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!

As all bloggers know, having a good Technorati ranking is key for establishing your credibility. But when you are starting out as a blogger, what is the easiest way to increase your rank?

Your Technorati authority is the number of blogs that have linked to your site within the last six months. For more information about Technorati and Technorati ranking, go here. Your number one goal is to increase this number of links pointing to your blog. Unfortunately, if one site links to your blog more than once, only one is counted. So the key question to ask yourself is how to get your link on as many different blogs as possible in the shortest amount of time. The answer: Contests.

People love winning things for very little effort. In the last month, I can count about 6 contests I would deem legitimate and worth more than $2,000. Some of you may have heard about the Sense to Save contest or the Winning the Web contest. Contests like these are a great way to drive traffic to your blog and are a lot of fun to talk about. The downsides are the effort involved in executing them and not everyone is willing to put forth the time and energy to properly run one.

To increase your Technorati authority by using contests, find upcoming contests through forums, Google Alerts, search engines or word of mouth (right now Ty over as Tysblog.com is collecting contributors). When you find a contest you can participate in, try offering something to be donated for the prize. The idea is to offer the contest either a service or products. For example, I found a contest and donated Entrecard credits to it. Entrecredits are cheap and work great for this. Because of my donation, my link was visible under the list of contest prizes, which everyone involved saw. In most cases, the hosting blog is willing to take on most prizes in order to sweeten the pot and make more buzz for his or her site.

The best part about donating to Internet contests is the publicity they can offer you. This is because one way to be chosen as a contest winner is to promote it and give some “link love” back to the hosting site. If you have donated to this contest, this will help drive a little traffic to your site, boost your Technorati authority and establish your presence in the blogging community.

I donated to one contest and gained over 14 backlinks to my blog from it. The cost of those 14 backlinks was the 1,000 Entrecredits I originally donated to the contest prize. Everyone would agree that 1,000 Entrecard credits go for about $4-5 dollars or about an hour of time. That is a great trade-off for gaining links. Imagine if you hunted down 5-10 different contests and donated just Entrecard credits. That could be enough to double your Technorati rank in most cases. Plus, all those contests you decide to donate to will enjoy the boost in prizes to give away. This is a classic win-win situation.

This is a screen shot of my Technorati authority. In one month, www.joshwhitford.com went from 0-54 authority.

The truth is, you will probably never run out of contests that are worth donating a prize to, along with gaining some traffic and Technorati authority for your blog. The number one way to grow your site and market yourself is to participate in the blogging community. Growing your network and community is the foundation to your blog. Trust, traffic and authority aren’t given to a blog, they are earned. Your mission is to establish yourself in your niche community.  

 

Online networking is vital for the continued success of your blog. Each blog receives traffic from all sorts of sources. For instance, the Unconventional Marketing blog and That Mutt get traffic from StumbleUpon, Entercard, search engines, blogrolls, Hub Pages and Adtoll. I don’t actively pay for Adtoll traffic, but I’m using up free coupon codes.

The more sources of incoming traffic your blog has, the better. Everyone knows this. But getting balanced traffic from different sources takes time and effort. The greatest thing you can do to increase your blog’s performance and tenure is increase your dedicated traffic. I am talking about the traffic that stops and reads your posts, not the Traffic Swarm visitor that has no intention of looking at your blog. So, what does my traffic look like and how will I continue ot increase it?

First, I have about 6 or 7 categories of incoming traffic. I say categories because breaking it down further than that will get messy. Right now, my #1 category for incoming traffic is StumbleUpon. This is in part thanks to a post Lindsay did on euthanizing dangerous dogs on her blog Thatmutt. That post made the Buzz page on StumbleUpon under the blog category (still currently there). This one post alone brought in almost 7,000 visitors to her site. Being that our blogs are tied together through Entrecard and our blogrolls, my site received an extra boost.

The 2nd breadwinner for our blogs are the members of Entrecard. After that, its the use of Blogroll on our sites and the sites of other Entrecard members. The fourth category is the search engine crowd. Then come the others like Adtoll, HubPages, Digg and so on. Here is a diagram of how my traffic flow looks.

As you can see, my traffic sources look chaotic at best but pretty straight forward. The key to driving traffic is pretty simple. Get involved. When you want your pages stumbled, find people you like and ask them to do so. Most people will gladly Stumble your page for free if they know you will also in return. When you find people like that, add them as friends and keep the relationship two-sided. I often Stumble pages for people even when I don’t have a post myself that day. The same goes for those who use Digg or Pigg.us or any other free traffic-driving source. This relationship is why the traffic quality you will receive will be much better and longer lasting.

The second step to getting involved is to spread your traffic over a number of sources. I believe you should have at least 5 different traffic sources. No single traffic source should equal more than 40% of your traffic. I am vigorously working toward this rule, but for now I am getting people through the door and signed up for a RSS subscription. The biggest reason to limit the flow of incoming traffic from one source is to minimize damage control if something were to happen to that source. Image if your site were to get banned from StumbleUpon and that is where 75% of your traffic came from. How would that affect your traffic? If the answer is drastically, then something needs to change.

The best way to avert a traffic disaster other than avoiding I-5 during rush hour is to spread the load. A well-balanced traffic load spread across multiple areas will serve all of us well. My next picture illustrates this.

Here we have a network structure resembling a circle. The idea of this setup is to draw visitors and traffic into the circle and get as much mileage out of it as possible. It becomes easy to see that having multiple sites working loosely together will help propel and add to their bases. Each site continues to draw in different traffic from the various sources except they also direct that traffic to their companions instead of the open Internet. Imagine 5 or 6 websites sharing traffic and visitors in a favorable way. It won’t take long to get great returns on time vested. This system also allows for the support and extra buffer in case a traffic tragedy occurs.

As the saying goes, “don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.” This is ever true in the realm of blogging as in most business models. The truth is, you will get by for some time focusing all of your efforts in one spot. But the law of numbers will always catch up and bite you. I am currently working on building up my own network of about 5-6 like-minded individuals, and I would encourage you to do the same. It reminds me of the Three Musketeers motto, “All for one and one for all.”