve noticed that my RSS readership tends to pretty much follow my blogging activity. If I don’t post or I only post mundane rubbish then it does not grow but when I post good posts it does. The subscribers pretty much stood still in May but they have picked up during the month of June. I’ve noticed that the monthly graph that I show doesn’t look very interesting these days because the growth is quite small in comparison to the existing number of subscribers so the graph looks rather flat so this month I thought it would be more interesting to show the growth of all time:
Do you notice how the growth is very steady and linear? If I was to put those numbers on a spreadsheet I would probably be able to plot out a prediction for the subscribers at some point in the future, but I won’t bother :-)
Traffic Stats
In terms of numbers the traffic is almost identical to the month before despite the increase in subscribers. This just goes to show that your subscriber base and your website traffic are two groups of people. The vast majority of RSS subscribers read your blog in their RSS reader of choice and never even touch your website.
Conclusion
I’m happy with the results this month. The readership has grown nicely and I have always considered that to be the most important factor for this blog. Financially, the income is starting to slide now. 6 month old ebooks can’t sustain an income stream forever :-) Still I’m very excited about releasing Stumble Rush next week so of course I’m also hoping to see a jump in income from sales of the advanced course.
One other thing to note is that this blog takes up a lot less time than it used to. I slowed down the pace of the blogging a couple of months ago and nowadays I aim for about 3 posts a week compared to the daily postings that I was aiming for at the beginning. Not only that but I find that the majority of my posts are now written from my own experiences - either opinion type posts or project updates which are very easy and quick to write compared to in-depth tutorials or resource type posts that take a lot longer.
Anyway, as always thanks to all of you for your continued support. I wouldn’t be writing this blog if it wasn’t for all of the great comments and feedback that I get day after day.
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Last week I compared three revenue models for making money online and concluded that the membership site is the way to go if you want to generate a recurring revenue stream. In this post I present 6 concrete ideas for sites and services that fit this model.
1) Fresh Content For Consumption
Some people need fresh content on a regular basis and if you can provide that content then you can cater to your market for as long as you can come up with the content. Some examples:
- A PLR site that produces fresh PLR articles
- Graphics for use in computer games
- Music for use in all manner of projects
This kind of membership site may tend to generate a high turnover of members as people lose interest in the industry but there will always be other members to take their place. You’ll need to be constantly marketing this kind of site. However to offset this downside, if all of your content is always available to all members your site will become more and more valuable as time goes on and you produce more and more. You might also be able to generate stand-alone products with a sample of your work as an added income stream or as promotional material for the membership site itself.
2) Cutting Edge Information
In some industries, the latest information about how to get ahead is forever changing. A good example would be the Internet Marketing industry! How often do things change in this industry? Search engine algorithms, social media sites, pay per click tactics and so on. The Immediate Edge is an example of a membership site that caters exactly to this market. It is run by Ed Dale and Dan Raine, the two guys behind the Thirty Day Challenge.
In order to make this kind of membership site work it is imperative that you know your industry and you can deliver the goods month after month! It is not sufficient to just slap together a series of articles about a topic and call it a membership site. It needs to be constantly up-to-date, you can never take a few months off. Also, whatever you are teaching or reporting on needs to be accurate. If you feed your members a bunch of bull you will not keep them for long. On the other hand if you really can deliver true cutting edge information in your industry you will have some very loyal members! Examples of possible industries:
- Internet Marketing or one of the many sub-topics
- Investing, or other financial information
- Technology - computer programming, graphic design, digitial photography etc
3) Project Based Teaching
Some people like to learn a skill by example and there are lots of examples of skills that can be taught in projects or lessons that students are able to follow along with. In certain industries there is no limit to the number of projects that you could create and thus as long as your students continued to learn you would be able to keep them as members. For example:
- Art - drawing, painting, pottery etc
- Flower Arranging - floristry for weddings, holidays, birthdays etc
- Cookery - dishes for every occasion
- Computer Programming - game projects for example
That last example is one that I was going to try myself a few months ago. Like with the fresh content for consumption, with every new project you create you are increasing the value of your site if you make it all available. Alternatively you can package up previous projects and sell them as stand-alone products.
One of my readers runs a membership site along these lines - Banjo Expert which produces many lessons. There is no limit to the number of lessons that could be created for this site.
4) Matching Services
The world is based around supply and demand but very often the people who have the demand and the people who can supply it don’t know how to get together. A matching service brings these two groups of people together. There are lots of examples of this model already working well:
- Dating / friendship services
- Buying & Selling such as eBay, Auto Trader etc
- Recruitment Agencies - matching employees to employers
There are numerous ways in which you can generate an income from these sites. In the examples above dating sites usually charge a flat monthly fee to its members, eBay charges commissions on products sold and most recruitment agencies charge a finders fee to an employer when somebody is hired.
5) Online Tools & Services
With advances in web development technology, software that was previously only available on a desktop computer can now be brought to the web and this has opened up a whole new world of opportunities in web-based software. If you can create (or hire a programmer to create it for you) a tool that provides a valuable service you can charge a fee to use it and keep members for as long as they want to use the software. I use many of these myself, for example:
- Weight Loss Resources is a calorie database with a food planning element
- Allakhazam is a comprehensive database for the online game World of Warcraft
- Vitalist is a task management service based on GTD
The last two on the list have both a free and a premium (paid) version so of course the free version is used as a pre-seller for the premium version. If you have access to the skills required to produce this kind of service then you can be onto a winner because once the software is written, little maintenance is usually required. Of course, somebody else can just come along and copy your idea so you will also need to keep your software up-to-date and keep on top of your marketing efforts.
6) Access to an Expert
This is often presented in the form of coaching around a particular topic. Usually there is a sense of community built into it. This kind of membership site is tricky to pull off unless you have already established yourself as an expert in your particular niche but if you have already done that with a successful info product perhaps, then this is a good way of converting your expertise into an ongoing income stream. Some example of people who have done this:
- Tom Venuto released a book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and later released the Burn the Fat Inner Circle
- Jeff Walker released his Product Launch Formula and now has the PLF Inner Sanctum
Any Others?
I’m sure there are lots more ideas that I haven’t thought of. Can you think of any? I would also be interested to hear from those of you who currently run a membership site. Does it fit into one of the models above or is it something else?
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In lesson #2 of my Stumble Rush course I talk about how to create content that gets stumbled but earlier this week I came across something that goes far beyond just good stumble-worthy content, this is what I would consider to be Stumble-Bait!
What is Stumble Bait?
Stumble Bait is content that is specifically designed to go viral on StumbleUpon and bring in thousands of visitors. Think of link-bait. Some people say that any good post that tends to attract links is link-bait but I disagree. If you think of the word ‘bait’ you are deliberating enticing people in and trying to hook them into performing a particular action.
Before I examine this example, let me just pause for a moment and talk about the concept of going viral. What does it mean when something goes viral? It spreads at an exponential rate. Recent development in social media have caused web content to go viral more than ever before because it is so easy for people to share content that they like with their friends. In the case of StumbleUpon, the viral nature is built in because the more people give a thumbs up to a page the more new people will be shown that page.
Let’s have a look:
Why Is This Stumble Bait?
First of all it’s funny and humor always does well on StumbleUpon so it naturally encourages the thumbs up. This alone can cause a piece of content to go viral but where this particular image really excells is in the call the action “Send this to someone Gorgeous”. It actively encourages you to forward it to somebody else which spreads the impact even further. But it doesn’t stop there! It doesn’t just ask you to send it to your friends, it particularly says “someone Gorgeous” so how do you think the recipient will feel when they get it?
They think “aww how sweet, this person thinks I’m gorgeous!” and that evokes the natural human desire to reciprocate in some way so they feel as if the very least they can do is give it a thumbs up. And of course, whilst in this positive vibe they are likely to want to make somebody else feel good and so they may also send it on to one or more of their friends too. This seriously, is genius Stumble Bait in my opinion!
I didn’t just ’stumble’ on this whilst using the toolbar - it was sent to me via the “send to a friend” feature which is why it was so powerful. Had I just stumbled across it I probably still would have liked it but I wouldn’t have felt quite so obligated to thumb it up. Maybe I’m just too mushy for my own good :-)
Accidental Hero?
It was the actual image, the JPG file itself that got stumbled. Check out the reviews page here - over 30 reviews. From the image itself there is no where to go, nothing to do other than just click the Stumble button again and move on so I don’t think this particular image was designed as Stumble Bait as I can’t see how it benefits the creator in any way. Plus, it’s on a Tumblr blog which is similar to Twitter so it does not even drive traffic to a main website.
However, still a great lesson that we can learn from! Anybody else have any good examples of stumble bait?
If you are interested in learning how StumbleUpon can be used to drive traffic to your website then check out my course, Stumble Rush. You can enroll now to receive 10 completely free lessons due for release in July 2008.
If you've enjoyed reading this post then please subscribe to my Full Text RSS Feed.
