Fifty and a Half » internet

Want Link Juice? – the power of Stumbleupon and Twitter

Ryan — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:54:40 +0000

I must admit this isn’t totally my idea. You’ve probably seen here that I’ve mentioned my friend Nick before in one of my other blog posts. He had this cool idea about using StumbleUpon to generate traffic to his blog. All you had to do was leave a comment with 3 of your URL’s that you wanted to promote and he’ll “stumble” them. The result would be that you would get more traffic. It worked for me, so I decided to “stumble” other people’s web sites too and from there other people did the same thing.

What I did come up with is a twist. I’ve been using Twitter to gain followers to funnel some of them to my web pages. Sometimes I promoted them but most of the time I just collected quotes. I did all the things to get more followers except pay for anything that supposedly increased your followers list. I did the – Follow all the top people in Twellow and follow their followers. I also used John Chow’s new twitter site to gain followers. Both ideas worked well. But it was all manual. I found that it took a lot of my time. I wanted something quicker and would work by itself mostly. What I did find was I getting many more followers from one simple fact:

People love to retweet other people who have interesting or useful information or links.

So, I came up with the idea of putting the two of them together. Twitter and StumbleUpon.

I will promote this blog post on Twitter.

Next, you leave a comment with your URL for me to “Stumble” your web site. Same rules as Nick’s (no porn sites etc., etc.) Just 1 site please as I don’t think I have as much time as Nick. Feel free to go over to his web site at http://www.nickstraffictricks.com and he’ll Stumble 3 for you.

Cut and paste this and post it in your update window in your Twitter account:

RT @Ryan700 Want link Juice? http://bit.ly/3CXkY

What’s going to happen is when people click on the link they’ll come to this blog and leave a comment for me to Stumble their web site. They’ll go back to their Twitter home page and retweet the last message back to their followers and the cycle begins. I’ve kept the message short so more than 1 person’s twitter ID can be RT’ed. Have fun!

The Key to Getting Massive Numbers of Followers on Twitter.

Ryan — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:42:46 +0000

Okay, I’ll give you the answer first. Then I’ll show you what I do. The way to get at least 500 followers a week is to apply consistent, persistent action.
If you spend 1 hour a day doing these things in a consistent way I guarantee that at the end of the week you will have at least 500 followers. First, I must stress to you that you must not spam your followers at Twitter. Constantly sending links to your followers at best will lose your followers and at worst may get your account suspended. If you want to get customers from your list it’s best to try to get them to sign up to your auto-responder list by offering them a free e-book.
Here is my step-by-step process that I use to gain followers quickly and easily:

If you haven’t got a Twitter account by all means go to Twitter and sign up for one. I’m not going to get into the rules and such so have a look around, play with it and follow some random people. Use the “search” feature for topics that may interest you and you’ll find some people to follow just to get started.

Once you have your account go to Twellow and sign up and you’ll find people sorted in to categories. You will be asked to fill in your information including which categories you wish to be included in. Once you’ve done that then it is time to subscribe to your favorite categories. Start following the people who have the most followers in their listing. Go to their home Twitter page and click on their followers link. Start following their followers. Do this for a few people in Twello. There is a 200 follower a day limit at Twitter. Once you’ve reached 200 followers for the day – stop! You’ll notice that if you picked your categories or people correctly you’ll probably get about 50% following you back. This is key. Do this for a week.

One you’ve done this for a week you’ll notice that some people followed you back as a result of your efforts. Some people use Tweetlater or other tool to automatically follow people who follow them. Once you are getting near the 2000 followers mark you should remove the people who aren’t following you back. You can do this at John Chow’s Twitter Follower web site. You can also gain more followers at Johns site because everyone who signs up at his site promises to follow people back – so sign up. His list is growing.

Once you have a momentum going you can also advertise you twitter page. Comment on people blogs. Join up at Vinefire and advertise your Twitter page for free.

After doing all these things you’ll find that your list of followers will grow and grow consistently. Once you’ve got a big list you can start deleting people who don’t fit in with who you are trying to reach. I try to weed out the people who post every 30 seconds, who post nothing but advertising or affiliate links or people who tell you every time they go to the store or wash their hair or other mundane things. Quotes on the other hand are my favorite. People who publish quotes are handy to have on your list. I have had many of my quotes that I have saved from other “Tweeple” retweeted on Twitter resulting in more followers joining my list.

Macs are Ubiquitous – Why I love mine.

Ryan — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:52:26 +0000

The thing that really loses me when I read newspapers and magazines are the $50 words columnists use to show off how smart they are. Sure, I like to learn new words just as much as the next person but I don’t carry a dictionary with me when I read the daily paper. That is probably why I don’t buy one every day like I use to. Why do columnists use the word “diminutive” when they can use the word “small”? Is this one of the reasons that newspapers are going the way of the dinosaurs?

Now what does that have to do with my Mac computer? I came across this word recently and all I had to do was highlight the word and drag it over my “Dictionary” icon and voila! Almost instantly the word was there before me with its meaning for me to understand. Once I knew what the word meant I could use it everywhere. I noticed that the Mac computer was everywhere too. In TV shows, TV commercials and movies. In Starbucks and even my local Chapters bookstore uses what unmistakably is a Mac computer as their search “station”.
I like to read blogs from reasonably intelligent people that don’t overdo using obscure words that only 2% of the population know without consulting a dictionary. But when I come across a word that I don’t know it’s great that my Dictionary is right there on my desktop.

All the world can be a stage

Ryan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:36:11 +0000

I can’t get enough of this video. It just goes to show what people can do when they cooperate with each other.

“Stand by Me” performed by musicians around the world from SKAT on Vimeo.

Free Traffic Exchanges – are they worth it?

Ryan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:07:51 +0000

Chances are if this is your first time here you got here because of one of the search engines. When I first started out with a blogger account and a web site I had no idea how to get traffic to my web sites. Free traffic exchanges appealed to me because they were uh, well, um FREE! I loaded up my ads on blogger and thought I was going to get rich. Trouble was hardly anyone was clicking on them. I thought maybe if I get more credits my web sites would go through the system faster and more often – that worked – but I had to spend a lot of time clicking through other peoples web sites. I was spending upwards of 2 hours or more a day trying to get more credits. Although, paying for credits was never appealing to me the thought quickly crossed my mind and then left again. If people were actually looking at the web sites and following through then I would have had more results with the free service. But they didn’t, so how would it be any different if I paid for them. Nick Stewart did a case study and found out it probably wasn’t worth it. If you’re new at putting up web sites or writing a blog using free traffic exchanges is good practice but prepared to spend a lot of time surfing for credits. If you’d like a couple of places to start you can go to Traffic Swarm or Web Centre Surf. Don’t worry my affiliate ids have been taken out of the URLs. Knock yourself out! P.S. – If you comment on this post with your URL in the space provided I’ll stumble your web site. Don’t forget to stumble mine too. Thanks.

How To Write and Publish Your Own Book in 40 Days – A Review

Ryan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:03:05 +0000

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”

If ever there was a comprehensive road map to getting your book “out there” then this is it. Bob Burnham, best selling author of 101 Reasons Why You Must Write A Book covered a lot of information in this night school course.

Three hours of useful information from writing your book to publishing, printing and promoting it. If you have ever thought of writing a book or even an article to generate more leads, make more money or work less then this is the course for you. You will learn:

How to write and publish your own book in 40 days

How to write your book fast with our BRWT Force writing technology

Why it is best to self publish your book

How to attract more customers rather than chasing them

How to promote and sell your information for the most money

Why you don’t have to be a writer to be a published author

How to earn more money in one month than your use to making in one year

How to self publish your book without any cost to you

Where you must go to get publicity for your book

How to niche your information to make it the most valuable

How to self promote your book and put all the money in your pocket

The must know reason why most authors are broke and why you will be rich.

I hope that you find this review helpful. One last thing – I feel that I got more than my moneys worth with this course.

Do what you love….you know the rest

Ryan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:43:08 +0000

I like the weekends, don’t you? But if I haven’t planned anything to do I usually end up spending more money than I do during the week. A question I ask myself as retirement draws nearer is what will I do with my time when every day feels like the weekend?

I could start a new hobby. But that takes money and by the time I get all the accessories to go with it I’ve spent even more. Besides, I get bored after a while and then I have a bunch of “stuff” to get rid of.

Traveling is something I’ve wanted to do but going more than once a year is almost an impossibility. What am I going to do the rest of the time?

I’m just thinking now but what do these things have in common?

They’re both teachable.

There are many hobbies that people would love to be introduced to in a classroom setting. Like photography and scrapbooking for instance.

People want to organize their photos and memories. They’re creating keepsakes for their friends, families, and relatives. They’re making Graduation scrapbooks and Halloween scrapbooks for their children. This hobby is huge and getting bigger! Scrapbooking stores are everywhere and they’re offering classes. Scrapbooking magazines and online scrapbooking stores also feed a hungry market! Take some classes and offer to teach.

Taking photographs with your digital camera can be a hobby that pays as well. There are a few places online where you can submit them and make money. Internet marketers, webmasters and bloggers regularly buy pictures from these sources.

What about travel? There are lots of things you can teach about traveling. You can teach people how to speak another language, how and where to get the best travel deals or even how to take better travel pictures. Just check the listings for the night schools in your area and if they’re not teaching what you have to offer then ask about what it takes to teach a class of your own.

Satisfaction guaranteed – if you do this

Ryan — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:19:38 +0000

One of the things that I notice is great service. When I took in my Smart car to be looked at because it was giving me some trouble they upgraded my courtesy car to a Mercedes C Class. Although I felt I was out of my league with this car I am enjoying every minute driving it. It got me thinking why would they give me this car and another car the week before that were a class above mine? I would have been happy with another Smart car.

It seemed like they were using something I would call a “long term” puppy dog close. If you’ve ever read a “How-to” sales book you know what a puppy dog close is. The salesperson lets you take the product home overnight knowing that you most likely will buy the product the next day. It comes from when people used to go to the pet store and were allowed to take a puppy home overnight. There was no way you could give the puppy back once the whole family has bonded with it. I think it’s also true with this Mercedes dealer. One day when I’m looking for next car it may be a Mercedes and I most likely would buy it here.

One of the ways internet marketers use the puppy dog close is to first sell or give away an e-book with a free trial to a subscription to a monthly newsletter and then later charge a monthly or yearly fee. Hopefully you’ll like the content and continue to receive their monthly newsletter whilst paying for it every month through automatic billing.

If you’re new to Internet Marketing (like I am) and would like to get started I’d like to introduce to you someone who also knows great customer service. He even answers his email like no internet marketer I know. His name is Chris Farrell and you can get his free e-book and sign up for his weekly Success Grenades here.