Buy Me A Ferrari

For both of my blogs, StumbleUpon has been the biggest source of traffic so far. On FerrariDave since it started in November, StumbleUpon has brought it around 13,100 visits.

Using it is really simple and it can be quite fun to use at the same time.

What is StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a toolbar which works with all current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer among others. The toolbar’s main feature is the big Stumble button. When you click this, it takes you to a random website that has been submitted via the toolbar.

However, the website it throws at you isn’t as random as it may seem. When you register, you submit some of your general interests into their system. This firstly where it finds out what you like, so it can show you similar sites according to your interests.

Once you begin to use it more regularly, it also remembers what sites and things you thumbed up and also remembers the sites you thumbed down. These reflect upon the pages that it decides to show you.

So really, it is a very clever little tool that should (once you use it for a little while) show you some decent websites.

How it benefits my websites and how it could benefit yours

Most of the articles I submit to both this blog and FerrariDave are submitted to StumbleUpon by me or by one of my friends on StumbleUpon.

When this is first submitted it will then be shown to a limited amount of people to start off with. This will, as I said before, be shown to people with similar interests to what your page is about.

Then if any of these few people thumb up your article, it will be shown to much more people and your page climbs up the ladder like that.

So as you can see, it is probably one of the easiest traffic building methods that you can adopt for your website as it requires very little effort with pretty decent results.

Making money with the traffic from StumbleUpon

I have adverts on my website from the Rubicon Project and used to use Adsense before that.

A lot of the reviews on StumbleUpon on the internet will probably tell you that for making money it is pretty useless to use StumbleUpon as apparently none of the isers click on ads.

I have proved this to be wrong, some of the traffic that comes through StumbleUpon do in fact click on my ads on FerrariDave. Yes, I’ll admit, I ain’t on my way to millions yet, but it does bring some revenue, that I can guarantee.

Why don’t you download StumbleUpon, add me as a friend and have a stumble around - you could even thumb up some of the articles on here or FerrariDave. If you are already a member thumb this article up please!!

Things are going quite well for Buy Me A Ferrari, already, within a day of starting, it has had over 100 page views as we speak.

Most of this traffic is coming from StumbleUpon, but in this article I am not just going to talk about the traffic I have had today, but the traffic that my other blog has generated since I started it. I will be talking about what I did and what effect it had on my traffic.

Again, as I did with the first post I am going to split this into headings for each way of generating traffic, it looks nicer and is easier for me to deal with.

I will be blogging about all of these methods in more detail very soon, these are just summaries and small tips to help you generate some traffic.

StumbleUpon

Thought I best start with this as it has generated most of the traffic to this blog today! Those of you who have never heard of StumbleUpon or don’t use, don’t worry - I’ll do a post about it soon.

When I blog about stuff on either of my blogs, I pretty much always tend to thumb up the article and write a little review about it. This brings varying amounts of traffic just by me thumbing it up.

However, because I have built up a network of friends in StumbleUpon, these friends often see what I have submitted to StumbleUpon and check it out, consequently thumbing the article up and bringing more traffic.

Networking

No, I’m not talking about your LAN or WAN network or anything like that, I’m talking about your network of friends.

To get more traffic it helps a lot if you have a network of ‘online friends’, friends who have similar websites and/or blogs.

So the next time someone thumbs up your website on StumbleUpon, or diggs your article on Digg, start a conversation with them through the messaging systems. Most of these users wont have had this sort of treatment and will admire you for taking the time and effort to get in touch.

This builds a reputation as being a nice person and people will visit your website on a more regular basis, if you are genuine.

Message Boards

I am a member on loads of message boards, too many that I can count in my head without looking at my bookmarks!! I’m also a member of a whole range of different subjects that I enjoy along with webmaster message boards.

How does this bring me traffic? You ask. Well, not only do I have my website in my profile on all of these communities, I also post links to my websites in my signature, so that every time I post, people see the links within my signature.

Then, if they are interested in the name of the link, they’ll probably give it a click to see what the link is all about. What’s even better is that when you are a member of a message board with similar topics to your website, you’ll get more visitors as they’ll obviously be interested in the subject or they wouldn’t be there!

Another advantage to being a member on webmaster-related boards is that you can post about your website, directly linking to it in the post if the message boards have some sort of review section.

Tell your friends

As I have just about covered your online friends in networking, I am now talking about those people you see in real life, off of the internet.

Lets face it, most people now have access to the internet one way or another, whether it be at school, home or work.

Tell these people about your website, give them a link, most people will have a look as if they are good friends, they’ll want to know what you are up to.

Instant Messaging Name

If you have a decent contacts list on services such as MSN and Skype, stick your URL in your name on there. People are bound to be inquisitive and subsequently point their browser at your site.

Blog commenting

If you are a blogger, you are bound to read loads of blogs on the website or have a long list of RSS feeds in your feed reader. Next time you see a decent post that you are interested in, offer your input.

Most blogs now have comments enabled and allow you to link to your website when you comment. Make use of this feature.

Please offer some sort of input though, don’t just say a couple of words like "cool post" as it’s quite obvious that you are just doing it to post your link. Doing this will make you look like an idiot and people wont want to visit your site because of this.

Competitions

Run a competition on your website or blog, this alone will bring in traffic as everyone wants something for nothing!

Even better ideas are when you ask people to do stuff for entries, such as comment on your blog for an entry or subscribe to your RSS feed for a few more entries.

This obviously isn’t a do all and end all list, but these were pretty much the main ways of building traffic for FerrariDave and I will be executing similar methods on this blog. I will be doing posts about all of the above methods in much more detail as it will all be an integral part of generating some cash.

If you have any methods that I haven’t talked about please do comment and tell me what I’ve missed. I don’t know everything (far from it actually), so there will definitely be stuff I’ve missed out.