A2 Network Business Blog

Hello, my name is Jay Chen. I’m a fellow webmaster like Andy, and since he’s trying to get this blog running again, I’d thought that I’d help him out with some guest posts. I’ve actually wanted a business blog as my own, but since this blog is already established and promoted, I figure I’d just focus my efforts on this one. If you don’t know, I actually wrote a guest post a while back called How to Manipulate Stumbleupon. Anyways, let me get straight into it.

So. You have a site with potential. But how do we put that to good use?

Everybody always wants their site to be the next big thing. The next Youtube. The next Google. Imagine if you had a website where everybody talked about it, and that you didn’t have to spend countless hours submitting your site to directories, or crawling the forums asking for link exchanges. Imagine how simple it would be to promote a website where people basically promotes for you. How easy would your job be? Well, today I’m going to tell you how to achieve this. Well. Maybe on a smaller level

Let’s take a look at McDonalds for a second. A while back, McDonalds came out with this ingenious commercial for their Chicken McNugget promotion. I’m not sure about the details, but I think two fans made a rap about Chicken McNuggets, and recently McDonalds picked that up, and made it into a commercial. If you haven’t seen it before, watch it now.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XSZ6k3QIsAk

This commercial became increasingly popular. After it’s release, most people knew about it. It was wacky, funny, and had a catchy rap. McDonalds took advantage of this and came out with a promotion. Buy a six/ten piece box of chicken nuggets, and get a box of six/ten chicken nuggets for free. The rap and the promotion were well known and I’d expect McDonalds profited from it all. To this day, my friends and I go out to the McDonalds every Wednesday and have what we call “McNugget Wednesday” where we just eat a lot of McNuggets.

How does have to do with advertising? Well, McDonalds basically had the best form of promotion. They put some commercials out, but the buzz from people talking about it is really what mattered. So this brings me to my point. How to achieve something like this? The upside is that the effect of word to mouth can be enormous and can drive a lot of traffic to your website. Probably a lot more than any paid advertising can do.

So I had this experiment to try to reach a “buzz” for my website http://freetextsend.com. Just a quick overview, FreeTextSend is a site where you can send free text messages to another cellphone. It’s just a fast, fun and free way to send free texts. So anyways, I came up with this way of advertising that is somewhat unique. This is basically how it works. I tell my friends to put a link in their AIM profile to my website, and if they do it, they get to pick an outfit for me to wear for school. Sounds simple right? Well, that’s the point. This idea works two fold:

The first, is that a lot of people are on AIM/MSN nowadays. I’d say the average person has at least 200 people on their buddy list, and if you get a lot of people to put their link in their profile, then there is a potential for a lot of exposure. Also, if I saw a link in my friends profile, I’d be more inclined to click it than if I saw it on some random website. Nowadays with identity theft and charging cell phones for unwanted ringtones and such, people are wary of giving away their personal information, such as their number. So if I saw a person that I trusted promoting it, then I’d be more open with using the service.

The second, is the “buzz” or word to mouth part. Say my friend thinks of some completely ridiculous outfit for me. The other day, I had to wear a headband, a long tshirt under another tshirt, short shorts, and long high knee socks with tennis shoes. As I walked the halls, people gave me weird looks. However, there were some people that came up to me and asked what I was doing. This was the effect I was looking for. By them asking me what I was doing, I was able to explain the promotion and the website to them. As time went on, almost everybody knew what I was doing, and I had a lot of people asking me, “Who dressed you today?”

See, it’s easy to do. The word to mouth effect doesn’t have to be on such a large scale as the one like McDonalds. I think I was successful because in the end, people knew of the website, knew what I was doing, talked to other people about what I was doing, and what I was doing it for. Plus, it was actually a pretty fun thing to do.

All in all, I hope you liked my post about advertising and word to mouth. It might not have been that informative, but I hope you got out of it that word to mouth is probably the best method of advertising, and that the potential can be huge. Stay tuned for more posts as we try and revive this blog.

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Hello, my name is Jay Chen, and I’m doing a guest piece for Andy about a specific topic. If you wanted to know a little about myself, I’m also a teen webmaster like Andy, and I’m doing this sort of like a hobby. I’d be interested in doing it full time, but school comes first. I don’t exactly remember when I met Andy, but it was probably around a year ago, and I’m pretty sure we met on Sitepoint, and after that, it was love ever since. Just kidding. But we naturally became friends because we both had the same goal in mind – to become a rich and successful webmaster.

The topic I’m going to be talking about today is Stumbleupon, and how to take advantage of this great tool to receive bundles of traffic to a website of your own. If your stumbling (no pun intended) across this blog post, then probably means that you are a webmaster yourself, and you know what Stumbleupon is. For those of you that don’t know what this tool is, let me explain. Stumbleupon is a website that bored people go to, and explore and discover new sites. They create an account there, and they choose which topics that they are interested in (Art, Computers, Sports etc.). Then, all they have to do is download the Stumble toolbar, and they are all set to go. On the stumble toolbar, there are many buttons, one of which is “stumble.” When a user clicks on this button, they are redirected to a random (or not so random) site that has to do with the topics that they are interested in. Another part of Stumbleupon is the feedback portion of the site. Users can also “thumbs up” a site, saying that they like it, or they can also “review it,” by posting a short blurb about it. After doing so, Stumbleupon records this site in their database for the specific topic that the website pertains to. This is where the sites come from when you click the “stumble” button.

Why is this important to a webmaster? If used correctly, this can be a major source of traffic. Think of it, bored people are out there using this service, which means that they are looking for new and inventive sites to use. Also this traffic is also pretty much targeted, the site that the user gets always has to do with the topic that they are interested in. Think of it, this means that you don’t to buy pointless popunder traffic. Popunders are annoying, and are x’d out of seconds after they are popped up (or under in this case). Also, your advertisement in the popunder usually doesn’t even have to do with the website you are looking at it in the first place.

So basically, enough for the introduction. Remember a while back where Andy blogged about how he had 2,000 unique visitors that day because of Stumbleupon. Well that was all me baby :-P. Andy and I both worked on Fakesend together, and I mainly did the advertising and marketing portion of the site. Even though there were some legal problems with the website, it was still a hit, and had a huge burst of traffic. If you do not remember, I would have pulled up an screenshots of the stats but too bad Andy blog got erased a while back.

So am I going to teach you all of this for free? Yes I am, but I have to say a few things before I start. This is not a guaranteed way of getting tons of traffic, but I’m pretty sure you’ll get a decent amount of it. Also, the amount of traffic will be proportional to your site. People use Stumbleupon so they will find something interesting. If your website is not interesting at all, then people probably won’t like it, or they might give your website a “thumbs down.” Also, you’ll get more traffic if your website is unique. I mean, if you’re trying to advertise on Stumbleupon with an arcade site, you most likely won’t get that much traffic. Why? Because there are literally thousands of arcade sites out there, and people on the net will probably want to play the games at a bigger or well known sites. People on Stumbleupon are trying to find the small unique sites that are very interesting.

Stumbleupon is very similar to Digg, users “thumb up” a website, similar to digging it. The more thumbs up the website has, the more times it will probably show up when people are “stumbling.” Similar to Digg, you can’t give the site a thumbs up more than once, so you need to rely on other users to do it for you.

The best way to get thumbs up from other users are forums. A person favorite of mine is the digitalpoint forum. There is an entire section for “freebies” where people give other people free things. In this section, it’s basically filled with people offering to trade stumbles, or trade Diggs. Take advantage of this and do a lot of stumble exchanges. The more stumbles you get, the more popular your site will probably become. Also, reviews are important in Stumbleupon. Basically, once a site is stored in Stumble’s database, it gets it’s own page, which shows how many times it’s been stumbled, and the different reviews of it. Reviews count more than the “thumbs up” when determining if the website is popular. The more reviews you have, the more traffic you should get as well. So when trading stumbles, make sure you ask if the person wants to trade reviews too. It is beneficial to your site. Another useful tool is the website www.stumblexchange.com It’s a website that has a fair system with exchanging stumbles. You sign up for the site, make an account, and list your website to be stumbled. There is a section where you stumble sites, and each site/friend you add, you get one credit. One credit means that your site will be stumbled once. So the more sites you stumble, the more stumbles you receive in return.

Also, it is important to “stack” your account. See, a while back, I owned this free texting site, which got a decent 100 uniques a day. I didn’t know about stumbleupon, I advertised mainly on forums. Then one day, my traffic jumped up to 300 uniques, and I was curious where the traffic came from. When I took a look at the refers, it showed Stumbleupon as the source, and it also showed the userpage for the person that gave me a review. I took a look at the userpage, and the person was pretty popular in the Stumbleupon network. He had a lot of “friends”, he gave a lot of stumbles, and he gave a lot of reviews. So basically what I’m saying, the more stumbles, friends, and reviews you have on your account, the more weight you will have on your account. I probably forgot to mention that there is a friend system on stumble, and there is. Basically, Stumble values the input of a person with a lot of activity, than a person with little. So it is important in the future if you create more websites, you can used your “stacked” account to create more.

For people new to stumbleupon, I hope that you learned a bit from my post today and use it in the future.

*Alert Shameless Plug*

After reading my post and you have the urge to use stumbleupon because it’s just that cool, then why not use it on an extremely nifty site of mine. Tired of paying 10 cents to send a text message? Never fear! FreeTextSend.com is a site where you can send free text messages to any phone. So why not use your newly aquired knowledge of stumbleupon and giving it a thumbs up and a review. Thanks. Hopefully I’ll be doing more guest posts later.

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