What is StumbleUpon?

You may see it listed with other social bookmarking sites but it differs slightly. You use StumbleUpon by signing up and then downloading their toolbar. When you sign up, you will be asked a few questions about your interests – what types of sites and articles you want to see when you search.

Then, plug in keywords that pertain to your site. Your results are targeted to those keywords and the information that you provided when you signed up. Now you can begin viewing content on similar sites and rating it. StumbleUpon is a voting site as well. Positive ratings are represented by a “thumbs up.” Conversely, negative ratings are represented by a “thumbs down.”

How to make it a part of your strategy

As with all marketing strategies, there is a method to the madness. With StumbleUpon, don’t think profit – think networking. In order for this tool to work, you have to follow a process to get to the desired end.

Here is what we are talking about. Now that you have signed up and started using the toolbar, begin reading and rating the articles and sites you find there. If they are within your niche, then you will also be able to see what your potential competition is writing about and how their work is being rated. Leave a review for new sites you discover in your searches.

Join the community. This site is built on the strength of its users. Network with others who are also using StumbleUpon. Create a list of “Friends” who you share favorite sites with. They can point you to theirs and you can do the same. Participate regularly so you are not perceived as only being seen when you want to promote your site content.

You can also increase your list of friends by encouraging friends from other social sites to join StumbleUpon. With the toolbar, you have the option of sending the URL for content you like to your friends to read and rate. The more friends (especially those with similar interests) you have, the more chance you have to see your own work read and rated. Sites that are rated high and often fly to the top of the pile.

Lastly, write good quality content on your website. Just like you, your friends and your potential traffic want to read good stuff, too. What type of content does well on StumbleUpon? List articles (such as “Top 5 Funniest Movies”) are easy to peruse given their format. Also, topics that are hot right now in the niche of your choice fare well, especially those that might contain a controversial opinion or a new angle on an old issue.

You can find ways to incorporate StumbleUpon into your marketing strategy. Best of all, it is free to try. So, you have nothing to lose.

When some people think of multiple income streams they think of “get rich quick” schemes that do nothing but take your hard-earned money. However, there are other ways. And for online business owners, creating multiple income streams can buffer you during times when another income source may dry up.

Ideas for More Income

Find new clients within your niche – Maybe you have one main client. This may be the case if you are a freelancer. Begin looking for other clients. If you are a freelance writer for instance, try writing for sites like Elance to find new projects that can increase your monthly income.

Set up a blog – Blogs are not only a good place to communicate with your market, but also a place to earn a bit of extra income. Find ways to monetize it.

Keep your job – Whether you are starting an online or offline business, it can be slow going the first few years. It is unwise to give up your job until you see a consistent turn of profit that can meet or even exceed the income you will be losing. It will take a balancing act to get everything done each day, but you will have that security of knowing your bills will be paid and your family taken care of until you can leave that job for good.

Create a product of your own – Maybe you provide a service working for others such as ghostwriting or virtual assisting. But you can also create an informational product that talks about the niche that you represent. If you are a life coach, create a workbook or video series that talks about how to become a life coach.

Another idea: Create tools that your clients or others can buy from you that speak of handling a specific life situation. This is another way to brand yourself as an expert in your niche.

Write an ebook – Ebooks are the wave of the future. They are easy and quick to download so your buyers have the information in their hands in less than 60 seconds. You can sell them on your website, blog or on another site for greater exposure.

Affiliate marketing – The best thing about affiliate marketing is that the person with the product gives you all of the tools that you need to promote their product in your affiliate toolbox. This makes it easy for you to begin taking advantage of this stream of income.  And, your revenue can grow as your business grows.

Are you looking to have more than one source of income? Click here for some ideas to get you started today!

Step One: Identify your brand personality

For most small business owners their brand personality is their own personality. If you’re a goofy or silly person then your brand may be goofy and silly. If you’re a hard hitting and serious person then that’s your brand personality. This is because it’s much easier and more effective to be yourself than to try to be a character. Martha Stewart is a great example. While she’s certainly not a small business owner, her brand is her personality. You know what to expect from Martha Stewart and people love that.

It’s also important when identifying your brand personality to make sure it fits with your niche and target audience. Some personalities and niches may not blend well.

Step Two: Identify your primary marketing tactics

Your brand personality will be communicated in every single marketing message and communication you have. When they’re consistently communicated, your brand will grow stronger. Each message will reinforce the last. Some marketing tactics to consider include:

* Email marketing
* Social networking
* Advertising
* Blogging
* Article marketing

You’ll want to make sure you have a unified approach. For example, if you’re a controversial personality then you’ll want to make sure you stir up controversy in your ads, blog posts, articles, email messages and your social networking communications. People want to know what to expect. Give it to them and you’ll strengthen your brand.

Step Three: Create, and adjust, your plan

Take a look at your marketing and content plan for the upcoming year. You’re going to need to adjust some messages so they provide a consistent theme and personality. It may be as simple as creating a salutation or signature sign off that you include in each communication. Or you may want to adjust your headline approach. Sometimes small changes can make a big difference.

Remember that your personality doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be a character or an exaggeration. What it does need in order to grow stronger is a consistent approach. When each communication and marketing message supports your personality and your personal brand, it becomes stronger in the minds of your prospects and customers. They’ll begin to identify with that personality and want to do business with you. A strong personal brand can make your business a lasting success.

It has to be the number one question I’m asked on an almost daily basis by folks interested in getting started earning money online. And I’m guessing as a reader of this article its something you’re wondering too, is it truly possible? Well, rest assured that it certainly is very possible! In this article I’m going to outline several strategies for getting started.

First, I know the common saying amongst a lot of information publishing guru’s in the “make money online” niche is that people fail because they fail to take action. Well, this is partly correct. Most fail I believe because they don’t have a plan! We spend months planning our summer vacations yet zero thought goes into thinking about starting an Internet business.

Second, I also believe most information products published in the “how to make money online” niche fall way short of delivering much other than a whole lot of hot wind & fluff. People get sucked into the magic button, push this and you’ll make millions type of garbage sales copy, and when that doesn’t work out, well of course they’re going to give up & be thrown into the you failed because you took no action category.

Third, almost 99% of these guru’s products offer no real plan. Its just a bunch of theories & secondhand non-sense written by an outsourced struggling writer. These reports are just full of wonderful “wow look how great I am” & look at all “the money I’m making” type dribble. Nothing concrete whatsoever.

Your Plan – To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing simply is getting paid a commission by referring somebody to a product or service online. Your commission payout can range anywhere from 5% to 75%. Basically as an affiliate marketer you’re getting paid to “presell” people towards a particular product or service.

Learn everything you can about Affiliate Marketing. There is a ton of free resources and materials online. Fantastic forums and affiliate marketing hangouts will also help get you started correctly. Affiliate marketing is quite simply the easiest way for you to get started earning money online with a zero budget. You can get started promoting a wide variety of products at places like ClickBank.com & Paydotcom.com.

Affiliate marketing requires no customer service or support. You don’t need your own product, website or even a domain name. Eventually you will want to get your own website, domain, hosting & also critically some optin email list building software. But you can start without those tools & pick them up as you go.

Some simple steps in getting started with affiliate marketing…

1. Chose a niche – Some say go where the big bucks are or big niches with lots of traffic. And yes, that’s true if you have some experience & past success. However, for most newcomers I highly recommend you chose a niche that you’re passionate about. Why? Because its going to be easy to write about it & follow through. If you chose a niche you know nothing about its going to make your job a lot tougher with trying to research & learn all about it.

If you’re really stuck choosing a niche then I recommend you chose something like the lose weight niche, most of us could lose a little weight so its something you can relate to. If you’ve recently stopped smoking or are trying to quit then go after that niche. If these don’t appeal then look at say debt reduction, how to write a better resume or how to find a job.

Then head on over to ClickBank.com & Paydotcom.com and start looking at the various products available in that niche. You’ll notice many of the products website’s have a dedicated page for affiliates. On this page you’ll find a lot of resources to help you market the products. Choose products to promote that help customers “solve problems” rather than focus on just finding ones that have high commission pay outs.

By also choosing a product to promote that’s going to help somebody solve a problem in their life or save money, you’ll be choosing a product that will continue to sell well into the future. Thus setting you up to receive affiliate commissions next year for work you’ve done today.

2. Target Your Niche Keywords – Go after long tail keywords, usually 2-3 words. Use Google’s fantastic keyword research tool to discover suitable keyword combination’s. I tell beginners not to worry to much about how many people are searching for that keyword. By over complicating things in the beginning you can get caught up worrying about this step & then throw in the towel.

My advice also would be to contact the product owner or the affiliate manager and ask them for some suitable keywords. Many will more than happily reply & help beginner affiliate marketers. Again, also check the affiliate page of the product you’re interested in promoting & you may discover some have a keyword suggestion area already set up with advice for which keywords to target.

3. Set Up A Free Blog – Use either Blogger.com or WordPress.com, or be smart and set up a blog at each one. All you need is an email address. If possible use a set of the keywords you’ve chosen to be not only used in the title of the blog but in the URL, usually its the username when you’re setting up the blog.

4. Start Writing – Include some of the keywords you’ve chosen to go into your article titles. If you’re stuck for writing ideas then go to your local magazine stand for ideas. Keep your articles brief say 300-500 words. Make sure you mention those keywords again a few times in the article, then bold & link them to your affiliate URL.

A lot of people panic when it comes to writing articles, here’s a few things to keep in mind. You’re writing for your blog, not the Wall Street Journal. Turn off all distractions. Write quick & fast, then go back and review, spell check etc. Just start out with a goal to write one 300-500 word article per day or even one per week. Be informative, concise and straight to the point.

Use headlines and article titles that are going to not just attract the attention of the search engines but also your readers. Be honest and helpful. Its not just about selling. If possible include yourself in the article and the results you might be getting. Make the reader feel and believe a real person is behind the blog.

If you do have a few bucks then you can get articles written for you. Usually a good 300-500 word article can set you back between $3-$5. I highly recommend you check out places like Fiverr.com to source out writers. You can get many other services performed there as well for just $5. Highly affordable and well worth it to help you get started.

Ok, I’ve covered a lot of ground here and will follow this post up with Part 2 shortly on expanding your affiliate marketing efforts using Squidoo, Hubpages, social bookmarking & more!

If you’d like to get an in-depth, detailed information on affiliate marketing training then I strongly suggest you check out my Affiliate Cash Overdrive program to help you get started

First of all, if you’re using one generic resource box over and over again for each niche you write on, you’re giving up clicks, and getting away from this is the first step to improving your results. Just because you’re writing a bunch of articles on one topic, doesn’t mean one resource box is going to cut it for all of them.

You absolutely need to be tailoring your resource boxes on an article by article basis to ensure that each resource box is extracting the absolute maximum clicks from your articles. A generic resource box just can’t do that, so ditch the canned box and start getting more creative.

Secondly, if you’re treating your resource box as an individual, completely separate part of the article, then you’re giving up clicks. A disjointed resource box that clearly wasn’t considered as a part of the article as a whole will almost never perform as well as one that was.

This is where blending comes in. By making the resource box flow as part of the rest of the article, you’ll make sure readers don’t hit the end of the main article area, realize it’s over and then bail before they get to your links. The best way to do this is by considering the resource box as a part of the article body, and writing it so that the close of your article is at the end of your resource box.

Luckily this is an extremely simple, and extremely intuitive way to write articles and it’ll be very easy for you to adjust. All you have to do is write your article as if there wasn’t going to be a resource box, make the last paragraph (or even the second last paragraph) a tie in to your product or whatever it is you’re promoting, and then close out your article as normal.

When you submit your article to EzineArticles.com or whatever site you use, chop those last paragraphs out and paste them in for the resource box, and then just use the remaining paragraphs as the article body. Do that and you’ll have an article that seemlessly blends the main body content into the resource box, ensuring that readers read through and get to your links.

It’s an extremely simple technique to implement, and it works. If you aren’t happy with the CTR your current articles are getting, try it out, and I’ll be shocked if you don’t see a marked improvement in the number of clicks your articles get.