This is where your stumble account comes into play. In your account you can list topics that interest you, like cars, games, web design, pets or anything else you can think of. When you can’t think of any website to visit you can just hit the stumble button and Stumble Upon will re-direct you to a website that matches one of your listed interests. If many users have thumbed-down a website it will not be send to other stumblers, so basically you should be served quality pages when hitting the stumble button.

The details on how the thumb-ups and thumb-downs are counted and affecting the sending of a certain page is of course a well kept secret. Tim Nash figured out how the votes affect users and sites by doing some very extensive testing. His findings are just a theory, but I think he is probably pretty close. Since Tim did all the testing and figuring out already, I won’t post it here but you can read it in his own post: Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers.

Now that we know how the system works, lets see how we can use it to get some traffic to our own site. What we learned from Tim’s post is that we need to use the system to get our accounts audience score up, so start stumbling!

I have been using the system for quite some time now and gotten some visitors to my own sites. The typical traffic stream I see when one of my pages is submitted to the Stumble Upon system is like this: the first day I get a few hundred visitors, the second day around a thousand, the third day about 500, then 200 and after that the traffic dies down to next to nothing. That’s a total of about 2000 visitors, not bad but we can do better.

To keep the traffic flowing we need to think about what stumblers are looking for. Think about it: why did the user hit the stumble button? The obvious reason is: because he (or she) was bored and couldn’t think of any website to visit. If the click on the stumble button send them to your site and the page doesn’t look interesting they will click on the stumble button again and they are gone as fast as they came. When thinking about this a little more you can come up with ways that will increase the chance of the visitor staying on your site a little longer than a split second. A big chunk of text is often a turnoff to the stumblers looking for some quick entertainment, a (funny) picture will do much better here.

I’ve done some experimenting myself and got some truly amazing results, learned a bit more about the stumble users and made a few bucks on the way! Here’s what I did: I created a single page website, put some text on there and a picture of a quite decent looking girl. The text was accompanied by some AdSense ads and the page was submitted to Stumble Upon. The results where amazing! After just 24 hours I had gotten over 10,000 visitors and I was wrong when I thought that it would soon end. Over the next 3 weeks I received 120,000 visitors and they still keep coming. The ad clicks on that page have been good for a little over $80, not very much at all considering the amount of page views, but it is easy money!

With that many page views I did get to learn a little bit more about the Stumble Upon users, just by looking at my sites stats: 91% of the visitors where using Firefox and only 7.5% where using Internet Explorer. These numbers are very different from the Global Stats. 75% of the visitors came from the USA. And comparing my site stats with the Google ads stats: about 50% of the visitors did not get to see the ads, the adblock Firefox extension seems to be popular.

If you have downloaded any e-books from our books section, you probably noticed that the .pdf files don’t open in your browser, but instead the ‘save as’ window will show. After the download finishes you can open the file with Acrobat Reader and enjoy the e-book with smooth scrolling and fast working search option. In addition to the forced download, a counter is being updated each time someone downloads a book. The number of downloads can be seen in your sites statistics page by default, but by keeping a separate counter you can also show the number of times each file has been downloaded on your page (I have not added that to our books page yet, but might at some point)

If you wonder how I have done this and want to add the same functionality to your own website, you can have a look at this very simple tutorial. You can probably get this to work without any programming experience at all. Your visitors will thank you for it!

Commenting on other blogs
You can post comments on other blogs, the comments usually let you put a URL in that will be linked to from your name in the comment. Do make your comments useful, nobody wants comment spammer on their blog and if you seem to be one, chances are, your comments will be deleted.

Guest posting
Since it is a lot of work to constantly come up with new and original material for blog posts, a lot of bloggers will put your post on their blog if you ask them. Just make sure your post is on the subject of the guest blog and make it a good post. I have done my best with a post titled “How I Made $21,496.95 in Just 2 Weeks!” on payment blogger. Judging by the replies on the post I’d say my post was a success.

Blogroll
You can often find other blogs on the same subject that are willing to do a blogroll exchange with you. All that really is is a link exchange: you put a link on your blog and they put one on theirs. If your just starting out your blog, don’t go asking Darren Rowse for a blogroll exchange, that just wouldn’t work. A link exchange like this has to be beneficial to both parties. Look for a blog on the same subject and about the same size as your own. New blogs will more likely want to put a link up for you, since they are probably looking for links themselves .

These are just a few of the ways to get started. This subject has been discussed over and over again, and probably will for a long time to come. You can have a look over at Pro blogger where Darren has made a list of some of the more interesting posts on the subject.

Another thing I noticed is that, while the website URL has been added to both the story and the company profile, the links are not clickable. So, if you are doing this to get some links pointing to your site, this is not where to submit your story. Still someone might have seen the story and published it on their own website. We’ll have to wait for the story to show up in the search engines to see if anyone is using it.

No confirmation yet from EcommWire, but the story on there can be found through Google.  It also includes a clickable link and the story is featured on the front page. The stories on the front page span 7 days, so this means that they eighter don’t get a lot of submissions, or they don’t approve many.

Since thousands of new websites are launched daily, this isn’t really something newsworthy, unless you have something revolutionary new. Still, putting out a press release for your website launch could be picked up by a few sites or blogs and give you a little exposure. You know how they say every little bit helps, so lets try this press release thing! (more…)

Running competitions is a great way to promote your business or blog and with sponsors involved it doesn’t even have to cost you a penny. There’s a new bolded entry on my todo list: find some competition sponsors.

Every once in a while a website pops up with a revolutionary new idea that practically markets itself and pulls in millions of profit. The rest of us have to put a lot of effort into marketing to make a website even remotely successful.

Marketing is not only for the websites trying to make money on the web. A lot of websites are merely used to market an off-line business. Marketing your business online becomes increasingly more important as more people use the internet to look for products and services. Even if you run a local business, there is a large group of potential customers you are not reaching when you don’t use online marketing!