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This is a followup post about Sitehoppin and what I have learned over the last two weeks. For the first week, I really didn’t do much with it other than use it to hop Entrecard blogs in order to drop cards and gain credits. Then last week I really began tapping all the resources Sitehoppin has to offer. It has quite a business model built around it.

First, let me tell you how I have been using Sitehoppin and what I have gotten as a return on investment (ROI). In two weeks, I have received 4,224 unique page views to our sites from Sitehoppin. In comparison, Entrecard has delivered about 14,000 (according to the Entrecard stats) since December 2007. That means that in the two weeks I have used Sitehoppin, I have received roughly 5 weeks worth of traffic from Entrecard. WOW. You mean to tell me that when I started using Sitehoppin, I more than doubled the traffic I was receiving from Entrecard with the same amount of time invested? I have spent about the same amount of time using both sites that I would previously spend on just Entrecard. But now I am reveiving twice the traffic for the same time. What is there not to love about that?

Use Sitehoppin to drop Entrecards

Yes, I know using Sitehoppin to drop Entrecards is a little slower. But, if you rate the pages while dropping, you will gain one extra visitor to the site of your choice for every two pages you rate. Over the course of dropping your 300 Entrecard limit for the day, you can effectively gain an extra 150 visitors to your site.

And here is a little secret: in slideshow mode on Sitehoppin, you gain 1 beer credit per hop. So with multiple tabs open, you can gain a few more beer credits while dropping Entrecards. In the amount of time it takes you to drop your 300 Entrecard credits, you are receiving roughly the same amount of traffic from Sitehoppin to your page. Won’t this degrade the value of the visits and credits? The simple answer is yes and no.

It costs 10 beer credits to receive 1 hop to your site. If you are not manually hopping the sites and rating them, it takes 5 times longer to acquire the same amount of credits. This lowers the incentive to just set it and forget it. Plus, at any given time there are over 2,000 visitors hopping sites on Sitehoppin legitimately because it serves them no interest to cheat the system if they do not have a use for the credits they generate. Looking at how setting 5 tabs to automatically hop sites degrades the system. You still have to acknowledge that the sites being hopped are still receiving a page view. In the long run, more real people are going to be seeing the pages shown than not.

Money to be made

Unlike Entrecard, Sitehoppin has a built in affiliate program designed to help everyone involved. The customer and member looking to save money on buying beer shares receives 25% off when using an affiliate link. The affiliate will receive 25% of the net profit after the discount is applied. Then of course Sitehoppin is receiving the remaining 50% to grow, expand, advertise, eat, sleep and drink. It’s a pretty bare bones setup.  To date, I have made $30 from people buying Beer Shares with my affiliate code. It’s not a lot of money, but when I combine that with the 4,000+ page views to my sites in two weeks, I am pleased with the results. I find it hard to imagine that someone like John Chow would not try and promote Sitehoppin when profits are that easy to make.

Don’t forget that in the Beer Stock Market you can actually resell the words you bought. If you own the word Business and someone else wants it you can resell that word to them for whatever price you would like. I don’t want to give out too many of my ideas, but imagine if you bought a bunch of small letters, numbers or words and then resold them. You could resell a letter or number that you bought for $2 and make 100% profit off of the deal. Hmmm… I hope I didn’t say too much. It’s the law of numbers, eventually the smallest letters, numbers and words will all be bought like domain names and to resell them would be easy and profitable.

Like StumbleUpon without the hassle

Lately, it seems that StumbleUpon has started banning a lot of people for really petty offenses. What StumbleUpon fails to realize is that those same people they are banning were the people that lead to the success the site has had. I don’t see Sitehoppin banning people for stupid offenses. Sitehoppin would probably ban you if you actually figured out a way to piss Max off. As long as you don’t do that, you are fine. The cool thing about Sitehoppin is the ability to submit all your urls to the site’s directory. In the near future, I beileve that once a site has received a rating of ( x ) by the users as they hop, that url will automatically be removed. I am not completely sure of the final details, but I do know they will soon be in place. With that said, if you have a lot of good posts on your site, feel free to sumbit them all to Sitehoppin for others to see.

I have found a few other ways to really maximize visitors and earnings from Sitehoppin but will work on perfecting those first before I show you how to make some real money. Be excited and look forward to many great things coming from Sitehoppin. I know Max is slaving away day and night to constantly improve the site and coding. If you have any suggestions, you should really chime in and share them with Max. If you haven’t already bought Beer Stocks and started receiving your share of traffic, you should hurry up and do so. Remember that it is always best to buy a word that pertains to your site or niche, but if you can’t afford that, try starting with single letters or numbers. It is better to get your feet wet first before you jump in. Don’t forget that if you use my affiliate code, you will receive a 25% discount. One letter could cost you $.75 for your share of traffic. Now thats a deal.

Here is a video of Sitehoppin’s founder Max explaining how all the pieces come together, enjoy!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRShDgLialw

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