I recently just heard of Entrecard after reading an interview somewhere online. The site is a great place to get traffic to your web blog. Basically it is sort of an exchange system where you get to exchange 125×125 advertisements with other Entrecard users. You accumulate “credits” and as your site gets larger, you will earn more credits every time someone wishes to advertise on your site. There’s a few other aspects to it as well.

Anyways, I thought I made a pretty good Entrecard banner. It’s not graphical or cool, but it does have Misa Campo on it.

To end the post, I’ll just link you to some hot Misa Campo images. You guys probably have heard of this chick. If not, then visit my link above to find out who she is. My blog definitely needs to be sexed up a little right? Yeah, how else will I get any visitors?

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Stumbleupon is seriously amazing. Wow. If you haven’t tried actively stumbling your sites, then you don’t know what you’ve been missing. The following images represent how much traffic I got SOLELY from StumbleUpon. And I didn’t spend a lot of time either (only getting 3 stumbles on picture one and only stumbling the site MYSELF on the 2nd picture)

I’m not sure how long this kind of traffic will last. But I like that the traffic has increased by 100x. I had previously used StumbleUpon before, and I was NOT getting this kind of traffic increase before. It must mean that StumbleUpon has really become a better system.

Now take all this advice with a grain of salt. You are NOT going to make sales with StumbleUpon traffic. These visitors are HIGHLY untargeted. Usually, when I’m just around stumbling with the toolbar, I see maybe 1/10 websites that really catches my eye and gets bookmarked in del.icio.us. The other sites I just quickly stumble away.

What you will get is more exposure and filling up your website statistics. It then becomes quite a bit easier to sell ads once you can prove that you’re getting quite a bit of unique visitors. Other than that, I see very little point in the stumbleUpon traffic. Upon second look, it seems most of the Stumblers are averaging 5 seconds on my sites as well.

Still, StumbleUpon is definitely a great way to get traffic. You do need to get other people to “stumble” your website. The best place I’ve found is DigitalPoint forums “freebie section.“

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In my 7+ year life as a webmaster, I’ve only had 1 successful forum website. I am currently still running it. Forums are GREAT, they are awesome, but you have to remember a few things to ensure success on a forum.

#1) Original Content - Sure a forum is all about user interaction, but you also need to have some original content on there at launch. You MUST have something to draw visitors and get them interested in actually commenting and posting. For example, I had one article about men’s hairstyles on my forum that drew a LOT of attention from search engines. It was just a simple post (and I didn’t even write it actually), and because of this article, there were links to me from Yahoo answers, search engines, google, and even other forums.

#2) Dedicated Forum Staff - Without getting a couple buddies to help you out, it’s impossible to get a good forum started. Users DO NOT want to post in a dead forum. You need that initial activity. If you can’t get the friends needed to get activity, then you should try paid posting. I’ve personally never tried paid posting, but I heard it can work wonders. Once you get a dedicated user base, it will be easy to promote some users to be moderators and super moderators.

#3) Benefits for the registered - Give them some kind of benefit to being registered other than just posting. For example, on one of my forums I had given registered users access to a lot of hidden areas. I also had contests open to only registered members. Furthermore, I had downloads, freebies, media, etc. These are the kind of things that you need to draw new members. Also be sure to MAKE IT KNOWN that these freebies are available to registered users. What I did was post a little message on the top of the forums if the user wasn’t registered telling them about the benefits of registration.

What DOESN’T Work AS Well as it Should
Contests - Believe me, I’ve tried. Although a contest is an OK way to get some visitors, MOST of them will not be interested after your contest is over. Although you might get some new, dedicated members, contests are not the great way to get new members as some sites will say.

Post Exchanges - This also is not a great idea since it will not only take up YOUR time (by making you post on other’s forums), but it will also give you another dead user once the post exchange is done.

Thanks for reading guys, and MORE in PART 2 coming later.

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I had lost a little bit of interest in maintaining my blog. It seems ridiculous that I’m still making money with the blog. Haha. Anyways, I am going to be writing some more in here in the near future. I have a few new startups that I think should be successful.

Let me talk about my first startup, Amped Play. You can visit it at www.ampedplay.com
Amped Play is an arcade website that uses a free arcade script. I thought it would be a great idea to open up my own arcade since I heard it was very profitable. Unfortunately, my partner in the project backed out and I’m left with a struggling arcade.

However, in the last update we went to a PR3. Looks like we can start either selling links or trade links soon.

I will keep you guys updated on my business endeavors as the days pass. Oh yeah, I have one more business that’s opening, but I’m not sure I want to reveal it just yet.

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