7 Tips to Improve Your Stumble Upon Experience
2008 has been the year that I have delved more into online social media apps. The two main reasons for this was curiosity and to connect with like-minded ‘internetty’ type people. I currently dabble with 5-6 Social Media apps daily – one of these is Stumble Upon.
What is Stumble Upon?
Stumble Upon is a social bookmarking online site that allows you to share websites with friends using the Stumble Upon browser toolbar. If you like a website you’re looking at, simply press the “Thumbs Up” button; if you don’t like it, “Thumbs Down”. If it’s exceptional or you’d like to add your opinion on the site for others to see, press the review button to leave a comment.
The name “Stumble Upon” is derived from the ability to Stumble through websites that are filtered via keywords/tags/categories that you have selected. For example, some of the categories that I have opted-in for are technology, science, internet and photography. So when I press the Stumble! button, it will show me websites that other people have bookmarked that are in these categories.
For me, this is more efficient than finding a website, then having to copy and paste into an email – with Stumble Upon I can do this all within a browser. It also provides the extra advantage of keeping a history of your favorite sites and sites that you liked.
The Benefits of Stumble Upon
I must say that the Stumble Upon experience has been very rewarding; I’ve connected up with similar minded people and discovered some amazing websites. It’s also given me an avenue to promote my own blogs a little too.
My Stumble Upon Statistics @ Aug 2008
Even though I signed up last year, I’ve only been actively using Stumble Upon for 3 months. My current stats of today are:
- Likes 1,920 pages
- Likes 94 videos
- Likes 136 photos
- Has 158 fans
- Received 40 reviews
The tally above is evidence that once you’ve started Stumbling it hard to stop! 
7 Tips for New Stumble Upon Users / Stumblers
I’ve asked a couple of my good Stumble friends to help me compile a list of tips for newbies. This list was created to make your Stumble Upon experience as rewarding and effective as possible from the onset.
1. Don’t spam others with your own website content: this advice was consistent amongst all my friends – nobody likes spam of any sort, regardless of how good it is. Keep promotion of your own site to at max 1 per day. Even this may cause others to block you so be careful.
6 Ways that I Make Money Online Via My Blogs
I’ve been blogging for almost 5 years now, but it is only this year (2008) that I have actually seriously looked at leveraging the Mr.Gadget blog pages to earn decent advertising revenue.
There are two main reasons for the lack of work in this area:
1. Most focus in the past was on increasing sales through the web store section of my website
2. World of Warcraft
Now that sales are taking care of themselves with additional staff on board and I’ve quit playing WoW (1st Dec, 2007), I now have more time to devote to other areas of my site such as monetizing our thousands of blog pages. Until recently it was an untapped resource.
Where To Get Information on Making Money Online? – Go To the Experts
With terms such as “six-figure blogging” and the million or so pages out there about “making money online”, I felt a bit daunted and overwhelmed with my next challenge. However, when in doubt, identify and refer to the experts. In this case, there are two guys in particular who provide superb information on ways to make money online : Darren Rowse and John Chow. Both are renowned for creating comfortable livings for themselves from the proceeds generated by their websites.
On the footer of each of their sites are lists of ways they create revenue online. I investigated each point on their lists and came up with a list that worked well with my style of blog.
Ways I Make Money Online
So after around 6 months of installing, testing and tweaking here is the list of money makers that are now earning me around 4-figures a month and I can recommend them to you. They are ordered by highest to lowest income per month:
1. Google Adsense: Even though I’ve been using Google Adsense for almost 5 years, it’s only this month (August 2008) that I have truly had time to optimize the code which has resulted, on some days, in triple the revenue I used to earn. If you don’t have it on your site, sign up and give it Google Adsense a go!. Tip: See my post on how I doubled my Adsense revenue with only 2 hours of tweaking over one weekend.
10 Tips on How to Reach Plurk Nirvana and Still Have a Life
Two weeks ago I hit the highest stage attainable in Plurk – Nirvana. To reach this, you have to have a Karma rating of 81 and above. While many of you are already mumbling thoughts of “he has too much time on his hands”, “no life” and quite possibly “loser”, I accomplished this in just under 2 months with very minimal impact on my life. I’ll share 10 tips to helping you reaching this top level of Plurk further down.
5 Simple Tips To Double Your Google Adsense Revenue
This year has been very fruitful. In particular, the advertising revenue for the Mr.Gadget website is now doing 4-figures every month, which is very pleasing since I only opened advertising slots in May this year. While far from being a 6-figure blogger, I can now comfortably pay for my daily-latte-fix without negatively affecting my personal budget.
Having sold all advertising slots for the next 6 months, I thought it was an opportune time to take a closer look at Google Adsense revenue again since it was my the first advertising programme I signed up with. I installed it over 4 years ago with acceptable, not super, results.
Here’s my graph of earnings over 4 years (2004 – 2008):
As you can see, revenue has been up and down over the years never clearly breaking the $10 mark at any point. However, with a little over 2 hours worth of tweaking on the weekend, you’ll see that August 2008 improved remarkably; where we are hitting over $20 a day now.
How did I achieve the significant increase in Google Adsense revenue?
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