Change your thoughts» affiliate marketing

5 Amazing ways to drive traffic to your site Part 2 – Social marketing

Steven Aitchison — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:23:39 +0000

I have to apologise for not getting this article out sooner. This article has been a labour of love over the last few weeks. I have had a series of obstacles which have been put in the way of writing this such as moving house, having no internet connection for 5 days, a major infestation of viruses on my computer and a host of minor obstacles. However I got there in the end and here is the second part of 5 Amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites .

You can read the first article here:

5 amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites – Part 1 – Article marketing

Social Marketing

There are many social marketing sites you can use to drive traffic to your main site. I will go over a few and list some others that will get you started.

The 3 I am going to talk about is stumbleupon, Hub Pages, and Squiddo.

When you use all the sites I mention I feel it is important to have a strategy.

First of all you have to answer why you want to use social marketing sites, to get your name known, to drive more traffic to a site , to earn more money etc.

I wanted to use it to get earn more money however I have seen the huge benefits that these sites can bring and have started to incorporate them in other ways such as getting my name out there as an expert on a particular topic.

I will list a lot of these sites at the end of this article. I would all the sites mentioned and link them to each other to maximise SEO and visability.

Stumbleupon, Squidoo and Hubpages

This has to be one of my favourite social media sites and it is responsible for over 30% of my 50,000 visitors per month.

What is stumbleupon?

Stumbleupon is a social media site which allows browsers to randomly click through sites based on specific tags they set up for themselves. This is done through a toolbar which is installed into your browser, it’s quick and easy to set up. When the reader reaches a site they have a chance to thumb it up, thumb it down or stumble to the next page. The more a page gets a thumb up or commented on positively the more the page will be shown to other readers.

The social side of the site comes into play as readers can comment on and connect with other stumblers and share each others stumbles. You can also befriend other stumblers and the more friends and connections you have the more your site will get seen by others.

As soon as you comment on a page, the page you commented on gets shown to all your friends on a front screen board on your stumble page. This gives more exposure to your site the more friends you have.

How much traffic can you get?

On average I receive between 200 – 5000 visitors per day to my site depending on my activity with stumbleupon and the quality of my content.

How to get more traffic from Stumbleupon

Use SU every single day for at least half an hour and befriend people who have given some good quality stumbles.
Leave comments on the sites you really like. This has the added benefit of it acting as a bookmark page for all the sites you like as all your comments are stored in your ‘likes’ page.
If you want to submit one of your own posts make sure you stumble pages for 30 minutes or so before submitting your own post. I have found that the more I do this the more visitors I get to my page when I submit my own post.
Write great content all the time and only submit your best articles. If all your articles are great then submit them all but be sure to submit lots of others pages as well.
Once you have submitted your site or blog post send the link with a quick message to your friends (be careful that these friends will accept your invitation to stumble you as some people don’t like it. You will get to know who your SU friends are over time).

There are some great sites out there which give more information on Stumbleupon, here are just a few:

www.stumbleupon.com

www.searchenginejournal.com/the-why-how-and-who-of-marketing-in-stumbleupon/4470/

www.seomoz.org/blog/stumbleupons-fantastic-ability-to-drive-traffic

http://website-marketing.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_use_stumbleupon_to_drive_web_traffic

http://www.dangrossman.info/2007/01/04/the-stumbleupon-experiment/

Seth Godin, the famous marketing genius, created a site called Squidoo to help people to talk about the things they knew about. It is like a blog platform but a lot quicker and easier to set up. You can set up a squidoo lens in around 15 minutes with no technical knowledge whatsoever. Basically squidoo is a free space on the internet to use how you wish and talk about your hobbies, interests and start linking back to your main site.

The benefits of squidoo are:

Squidoo lenses get ranked extremely quickly in google, I’ve seen them ranked in as little as two hours. Google, at the moment, adores squidoo and it’s content. The benefit of this is that you can write a short pice on squidoo have your keywords in the title and depending on the keywords you could be ranked in the top 10 in Google for your keywords (It’s important to do keyword research first before making a title foryour squidoo lens).
The more lenses you creat you will be ranked higher in the squidoo system.
You can earn money from squidoo by using ebay, amazon and adsense widgets on your lens.
The social side comes in as other people can link to your lens and rate them and befriend you as well. Obviously the more friends you have the more your lens will climb quicker up the rankings.
If you are into internet marketing then squidoo is a godsend as you can create as many lenses as you want and link them all back to your main sites.
Used in conjunction with other social media sites such as stumbleupon you can drive traffic to one main site if you wish.

Some other great sites talking about squidoo and how to build upyour lens ranking are:

Some tips on making a great squidoo lens

Squidoo allows you to use tags to help people find your lens, use them and use lots of them. Use a keyword research tool like http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com when you have a key word or phrase that you want to target type it into wordtracker and look at all the listings for the keyword or keyphrase and use them as tags on your squidoo lens. This way more people will find your lens and google will also track your tags.
Have a great headline and content. You need to grab readers attention when they are going to your lens and you need to keep them interested. Having a great headline will be the first thing you work on. Use something called a headline analyzer which you can get at http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm this site basically gives you an EMV score of your headline and gives you a percentage of your emotional marketing value. For example, consider the following two headlines:

Questions on Lucid Dreaming?

Lucid Dreaming made easy!

The first one has an EMV score of 50% whilst the second headline has an EMV score of 75%.

What this means to you is that more people are likely to click on the second headline or read more if you have an article.

Read the top lenses in your category and find out what they are doing to rank high on the squidoo scene.

Some more squidoo resources

http://www.squidoo.com/lensbrainstorm

http://www.squidoo.com/easyboost

http://www.squidoo.com/advancedhtml

http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-lens-of-the-day

http://www.squidoo.com/basichtml

http://www.squidoo.com/first_lens

Hub Pages

Hub Pages is similar to Squidoo in it’s format and web 2.0 like feel but there are some differences. The main one is that you do not create lenses but rather you create hubs and use them in a similar way to attract traffic, backlinks and you can also monetise your hub pages. In a recent interview with the marketing manager of hub pages Jason Menayan, he defined hub pages a being different in the following ways:

1. We removed all adult content. This was tough since it accounted for about a third of our overall traffic.

2. We disallowed spam Hubs. We forced users posting aggressively promotional articles to create genuine informational value, and to tone down linking to sites they were promoting.

3. We unpublished purely personal articles (like blogs!), as these were less likely to be useful to readers or to attract traffic from search engines.

4. We checked all articles for copied content, and applied a score penalty to those with content already published on the Web (even if they had rights to republish that content). Those articles with very low scores were not shown to search engines.

5. We identified and flagged articles linking out to questionable sites, like sites that potentially phish, or display obnoxious popup ads, or redirect visitors to a different site than they intended.

6. We set up a discussion forum on the site, so users could help each other out, share advice, and socialize beyond the scope of publishing articles.

7. We started paying users up-front for exceedingly high-quality articles. Their quality attracted significant traffic from search engines and created success stories, which, in turn, set a good example that users followed.

Hub pages is a little more restrictive than squidoo but it is fantastic for getting into google quickly and getting visitors to your sites.

Tips on better hub pages

Use the same tips as the squidoo lens tips and you will get high rankings for your hub pages.

Here are some top ranked hub pages for you to have a quick look at:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Christmas-Gifts-for-Mom

http://hubpages.com/hub/Different-Ways-To-Make-Money-Online

http://hubpages.com/hub/10-reasons-to-have-sex-toninght

http://hubpages.com/hub/Ten-Quick-Ways-to-Make-Money

http://hubpages.com/hub/Palm-Reading-Guide

As you can see from above the topics on the top hub pages is diverse so there is no need to limit yourself on hub pages.

Some other great sites to build up your traffic

I would use all of these sites and have similar articles on all of them and link them to each other to get the most traffic. Yes it is hard work initially but it is worth it especially if you want more traffic and would like to earn more money.

www.wordpress.org – Having a blog is a must if you want to maximise your visibility on the web. I would use a self hosted blog rather than a blog hosted by wordpress, having this allows you more flexibility.

www.blogger.com – Google owns blogger so they are already optimised for Google’s search engines so I would also see this as vital part of traffic generation.

www.wikidot.com – I love using this site. It takes a little longer to get used to the coding but it’s very simple when you get to know it.

http://www.tripod.com – I use this as another link to my main site but it’s easy to use and you can build whole websites with this.

http://www.geocities.com – Another great site which gives you a lot of control over your content and layout, worth a try.

www.weebly.com – Similar to other sites but another useful one for backlinks.

www.wetpaint.com – I liked using this on a recent campaign, it’s quick, easy and you can have a site within 10minutes.

www.livejournal.com – another easy to use site similar to wordpress with plenty of templates and design choices.

I would also use the following:

www.googlepages.com -

Affiliate recommendations

One great ebook on this subject is Craig Beckta’s book: The Secret Affiliate Code 2 which is a must read for anybody wanting to know more about this strategy and looking to drive traffic and money to their sites.

If you have any sites which you would recommend like the ones above why not post them here.

The next article will be on video marketing to drive traffic to your site.

How do you make money online?

Steven Aitchison — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 06:20:42 +0000

This is the question I have asked myself since I first started using the internet when I was a wee boy, well, about 25 years old. It is only recently I started seriously asking the question and only recently since I started making money on the net. I am extremely interested in this as a model for creating wealth and for creating the life I want. I have spoken to a lot of people who have made it online and without exception all of them have said the same thing:

‘Anybody could do it!”’

Anybody could do it!

When I first heard this I thought it was a joke. I thought you have to know hundreds of people who would help you, I thought they all have time on their hands and no family to consider. However this is not the case. Most of the people who have made it, have had families, started part time, and due to their persistence have been able to give up their 9-5 and start their online business.

That’s another word I keep hearing from internet business owners is:

‘Persistence’

It is the key to making money online, you never ever ever ever give up. Sometimes you will strike it lucky on your first shot, sometimes you will have to fail 10 times before you get a success.

Changing your psychology

The trouble when I first started trying to make money was that I was aiming high. I was looking at earning $140,000 to pay off my mortgage and give up my 9-5 job and concentrate on making a sustainable living online. The problem with this type of thinking is that $140,000 seems insurmountable and my unconscious mind almost gives up before it’s even started.

I read an eBook that changed all that called ‘5 Bucks a day’ by Dennis Becker (Don’t worry I am not going to put my affiliate link here, if you are interested you will find it). What this guy said, and it’s very simple, is aim for earning $5 per day profit and then ‘rinse, lather and repeat’.

Rinse, Lather and repeat

This is the phrase internet marketers use when they are explaining the process of making money.

Basically when they find a winning formula they repeat this formula over and over again.

For example, imagine having a blog that makes you $5 per day in adsense you then repeat the process and build another blog, and another and another and pretty soon you are earning $100 per day just from adsense. No, it’s not that easy as you have to drive traffic, however you now have a network of blogs which link to each other which means your search rankings are higher which means more traffic which means more adsense earnings. So the first blog might be hard to build as there is a steep learning curve but now you have learned about driving traffic, SEO, interacting with readers etc you don’t have to learn so much for the second blog so there is not as much effort. That was only a quick example. There are literally hundreds of ways to make money online.

The route I have chosen is affiliate marketing and it’s now starting to work out for me. Undoubtedly the biggest thing I have done is join affiliate marketing forums and I would strongly suggest finding a forum in the market you are interested in. For example if you are interested in building blogs as a way of making money join one of the big blogging forums, if it’s affiliate marketing then join a well subscribed affiliate marketing forum. This will increase your learning curve dramatically, in fact there will be a period of information overload as there is so much great information from a good forum.

Free reports and making money list

I know a lot of readers are not interested in the topic of making money, which is why I don’t post a lot about it. However, for those of you who are interested I am putting together a mailing list where I will be sending lots of great links, free reports and free online videos. If you would like to join this list please put your name and email address in the box below and you can start your learning curve immediately.

To start off I will be sending you a free report called The Million Dollar Briefcase’ written by Karl Warren.

10 ways people make money online

Blogging – There are plenty of six figure bloggers out there who are making it big with their blog; Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, and John Chow all come to mind. What they did was to give great information to their readers and then monetised their blog with affiliate links, adsense, chikita ads, etc. It took them time to build up their readership but look at them now, I am sure they would all say it is worth it.

Membership sites - There are a lot of people making money by starting membership sites. Basically this is where you start a site and for a monthly fee you give information on your chosen niche.

Writing – With the internet almost anything is possible and writing is a skill in demand right now. If you are good at writing then there are people willing to pay you. If you are a good writer you can make a lot of money online and offline. Sites like www.elance.com , www.rentacoder.com all advertise for writers. there is one drawback to using sites like this and its the competition. People want writers on the cheap, however if you have very good English and know your topic you can command higher prices.

Selling affiliate products – This is the method I prefer when making money online. There are tons of affiliate networks now; www.clickbank.com www.cj.com , and www.linkshare.com to name but a few. You have no physical product to ship out. I like to sell instant products whereby the buyer can download their product immediately after their purchase like an mp3, or an eBook.

Write your own eBook – If you go to www.clickbank.com you will find thousands of ebooks and it should give you an idea on the breadth of topics that people are writing about. If you have a specialist skill, can write and have people to sell to then this is a good way to make money if you put in the effort. It’s not as easy as writing it and then hoping people will come to it, you have to promote it, this is where joining a forum comes into it’s own.

Sell your skill – Do you have a particular skill? Are you a whiz at blogging? sell you skills to people who know nothing about blogging. Are you a qualified counsellor? sell your services online. Can you build a website? There are still thousands of small businesses who do not have an internet presence and are willing to pay someone to build a site for them. Truth is we all have skills that we can sell it’s just a matter of who can promote themselves the best.

Start a directory – There are a ton of directories out there and a lot of them charge a fee for inserting a link to their site. If you have a niche blog or website you can start your own directory. It might take some work initially to set it up and promote it but a $20 annual insertion fee could bring in a recurring income for you all of it passive income after the initial setup. There are lots of free scripts out there to help you do this, just have a search on google for them to find the best one.

Website flipping – If you know what you are doing and are good at SEO and getting links you can start a website and sell it on a few months later. A lot of people are now doing this with blogs. To make it worthwhile you would have to have a few on the go, build them up and then sell them.

Putting ads on your site – This is an obvious one but not one to be overlooked. Adsense and link ads are the easiest ways of making money from your site but you can also have affiliate links to the products you are promoting like the ones I have in the sidebar.

Write an eCourse – A lot of people have made big money from writing an e-course on their speciality. Again, all the work is done at the beginning. You write your course, a quality one, add some audio, video or other ways to make your presentations professional and sell it to a niche audience. Once your course is written, you can set up an autoresponder account at somewere like www.aweber.com and split the course into 7 -12 parts. The beauty of the auto responder is that you can send out emails on a timed setting i.e. send part of the course out once every 2 days or once a week, whatever you want. Then all the work goes into promoting the course, not easy but if you have a skill it could be a good money earner.

More money in your life

Steven Aitchison — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:36:02 +0000

Attracting money into your life

I suspect most people would like to attract more money into their life, but are you ready for it? Mentally you’ve got to be ready to receive money. I am noticing more and more in my life that the law of attraction really does work especially since I downloaded my intentions onto my iPod, I wrote about it here. Money has been coming into my life ever sinceI removed the blocks in my mind about money. I used to believe that I would never be able to make money, I didn’t have any special talentsto make money, I had failed in the past etc etc. These thoughts definitively hindered my progress in making money and as soon as I dropped them and believed I deserved money in my life and believed it would come, it did.

There is a great way to change your thinking about money and attract more of it.

Put some money in your wallet! Esther Hicks wrote about it in ‘Ask and it is given’. I have started carrying more money in my wallet and believe it is a catalyst to me receiving more money.

How the hell does putting money in your wallet attract more money?

Okay try it. Put £100 ($150) in your wallet and do not spend it. If you need to buy something at the shop do not use the £100. Whenever you see something you like you can say to yourself I can buy that if I wanted to. Resist the temptation to buy it, but say to yourself I’ve got the money to buy it. Do this for a few weeks and see what happens.

You are mentally preparing yourself to receive more money into your life. If you try this for a few weeks your mind has fewer blocks about money coming into your life as you have spent that £100, mentally, 100 times. In your mind you have spent £10,000. You might have passed a clothes shop and said ‘I could buy that if I wanted to’ and you could, you had £100 in your pocket. You might walk past a computer shop and see that iPod you wanted and say to yourself ‘I could buy that if I wanted to’. Your mind goes from lack of money to lots of money.

I really do believe that what we think about is what we attract in our lives. I have seen the transformation in my life and I have seen more money than ever coming into my life. If I am being completely honest I have had to slow the amount of opportunities coming my way as I do not have time to take on the jobs I am offered. However the amount of money coming into my life that I have not worked for can continue ‘til the cows come home.’

As an example I used to run a small book dealing business which I stopped in September 2005. I filled in all my tax returns etc and thought I was up to date with everything. 5 days ago I was at a hall helping some of my clients fill in benefits forms and get advice on benefits and child tax credit etc and someone was there from the tax office. I casually asked if I would be due any rebate. After explaining to me that the tax office would eventually get around to issuing a rebate it would be better to ask for it and I could receive it quicker. She asked my to write a quick letter and she would hand it in. 3 days later (yesterday) I received a cheque for £543. Now if I hadn’t seen the girl from the tax office I wouldn’t have asked the question about a tax rebate. The tax office might have issued it eventually but I hadn’t received anything so far.

Try it

If you are open to receiving money you will receive it. If you don’t believe this rubbish that I am talking try it for yourself, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. If you have a deep seated belief that this will not work it may take longer to start attracting money. If you are open to this you will manifest money a lot quicker.

If you don’t have £100 in your pocket try it with £50 and work up or try it with £20 and work up.