If we see history, we often notice that most king’s  come back to capture their lost empires the second time before they die, and seeing recent events it makes me think that it might also be true for the internet, as today the internet is no less than a medieval battlefield. By referring to Kings and Emperors I wanted to make you understand that they considered power, reputation and authority as much more valuable than wealth, which is what makes them similar to internet entrepreneurs today.

Whenever I hear about a successful internet firm being taken over by a larger firm, I kind of feel sad for the founders, though most founder’s would be happy about the huge profits they’ve made, I’m sure many of them will feel the pain of loosing control of the company they built with sweat, blood and hard work, and I’ve seen many such entrepreneurs who repent years later for giving up their first business.

The main reason for this is that good ideas come only once, and great ideas come only to 1 in a million, and those of them who give up such great ideas for short term benefits will surely repent later on, I bet atleast some of you have heard about Roy Raymond, the then infamous founder of Victoria’s Secret, if you haven’t heard of him then don’t be surprised as nobody does. This guy got this great idea which was worth billions of dollars, but he decided to sell it for just $4 million. He repented doing so as just a few years later Victoria’s Secret was earning over $300 million a year, and Raymond lost two of his other startup’s and finally ended up bankrupt jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Now lets get back on topic, just a week ago their was huge buzz all over the internet about TechCrunch founder announcing his resignation on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt, and as expected it was the clash of interests between his editorial values and ethics and that of Aol, and so far TechCrunch has never hesitated in criticizing Aol or its management for any reason, but now I suppose that the Aol management has had enough and Michael being a regular employee at the moment, couldn’t help but quit.

Yesterday, after almost a week the former TechCrunch editor made a small and simple comeback, with a blog named Uncruched, at the moment the blog has just one post titled ‘Here I Am’ but with no text, but even after that it’s received 100s of comments. What he plans to do with this is not quite clear, but seeing the name and style it seems like a direct attack on Aol and even on TechCrunch.

There were certain reasons why Michael Arrington was an important asset even after buying TechCrunch, and this was because in the past six years Michael Arrington has successfully uncovered various secrets of the silicon valley, and TechCrunch’s revenue sources are not really what they seem, TechCrunch earns a lot more by endorsing other firms and internet services than normal advertising, and many of these are against the ethics of blogging and journalism. Now that he is successfully out of TechCrunch, there is no one to keep an eye on what he does and where he does it, so his new blog, Uncrunched may turn out to be the next Wikileaks for the silicon valley.

Whatever I mentioned above might not be true, but at the moment Aol would surely feel insecure as Michael still has a very loyal support from colleagues and former employees. I’m watching Aol and Yahoo quite closely these days

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I suppose its been quiet some time since I wrote on this blog, in the past few months I’ve been completely occupied with my humor site, SEO services and a few other projects, but with that I also kept working on my social media bases and I constantly engaged with my audience on Twitter and Facebook, and so far I’ve come up with pretty amazing methods to blast your Twitter and Facebook audience, in this post I’ll be concentrating on Twitter and I’ll be mentioning two methods which I’ve successfully used and which have worked well.

If you’ve ever visited my Twitter account before you’ll see a decent following of 2000, all of whom I know and with whom I constant engage, but as Twitter kept growing over the years it seemed like a puny number, especially if your a social media optimizer and whenever I approach a potential client they often expect a decent following to prove my expertise in the field. These two methods I’ll be showcasing below are pretty old and I’m sure all of you already know about it, but I’m changing a few methods within them adn adding a few more tricks.

All of these are basically inexpensive, but it all depends on how you want to do it, if your planning to do this manually, which is not recommended your sure to save a lot of money and see a rise in your following for free, but at the same time you’ll be spending hours of precious time on this, so it’s recommended that you buy bots and Twitter automation software’s such as TweetAttacks and TweetAdder.

Social Media Swapping (Retweets)

I bet I’ve mentioned this term 100s of times on this blog itself, if you’ve not heard about it, don’t worry because I myself coined this term. This basically means the exchange of social media votes on various social media platforms for increasing traffic and authority, in simpler terms I ask you to retweet my tweet and then retweet yours in return, which is sure to yield huge results if done massively. Over the years I’ve successfully built a huge swapping network on Gtalk which is currently big enough to get to the front page of Digg within minutes of submission.

Now in the past few weeks I used this network to the fullest extent and started aiming and working for 200 to 300 retweet’s, all of which contained 3 to 4 hashtag’s making it even more targeted, now using this method, my Twitter username would pop up with my Tweet for high volume keywords on Twitter 200 to 300 times a day, so surely I got a awful lot of targeted followers every time I did so, and this came with 1000s of visitors and pageview’s almost instantly.

This method does take a lot of time, I took almost a year to build mine, but I’m sure many of you can do it within 3 or 4 months if you can concentrate on this for a few hours everyday. Firstly I’d recommend you to start swapping with your friends on Facebook and Gtalk, which is why I recommend you to connect with as many internet marketers and bloggers as possible, no matter how small your initial network is, it is sure to grow as many of your friends would like to exchange their contacts for your’s and many of them also recommend their friend’s to ping you for votes, so once the initial network is set up most of the other work is done by itself.

If you have a good enough network, start promoting your Tweets, Diggs etc, via exchanging votes from them and I’m sure you’ll see a steady rise in Twitter followers from day one.

Mass Follow Technique (Finding the proper bait)

I believe all of you are familiar with the Twitter mass follow technique, which by far is the most popular black hat Twitter method to increase followers, but over the last 3 years Twitter has made multiple changes to it’s algorithm which makes it extremely difficult to mass follow users manually with an intention to increase followers, which is why tools such as TweetAttacks and TweetAdder mint so much money.

I recently bought TweetAttack’s and so far its working like a charm, each day I follow up to 1000 people and gain 250 to 300 follow backs, and what makes these tools different from manual following is that they have a clear understanding of the Twitter API and try to manipulate it and make our tasks seem highly legit, and today there are hundreds of such software’s and services out their many of which are even free, but what most people don’t realize about Twitter marketing is that it does not depend on the software you use nor the client you manage your account from, it depends on your timing, planning and selecting skills.

No matter how good TweetAttacks was I still had to decide whom to follow on my own, and for the first few weeks I had a very little follow back, but soon it reached to over 50% which is what it is today.

I succeeded in doing this because I made a list of those Twitter users who themselves increased their following through mass following method, and you can easily identify them by seeing the ratio between the number of people they follow and the amount fo followers they have.

It took me almost three weeks of search to find the best and now I have a list that could last me for at least 2 months and can surely bring in over 10,000 followers.

To start off with this method, the first thing you must do is to buy a software such as TweetAttacks or TweetAdder, both are expensive, but they are really important for internet marketers, after that try playing around and learn as much as possible about using these tools, then you can start off with your hunt for baits on Twitter and if you are looking for the signs which I’ve mentioned above I’m sure you’ll find many such users. The best way to search is to use search terms such as #Twitterfollow, #Massfollow etc.

On to our readers

It’s been more than a month since I stopped blogging on this blog, although I cannot promise to get back, I can surely promise all of you that I won’t let this blog to die, soon I have various plans after which I might bring in many more things within this blog, but at the moment you cannot expect more than one post per week.

Do let us know about your questions and suggestions in the comments section below and also do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter to stay updated.

The infamous and widely populated micro-blogging site Twitter may have gained a name as a game changer on the internet, but for its investors who have bet billions on it, its nothing more than just a hole in their pockets, as Twitter is not just burning cash at a high rate, but its not even having any plans as of now to monetize itself.

In 2009 it made a series of search agreements with Google and Microsoft which resulted in a cashflow of $20 to $25 million and I guess it covered up their overhead costs for the next two quarters after that, but later again they started burning cash at a heavy rate. In the beginning of 2010 Twitter again came up with a new way to monetize themselves, which was known as promoted tweets, which will allow individuals and companies have a trending topic on Twitter in their own name, so then people other Twitter users would tweet about it creating widespread brand exposure, and the cost of such ads were upwards of $100,000.

It did generate some revenue, but that initiative was called just an experiment and was never enough to cover up Twitter’s huge management costs. Today Twitter has over 300 full time employees and the biggest expense they face is their bandwidth charges which I think would go in millions every month, so basically they are burning a hell lot of cash than they are actually bringing in.

Are they running an NGO?

The top executives of Twitter are running their internet company like they used to in the 1990s and we all know what happened to the internet after that, though many people disagreed with me already I’m sure that Twitter is running like an NGO, all they want is to serve the society, but ‘What is to happen to the patient, if the doctor himself falls sick?’. Even if I was going to start an NGO I wouldn’t have taken $3 billion in venture capital for it.

I guess its pretty clear, Twitter isn’t doing any social service here, they aren’t generating any profits for its investors, so either the top execs are planning to pull off their interest in an IPO or they are just interested in earning a handsome salary and bonus.

The best monetization methods for Twitter

Though most people think that Twitter is incapable to provide returns, I feel its got great potential and can even overtake Facebook if it wanted to. I have found out a few methods through which it can continue the way it worked without hurting its user experience, many of these methods are taken from other startups and firms.

The first way Twitter can earn a good profit is by charging users for registering their own custom domain for $10 to $20 and Twitter can easily earn a 30% commission on that. On top of that Twitter can provide premium services for businesses and corporates which allows them to add extra tabs, pages and features onto their profile, both of which can generate enough to cover up their overheads and if it goes the way I’m thinking they would surely generate $20 million a quarter.

Last and the best of all is the Twitter search advertising, all of us know the amount of searches made on Twitter everyday, so why can’t Twitter use this to promote potential advertisers, it would surely be much more targeted than Facebook advertising and if Twitter can use the Google Adword’s style bidding then even small and medium sized businesses can promote their presence on Twitter, and thi method would surely make them a fortune, and will surely not destroy the user experience.

On to our readers

The above methods are just my views on this, your completely free to disagree with me or have your own opinions, to keep up with future posts of such sort do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

I really hope all of you know who Justin Bieber is, if not your not worth reading this post, to get a bit deeper this kid was born just 2 years before me in London and like any other jobless teenager he had an interest in music, he didn’t go to any classes like most people do and was mostly a self taught musician which was actually something which made him different and creative.

After mastering himself with this wasteful art his mother decided to record his singing and post it on Youtube for his family and friends to see, so basically they had no idea about the power of social media.

While he and his mother kept doing so they found an increase in viewership, I bet they always had people other than his family and friends watching, so they decided in the beginning of 2008 to make their videos look more professional and by now they already had a loyal audience. They got over 10 million views with just pure word-of-mouth promotion which can be called ‘The snowball effect”.

One of the many of watched his videos were Scooter Braun and Usher Raymond, both of who are famous celebrity managers, they immediately took charge of him and turned his hobby into a professional full time business, and by the end of 2008 he was also signed for Raymond Braun Media Group which released his debut “One Time”.

All of this was more than enough to launch an artist’s career, but getting to this level is not easy for anyone, but little Bieber got this overnight, I bet he himself hasn’t realized the reason behind it other than his talent, as their are currently many kids out there who sing better than him. This is not a celebrity blog, so more than Bieber’s success story we’ll be concentrating on how social media played a major role in it.

The beginning : Power of Youtube

In 2008, two years after Google took-over Youtube, it was at its highest state, I always believe that 2007 – 08 were the best times to start a Youtube business as at that time their traffic was on a constant rise and the competition was extremely low than compared to today, so quiet often almost every upload received tons of views and if it was good, no one could stop the video from going viral.

I believe in this because many of the successful Youtube channels such as RayWilliamJohnson, Smosh and JakeValeFilms rose to popularity during these two years. Youtube videos faced the ‘snowball effect’ much faster and easier back then, so I bet Justin Bieber’s word-of-mouth campaign started out with bloggers and webmasters embedding his videos onto their sites.

Soon his videos got branded well enough and started to attain loyal subscribers, which was the backbone of his long term success and Youtube often shows unpredictable results once you touch this level.

I believe Justin looked forward to monetize his asset on Youtube by signing up to their partner program, which I highly appreciate as unlike other artists of that time who considered running advertisements as a bleak to their brand image, Bieber was successfully leveraging good income allowing him to reinvest and improve his videos and at the same time meet with his expenses.

Youtube is a great step towards brand promotion and one could easily leverage his influence and audience there to other networks and purposes, I believe Justin Bieber built his initial Twitter following with the help of the same, and many big channels on Youtube have contact and advertise links through which they receive proposals for various business deals.

The next step : Get social, create a buzz

I strongly believe that popularity cannot be based upon the number of people who know something or someone, but its based on the number of times they speak and discuss about that something or someone. By now millions of net surfers knew who Justin Bieber was, but they hardly spoke or discussed about him.

This was solved by getting him to be more social, the first way would be to constantly interact with fans on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, I’m sure he would have outsourced this real soon. This helped boost discussion about him and because he outsourced it I’m sure the same was done in a massive scale, which added on to the previous ‘snowball effect’.

Many celebrity management and social media firms help build fame triggering fake discussions and massive social media upscale which involves creating fake controversies in ones name only to promote his / her brand, this method is tough and can be learnt only via experience and is popularly called ‘The naked fanatics’.

Again because Justin Bieber monetized at an early stage he was able to invest on these methods which are sure to cost thousands of dollars.

A big leap : Partnerships and Joint ventures

Every economic activity depends on a few others in order to be successful and at times one small partnership is all it takes, that is why I mentioned to always remain open for business deals in all your social media profiles. This may lead to a possible takeover, advertiser, sale or many a times a partnership / joint venture.

Justin Bieber soon came into the limelight of a few entrepreneurs in the music industry, many of them were smalltime, but soon enough he had a big deal from Scooter Braun which was basically a game-changer for him.

He got a huge contract which turned his small time internet show to a huge mainstream business. Many times even I myself receive many offers for joint ventures and business opportunities on this blog, most of them have helped me to a certain level, but you must watch out for scams a few times.

Rise to mainstream fame

As soon as he signed the contract with Raymond Braun Media Group he immediately launched his album which was efficiently promoted by RBMG, moreover his online bases were improved and well developed at the hands of professionals hired by RBMG, they promoted Justin Bieber and his talent in mainstream media with the help of publicists and made sure he gets all the mainstream fame.

The Music company did take a share of his earnings to cover up their expenses and to earn a considerable amount for their services but all of Justin Bieber’s launch depended on them.

His highly influential social media bases helped him leverage mainstream publications which brought him more fame and influence over the community. Like any other professional singer Justin Bieber started having his own concerts organized by his manager which again added to his ever growing fame.

These concerts were organized by his managers, and they generated millions of dollars from that and when Justin was singing for someone else he would charge upto $300,000 for it. Other than this his managers, RBMG got him a lot of sponsorships and endorsement deals which again brought him good revenues.

Being controversial

I’ve written about being controversial in many of my case studies and in all of them I’ve recommended my readers to be controversial in order to get your name out there. Justin Bieber may not have got into controversies for the sake of fame, but even then his name spread across the world due to his small controversies.

I believe that one must not be afraid of doing things differently, even if he fails at it I’m sure their will be some sort of positive outcome from it, that is what bring controversial is all about.

In today’s social media one can gain fame by going against the odds, lying and being daring enough, and Justin Bieber being 14 became a pop sensation which itself was something daring and against the odds, I feel that Bieber got maximum benefits from the fact that he was just a teenager.

On to our readers

This post was meant to be a case study on how an artist can get fame with the help of social media, but this can be for anyone else in any profession, Justin Bieber is actually one fine example of social media success and I hope all of you have realized that after reading this post.

No matter what he is today, his career began on the internet and I’m sure many more singers will use this medium to get world wide fame. All this while I considered singing a non-economic and wasteful activity, but I must say I was very much wrong although I would never dare venture out to such a business.

Many things in this post cannot be backed by proof, but I’m sure this was somewhat similar to the methods used by Justin Bieber in promoting himself, to keep up with future posts of this sort please do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

Until recently I actively promoted my list of social media and internet marketing services on my blog and if sales were concerned I got more than I expected, but the only issue I had was that I wasn’t able to provide quality service. Firstly, most of the projects I got were outsourced and because I’m a student I was never able to answer mails quickly and respond to customers and my overall project management was poor.

I made good money during the previous 4 months, but everyday I encountered a new problem and quiet often it resulted in permanent damage to my and my blog’s reputation. I think this was something which everyone face if they are alone and they keep such businesses as a part time business.

After my partner completed his exams he actively joined me, and we did find it successful atlast, but we knew that as we moved ahead for our higher classes we would never be able to do such stuff, so we started concentrating on things we thought would provide us with passive income and we started a highly viral humor site, after that we thought that this was the right time to stop all our services.

We did continue with a few permanent clients and projects which were doing well by outsourcing and we still are earning from that, but we stopped all our short term projects and those with plenty of complications.

So I guess thats enough of my story and now this is a post on how to get few freelance projects and jobs online which I guess is the dream job for many of you here, most people try their best in freelancing and loose hope really fast, but let me tell you that the best guide you can find is experience. In this post I would like to deal with promoting and marketing your services rather than improving your quality and service so all those are upto you.

Networking

My first clients were either my friends or the friends of my friends, I had successfully made a huge list of friends on Facebook and Twitter all of who are internet marketers or rather potential customers.

So as soon as I got started the first thing I did was to pitch them all with a mail briefly describing all of the services I had to offer and tried to create huge buzz in my network on Facebook by uploading all my banners and posting links of my services.

This tactic worked miracles, 100s of people started replying to my mails and commenting on my links and statuses, though almost all were just wishing me luck, but thats a great step as the main idea here was to make sure your friend network knew about this and on the very same people came up to me to negotiate a deal which converted into a sale 2 to 3 days later.

As all of them were in the internet marketing niche I knew that they would somehow result in a few dollars worth sales and I was very much right, another thing which boosted this was my reseller program and affiliate program which brought in a lot of friends who were interested in earning money and even if they didn’t ask for an incentive I made sure I atleast sent them a gift as their should be no money involved in friendship.

Job boards

Many big time freelancers use big job boards like Elance, GetAfreelancer and Odesk, there are hundreds of those out there and I first believed that these job boards could be my main source of income, but I was really wrong as these job boards are completely saturated and you’ll need to pass a lot of tests and get some titles in order to be recognized.

For newbie the only way to win projects is to make 600 bids and try to be the lowest bidder and maybe you could win one of the projects from those who are low on budget.

I tried my best for a week and left it as I knew it wouldn’t work for me, as most people who find success from these directories are big firms who have individual sales executives working full time on these sites which we cannot afford so this method resulted in zero sales and I didn’t even get a small hint of income.

But recently I realized what I was doing wrong while chatting with a few experienced freelancers, the best advice they give to newbies is to target medium and small sized job boards.

The main problem for us with big ones such as Elance are that their is too much competition and quiet often you see more than 100 bids on a project, but if you work hard on new job boards such as Project4Hire and Net4ManPower your sure to find huge conversion rates.

Paid advertising

I wouldn’t advice you to follow this step until you have a good set of permanent clients and a steady flow of income as this is just for reinvestment of income. These methods work really well and can even transform your part time job into your full time business, but on the internet it depends on your planning rather than your investment.

I’ve tried 2 different forms of paid advertising, though I didn’t earn much from them I did learn a lot from both of them, my first campaign was the traditional Google Adwords campaign, I used a coupon as well as my own funds adding sufficient funds for a one month campaign. My campaign provided minimal success and I got nothing more than just traffic.

This was basically because of my lack of targeting and the rich keywords I had targeted had low bids which showed very less, so basically my traffic wasn’t that targeted.

After a few weeks I heard about Warrior Forum’s Special Offers section which showed paid listings and I saw many of its members minting good money, so I got a War room membership for $40 and again spent $70 for the approval of my thread, I did get all my investment in return, but I can’t exactly call it profitable as the returns were slow and quiet low. You can have a look at this thread here.

Build a referral / reseller network

One thing which I did perfectly well was building a reseller network, firstly my huge existing network often referred their friends to my services and as I’ve mentioned above I used to compliment them with pricey rewards, but that wasn’t very professional and I couldn’t have hoped for consistent income from that.

To solve this I used a method which was highly used by big SEO firms, that is giving reseller rights to interested internet marketers, we would allow them to sell our services in their own names and price they preferred and all they had to do is to fill up a form after they’ve made a sale and unlike most SEO firms I did not charge a single penny as deposit which gained attention of a lot of small internet marketer friends of mine.

Using this method I had the risk of misuse as people would sign up for a reseller account and get our existing services at a lower rate, but we made sure we had plenty of information which would guarantee us that the applicant was legitimate, moreover we never provided discounts if a reseller wanted our services for his own web properties.

I had a separate page in my services page which promoted this offer effectively and moreover I wrote a post on this as well, I sent a mail to all my internet marketer friends and I did get 6 to 7 from their side. Later I went to a section of Digital Forums which deals with affiliate programs and I bought a sponsored thread their for just $5 and posted about the program I had to offer and very soon I had a heap full of mails many of which went unanswered, but I had all the sales resources I need. You can see the thread here.

Offline methods

I often believed online services like mine would work only on the internet, but I was in quiet of a surprise to see many people earning huge amounts from traditional web design services by marketing them offline. Let me remind you such methods work only in countries such as India and a few other Eastern countries.

My friend Nicholas Francis is one such freelancer (college dropout) who is minting money doing services for local businesses here in Bangalore. His main strategy is networking and later on he shuffles through newspaper classifieds and finds firms whom he think would require his services, he admits that it takes 100 phone calls to get a particular client, but soon enough he had heap full of work.

This is really complicated, but fruitful most people ask you to personally meet them, you may need to sign an agreement if its a big project your handling and soon enough you may also incorporate your services as part of a firm, which is where the internet stands as an advantage, me and my partners have earned huge amounts of money without paying any tax.

On to our readers

This was basically a post on my experience in this field and I’m sure many of you have had similar stories, I believe that providing such services allows you to earn a better income than blogging, all you need is a bit of hard work and time which I couldn’t provide resulting in bad customer satisfaction.

I’m sure to write more on this topic so to keep up please do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter, if you have any questions or suggestions please write to me here.

StumbleUpon has always remained a faithful source of traffic for bloggers with good content and I have always had 1000 visitors every month from it ever since I created my account, I also often had a feeling that I should have started earlier, today its my second source of traffic after digg and is one of the first places I go after making a new blog post.

Unlike others I have never concentrated on search traffic and now it stands in the 9th position, though I think that nothing can be as targeted and profitable as organic search traffic, my blog has moved and grown a lot faster with social media.

When I got started Stumble Upon was already pretty saturated and their was hell lot of competition, so a single submission would not get more than 8 to 9 hits or more than 3 likes which I’m sure would be from my blog itself, but since then I have made a lot of changes to my promotional plan which turned it all around for me.

Factors for StumbleUpon traffic

StumbleUpon’s algorithm is still not very clear, but due to a few experiments and experiences of mine and a few friends of mine I’ve put up a list of factors which you’ll need to consider to get StumbleUpon traffic, some of it is something all of you already know and we’ll be discussing about how to get them as well in this post.

No. of users who thumbed up is the basic ratings used by the StumbleUpon algorithm and its a means used by users to promote an article they like, at one point of time this was the most important factor and you could have done well with only a couple of likes, but this has been changed and the importance for likes has been reduced.

No. of users in your network as the value of your likes reduced, Stumbleupon started giving importance to your network that is the number of followers you have, the main principle behind this is that more the followers, the better you are, I asked all my friends to follow me on StumbleUpon and I successfully built a strong network.

No. of profile views is again something which proves influence and quality, but I seriously don’t believe in this as you can get a hell lot of views even if your profile is brand new, but most internet marketers believe this as a priority.

No. of reviews on profile and submission which is extremely important as one review can be equal to 25 likes, but reviews are tough to get. Reviews of you again is to improve your stumbleupon quality and you can take all of your articles viral if you get 10 reviews on you.

I’ve often seen one review make a submission go extremely viral, so I often ask my social media network to review my submission.

Type of users who like, review or submit your articles matters very much, reviews, followers and network is something one can use to determine ones authority on StumbleUpon, so I often ask a few influential friends of mine to submit my posts and I promote the posts which indirectly gains them exposure.

Build a strong social media network

Many of you would already know about the methods I use to promote my blog, I have huge social media mutual swapping network on Gtalk and we all send each other links to get votes and many times I get more than 120 to 150 votes on each social network.

This has worked out to be a fantastic way to build traffic and many of these guys generate tens of thousands of visitors each day to their sites using these methods.

As I’ve mentioned above StumbleUpon requires a hell lot of ‘likes’ and reviews in order to trigger a chain and that would seem very much impossible without such a network, I know many of you would consider it spamming, but their is seriously no way other than that.

Build an authoritative account

I used to always bring in 50 to 60 likes on each submission of mine, but sadly they never gave me more than 300 to 400 views which itself is less, this was because StumbleUpon underwent a change of algorithm and now more importance is given to the submitters authority and the voter’s authority rather than an assigned value to all votes and reviews.

After you’ve built your network on Gtalk you can easily ask other users to follow you, review you and review your submissions which could result in an authoritative account. Sometimes you can go extremely viral just after you make your submission even if you don’t get likes from anyone else.

Bring in ‘Likes’ and ‘Reviews’

After you build your network your surely going to have tons of requests for votes, so after making every new submission go out there on Gtalk vote on theirs and ask for likes and reviews on yours, before doing this I hope you’ve built an influential profile as that adds to the effect.

Many of these guys on your network will have good profiles themselves so you’ll surely trigger a strong chain which would undoubtedly bring in 1000s of visitors immediately and will continue for a few weeks.

This again brings in hell lot of exposure to your profile so each time you pull off a successful campaign your StumbleUpon presence keeps getting better and better. Right now I get a hell lot of traffic from it, but sadly I’m not able to post consistently which makes it non-consistent.

Instead of sending swappers to your StumbleUpon page directly for reviews I’d advice you to send them to a twitter page or to your post page where they can use your widget or goto stumbleupon from and like it, I recommend this way because direct traffic has lesser value or maybe the moderators may feel suspicious which may restrict your popularity.

Get on-site exposure

As I’ve mentioned above, the best exposure you could get is through your blog and StumbleUpon naturally adds more value to likes and reviews which come from your blog.

This can either happen organically if you can succeed in creating a strong community or you can send your swappers onto to your article page and make them like your article as thats better, but its time consuming and many of them may disagree and ask for direct links.

Its also recommended that you put up stumble follow buttons on your site and try to get as many followers as possible from it as most people who come from your site will remain loyal and may share similar interests.

Leverage and capture leads

StumbleUpon may give out hot numbers in your analytics view, but if you go a bit deeper you’ll notice a huge bounce rate, so the idea here is to make sure your site loads fast enough to make sure the user doesn’t click on the stumble button again.

You can cover up your blog with subscribe buttons and also fill it up with StumbleUpon badges, I recommend you to use the WP Greet Box which I think is really useful in capturing leads.

No matter how much traffic you get their are great chances that you turn 1% of them into subscribers and 3% into followers on StumbleUpon. That is why I mentioned that your presence gets better each and every time you go viral.

On to our readers

I’m sure many of you would feel that our methods above are spammy, well yes they are and I hope you get used to it as their are no ways out. StumbleUpon which is one of the best sources of traffic always keeps tweaking its algorithm usually to provide the best content for its readers, so quiet often we need to keep evolving.

Surely we’ll keep posting more on this topic so to keep up with such posts do follow us on Twitter and also subscribe to our blog’s feed and if you have any doubts, suggestions or queries please comment below or you can also connect with me personally.

The RSS feeds were a bloggers best friend in order to get back traffic and to prove authority and popularity, but lately this era has started to fade off, RSS feeds are no longer a good source for keeping up with your readers, basically the only one who cares about the number of subscribers is your advertisers. This change of trend was basically due to the emergence of new alternatives which are much more viral, profitable and faster. Basically there are hundreds of alternatives today, but I’ll be listing a few which I recommend myself.

Facebook fan page

Today there are over 1.5 bn internet users worldwide and 500 mn of them have an account on Facebook, so don’t you think most users will prefer getting notified about your posts there rather than being sent to your mail box in an unattractive format?? Moreover its easier for them share, comment and do many more things which is mostly beneficial to you, and all of these are impossible if you take your traditional RSS feed.

Right now my fan page on Facebook has about 580 fans and it grows by about 100 fans each month, after every post I make, Facebook will be the first place to get notified and within minutes I’ll start getting tons of comments, likes and shares making it one of my top traffic sources, actually Facebook steals almost 75% of the comments on my blog.

So unlike your RSS feed Facebook helps you build twice the traffic in half the time and after each post I’ll surely find 7 to 10 new fans which is the result of the highly viral potential.

Most people prefer ‘liking’ your fan page rather than subscribing to your feed mainly because its much faster instead of a 5 minutes process of signing up and then verifying, so as soon as I added the Facebook like box I started receiving likes from those visitors who would never have returned again. This is basically the main advantage it has got over others.

The first thing you have to do is create an innovative fan page which contains all features which make it web 2.0 such as a welcome page, attractive profile pic, videos and images and the most important of all is that you must keep your fan page constantly updated. After building an attractive fan page, you’ll have various methods of promotion firstly I’d advice you to invite all your friends and ask them invite theirs, put up the widget on your site as this is where you receive targeted fans, but you can also launch an advertising campaign, but that takes a bit of investment and customization of your campaign.

Browser extensions – the new RSS feed

Facebook fan pages are extremely powerful and effective, but there are often great chances that you might miss out on traffic as you can’t expect your Facebook fans to login and see for updates everyday.

To solve this there is another option which is made for bigger blogs, but its sure to work extremely well, the conversion rates will be higher than RSS feed and most of your subscribed users will notice new updates. This is a feature first started by Firefox and was soon started in all other major browsers such as Chrome and Internet Explorer. It was basically called browser extensions which would allow you to increase your features with privately developed extensions usually made by freelance developers.

Most extensions these days are used for mailing, social media, SEO and for other personal purposes such as time management etc, but very few blogs have used it to send out updates to its users. In the past 3 weeks I’ve downloaded a hell lot of extensions by big blogs like Techcrunch and Gigaom, and evertime they make a new post an icone starts glowing on my browser updating me for it. I use these two sites for driving traffic to my own blog via commenting, so I constantly keep track of them.

Whether a reader logs into his Facebook or mail id, he will be updated whenever he comes online. This is surely a system of choice to get back your readers. I’ve seen the effect of this and usually I never fail to miss out on a single post. Unlike your fan page or RSS feed this one is a bit difficult to create and takes a bit of technical expertise, but you can hire a developer and get it done for less than $100, or even if you have basic technical skills you can easily attempt this.

The reason this converts well is that as soon as a user visits your site using the particular browser he gets an on screen update to download the extension which is the most eye catchy features on the browser.

SMS alerts – the future

The trend in today’s blogosphere says that a majority of internet users will use their cell phones for accessing the net in the next half a decade, and its important that you start optimizing yourself for cell phones immediately before you stand a chance to loose out on this.

When sending updates is concerned the most used method by most company’s is the traditional SMS which is effective and cheap, there also a stat which says that 80% mobile phone users are constantly on work with their cell phones. So basically they would never miss out on a single valid update.

Right now majority of the people don’t use smartphones, so many users will use their PCs to check out on your post once they are updated, so you can’t actually track your conversions as of now, but its advised that you keep trying to get more subscribers. This doesn’t take much effort as their are already hundreds of apps and services which do this for free.

The only thing you’l have to do is place banners and widgets on your site and urge users to subscribe, once you build a huge following it’ll amount of hundreds of thousands of readers in a few more years.

On to our readers

I really hope you’ve picked up a point or two with this, though this blog is on the verge of popularity I don’t have more than a hundred subscribers as I never promoted my subscriptions, except for a small link at the end of each post, but I’ve already started working on these new methods and I am sure that I’ll find results with these.

To keep up with future posts do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

The past few days has been extremely exciting in Dumb Little Blogger, it included a huge mainstream interview on a leading daily, an interview on a radio channel and now a personal response from one of the internet’s most popular firms. If you all could remember we made a post on Digg’s usage of fake accounts in order to promote its publishing partners.

In that post we had just proved it to you that they were involved in the promotion of their partners, but for what reason we never got to know, though our entire team had a personal instinct telling us that they were all paid promotion.

Just two days after we published the post, it went extremely viral on Twitter, Stumbleupon and reddit, which gave it a hell lot of exposure, and on the same day I had a mail from a guy named Jen Burton, the message threatened, encouraged and gave me a sense of pride and excitement, of course because it was from Digg and they personally approached me, which for me is a great achievement. I’m sure most of you won’t say that after you read the message .

As soon as I got to know that it was from Digg I had expected a few answers for my questions, I know it was silly to think that way, but more than that I wanted to know whether this was really a legitimate mail from Digg, as I had never heard of Jen Burton and there was no way to find out whether it was real other than to reply to that mail id.

To clarify this I had to take help from a bit of friends, as my partner Bittu too wasn’t available to guide me. After a bit of consultation with msiGeek, Athul Jayaram and Shekhar Sahu I had to come to the conclusion that this guy was real and so was the mail. It was after this that I got to know that Jen Burton was the community manager at Digg, and the blog post made on Digg was written by him, which me mistook to be Kevin Rose. Strangely he is currently following me on Digg .

Nothing is clarified – no answers to any of our questions

Though he wrote a huge 150 word mail, he didn’t give a suitable answer to any of the questions I had asked in my previous post, the only thing he did was threatened me -

We do have 159 fake accounts, but we use it for the sake of testing new features, spotting errors and making the site spam free, and your claims to see only our publishing partners is false, we have promoted Techcrunch and Guardian, but just to test new features and moreover it was the best article only which we promoted.

We have provided the proof of the all the sites which were promoted by these accounts with the usernames of these accounts, all these 25 sites are Digg’s publishing partners and from the time zone of 1st Oct to 23rd Oct. There as been a total of 2390 stories from these sites being promoted to the front page all from the listed sites and the list of accounts involved have also been proved. We couldn’t list the links to those submissions as all of those profiles have been deleted.

We have been facing problems from a few people like you who have used our name in order for personal gains, we want clarification on such things, or we may have to take serious action.

This is pure senselessness, how could they even say that when I had provided them with a whole 600 word evidence. Also I have proved with the help of images from Thirumalesh who was one of the first few to break the news. So obviously they are in our radar now and nothing was proved yet, which makes this even more interesting

On to our readers

Hope all of you found this series interesting and shocking, this was the first time our team went into thorough investigation and caught in the results. All of this did help us increase our popularity by quiet a lot. To keep up with future posts of this sort do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

Facebook campaigns are widely used these days and account one of the highest advertising sales each year on the internet and are just behind Google Adwords. Same like Adwords you’ll need to think a lot and plan before you put in your money, I’ve had two unsuccessful campaigns, but fortunately I had used a coupon rather than my own money, and I think most of you should while your starting off as it helps you get a touch of it before you risk your own money.

Unlike Google, Yahoo and Bing, Facebook allows you to use ads to spread viral and keep getting the traffic consistently forever, but the complications in launching one are above all the three, though Facebook as a lower competition than them. So this guide will teach you how to launch a Facebook advertising campaign which is effective in generating traffic, sales, builds a network and also at a cheaper rate, which requires planning and equal implementing, unlike Adwords you need to keep monitoring your ads almost everytime, in order to make sure that you aren’t loosing money.

The 3 types of audience

On facebook ads you can target three types of audience and its recommended that you always go for the smallest. Here I’m not talking about interests and age groups, but the targeting levels which Facebook itself provides us. The first one is the fans, the second ones are those who aren’t fans and the third is the friend’s of those fans.

Its the fans and the friends of the fans you must target, what I mean to say is if I’d launch a campaign for my blog I’d firstly search for one or two in my niche, for now lets take Shoutmeloud and SmartPassiveIncome as they are both related to my niche and are hugely popular, so I’ll have the reach of the total of both their fans who’ll be shown my ad, if I target their friends then it would multiply by a hundred times, but the efficiency of targeting would reduce.

You can do this only if you have no age, gender or geographical restrictions for your audience, even if you do you can, but you’ll need to target more number of networks. This is extremely useful when you want to compete with someone, as you’ll be stealing their fans, very soon you can impress your fans more than your competitor.

Fan pages Vs Landing pages – make your pick

There are two places you can send your advertising traffic to, the first is your own site landing page, secondly your facebook fan page. Both are equally important and have their own advantages, but it depends on your needs on what works better. According to my analysis a Facebook ad redirecting to your landing page results in a bounce rate of about 67% on an average, so only 33% of the traffic actually spend time, only 10% would return to your site and 5% would make a sale instantly. It is profitable as you make instant sales everyday, but as I said it depends on your needs.

The second option, which is leveraging traffic to your fan page is also profitable, its common to see about 80% become your fan and a few of them will visit your site and even fewer would generate leads. One thing positive in this that you can always get back those visitors and this is true sense of viral marketing, its recommended that you keep your page active as once you get a few thousand fans many of them will share your links helping you go more viral.

So as you can see both are equally good in their own ways, the first method allows you to boost instant sales and get immediate returns, but most of your traffic has no return rate and their is a huge exit rate. The second method helps you grow your followership by a huge rate, it is sure to keep bringing in more and more traffic and also helps you build a solid brand, though sales will be low initially you can make up to it later, there is no guarantee that you’ll earn back all your investment initially, but you surely will in a few months time.

As I said this decision is totally based on your needs, if your looking to promote your blog or something which has constant updates or mainly runs on pageviews, then I’d strictly recommend you to use your Facebook fan page, but at few instances you can make it convert by leveraging it to your blog, this is by optimizing your landing page for Facebook traffic. If you are advertising an affiliate link or page or any product of your own, then direct to landing page will be the best.

Landing page / Fan page optimization

After you’ve made up your mind on which of the above you want to use, its necessary to optimize it to highest extent to get the maximum conversions. I have also mentioned above that both the circumstances can be defied of their principles if you optimize your landing page/fan page, but such optimization takes a hell lot of creativity and a lot more graphic design skills than most of us could afford.

So if you can’t do so, then its better to stick with your plans above and optimize your selection, either fan page or your landing page, in case of a fan page there are many apps and methods to customize it efficiently. You can do this easily with the help of Facebook’s static FBML, tabs, videos app and a few banners. Just a few a changes would give your fan page a staggering new look, this takes very little technical skills and more of creativity. To learn more on this do refer to our article – Creating a unique and innovative Facebook fan page.

If your directing your traffic towards your landing page, its seriously not advisable to direct it to your home page. For increasing conversions you must create a whole new separate landing page for Facebook traffic, it requires a catchy design which would look social like Facebook, you need to find a way to welcome Facebook users and make it easy for them to invite their friends. I know that my description isn’t clear enough, but I myself have no idea on how to optimize this, it takes huge creativity and skills to pull this of successfully, you can always hire someone to do it, as you are spending money on this.

For the landing page, the design and optimization isn’t everything as your targeting and efficiency of your ad too matters, so you can’t consider your landing page to be everything, but yes it surely does help increase leads.

Target less and increase ad volume

As a marketer its a common sight to see many people targeting all of their audience and all of their services with a same ad, this causes huge bounce rates and at times very little returns. So what most experienced marketers do is launch about 10 campaigns for just a single feature, each targeting different demographies, likes and interests.

For example, if your advertising a dating site, the effect would be really low if you title it ‘meet new boys and girls online’ and target both boys and girls with it, but if you create two separate ad campaigns, one targeting only girls and the other targeting only boys, then you’ll surely get good conversions. This one was just a basic example, but the true effect comes when you start a multi-level campaign when each feature gets different campaigns. It was of great effect in Adwords, but Facebook too is no different.

The idea is to promote the same page to people of different geographies, interests, age and genders with different campaigns, each having a personalized approach to its audience. This allows you to save on the wasteful impressions and clicks which would mostly takeaway half of your budget.

Create an attractive ad

Hope most of you already new about this, the main aspect for you to gain clicks would be the attractiveness of your ad, this is the most important aspect to improve your click-through-rate after effective targeting, so you must never lack behind on this as you may loose all your effort you’ve put above with this one thing.

You can just add a title of your product and your logo and make it your ad, you’ll have to be more creative and use attractive words, because thats what makes the difference. The image you upload may not have to be your logo or anything containing your name, just something related to your niche is enough. Its common to see many people trying to explain too much in the description, but its better to keep it small, but something which gets a user interested, after you get his interest you’ll have pages to express yourself.

On to our readers

These are few of the basic tips for you to get started with, but one can become an expert only with the help of experience and thats why Facebook provides coupons for advertising. I’m sure many of you will have your own tips and tricks that you’d like to share with us, so please do share your Facebook experience. To keep up with future posts of this sort do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

A huge Twitter followership is something which can boost any sort of internet business, and I bet most of you have realized its power by now, I started building my Twitter followership from the time I started blogging and how much ever I tried I failed, it was just recently that I realized that the successful Tweeters today were just part of the luck early starters had, when I started off Twitter had plenty of restrictions against spamming and mass following, so for many months now I had given up hopes for Twitter and was just using it for getting retweets via swaps.

Recently I went to a bloggers meetup #BuzzomTweetup which was organized by InRev Systems which makes social media management softwares such as Buzzom. At the meetup I was introduced to many big faces and also Khanal Bhupendra the CEO of InRev. I was really inspired by the way he treated us and the way he spoke to us made me his instant admirer, at that point I had known him as a small business owner who has a dream to make it big, but I got to know the next day on what an influential man he is in social media. He has over 60,000 followers on Twitter and huge followership on Facebook for his company.

As soon as I got to know about this I tried my best to connect with him and forced him to do an interview for my blog, he was really a nice person and immediately agreed, I spent an entire night framing questions and in the end of the interview he seemed to have liked my research. With a few questions on growing your followership we also went deep and asked him about a few of his new ventures and a few tips for wannabe entrepreneurs. I really hope all of you find this useful and I’ll really hope for your opinions in the end,

Can u give a brief introduction of yourself to our readers?

Sure. I am a data person. Thats how I see myself. I like playing with data and have working experience in Analytics space. I’m also the CEO of InRev Systems, which makes softwares for social media management.

When did you create your Twitter account and how did you gain the first few initial followers?

I started tweeting in late 2008. But started using actively only from Feb 2009. I just tweeted what interested me. Actively participate in discussion with folks out there. Retweeted and had chat with people. This got some early followers. But after that I started finding interesting news and articles in Tech and business, and started tweeting them, then I started getting a lot of retweets from my followers which resulted in an average Twitter account.

I think you’ve also used the technique of mass following, is it true and is it still possible today

It helped me a lot. Whenever I look for potential clients, I go to Twitter and find the folks. This has again prompted us to give People Search in Buzzom. There was a time when if I had to search for CTO of Infosys, I had to spend huge time and money. Now its available in a click. Twitter has open profiles and people are using it.

Most of our marketing for Buzzom and other products is thro Social Media Networks, primarily Twitter, mostly people know buzzom through Twitter talks. There is a good fan base for Buzzom and they talk to each other, along with it, we do active marketing campaigns in Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

People find our value proposition and come to us. There has been very little sales work from our side so far. This might however change in future. Our products are highly viral so we did not need any sort of advertising till today, though we have plenty more planned up for the future.

What tips would you give for non web businesses on using Twitter?

Everyone has to be in Twitter. It is the place where there are clients, potential clients and competitors. This is irrespective of domain of business.

The other important thing is the change of web structure. The search based web is changing to Social web. Its all going to be word of mouth driven business in future, and engagement will rule. businesses need to get ready for it.

What tips can you give me for improving my Twitter traffic, that is for a niche blog

I would suggest to follow good blogs and bloggers, tech enthusiasts and engage with them in fruitful discussions. It will not only give you direct traffic and blog engagement with comments, it will help you find original topics too.

Its the talk with people that bringout original problems of the industry, and give a head start in predicting the tech shifting thats upcoming. This makes you a value blogger and not a me too blogger. I think this may sound tough for anyone as soon as they hear it, but its really easy once you start off and you may even get addicted to it. This is the only advice I can give for bloggers.

Tell us, what makes Buzzom different from others such as Hootsuite and SocialOomph

Buzzom, as many fans complain, is not great in UI. This is the only area we are losing with our competition. But it will change very soon. We are working on it. Buzzom is a complete Social Media Manager. No apps in the world is as complete as we are.

I see your also planning to enter into online advertising, we would love to hear a bit about it from you

We have bigger plans in that space and have run a test case with Buzzom Blog Ads. The idea is to produce a complete ad platform that serve the social web better.

The response we have got through Blog Ads is optimistic and we will come with a complete social ad engine very soon. It should be possible by year end.

Twitter is of course one of the main strategies used for Buzzom’s success, Bhupendra couldn’t wait to share his success story with others, so in the beginning of 2010 he published is long awaited book on Twitter marketing.

Demystifying Twitter Marketing makes a clean breast of social media and explains how a business can take a full benefit from its presence. The book is more focused on using Twitter as a marketing medium. The book contains views from an experienced marketers and business professionals. It also contains amazing successful business studies with focus on their key strategies.

So if any of you are interested in social media marketing or trying to build their company’s social media presence, I’d say that this book is a must for you.