Creating A New Digital Fingerprint In StumbleUpon

Written by Garry Conn on May 30th, 2008

Yesterday I wrote a pretty lengthy article that explained what I think the future will hold for Google and SEO. Today I want to discuss with you how you can build, shape and mold an online identity or digital fingerprint that you can use to help successfully promote your make money online blog.

In this article I will guide you along with with what I did using StumbleUpon.com; however, the advice, tips, tricks and strategy can be used for most all networks. This article can be used as a blueprint or guide so that you can successfully create your own digital fingerprint to use for the niche blog that you have created for making money online.

At the bottom of this article, learn how you can easily score a free $50 dollar GarryConn.com article advertisement!

What Is StumbleUpon.com?

As quoted from the StumbleUpon.com about us page, “StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 5,213,995 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”

StumbleUpon.com is very simple to use. After you register for a free account, you’ll be instructed to download a special web browser toolbar which will give you the StumbleUpon tools needed to participate and contribute in their network.

How To Sign Up For StumbleUpon.com

Signing up for StumbleUpon.com is very easy. Simply visit www.stumbleupon.com and click join.

You will be prompted to fill out an online registration form. Simply fill out the form and then click Join and Download Now. On the next page you’ll be prompted to download the StumbleUpon toolbar for your appropriate web browser.

After you install the toolbar you may be asked to restart your web browser. Go ahead and do so. After you reload your web browser, look at the top near the left and you will see your new StumbleUpon toolbar added. From there, simply click Sign-in.

Creating Your New Digital fingerprint

From this point on, I’ll show you how to take your first step towards creating your brand new digital fingerprint that you’ll assign and use towards publicly representing yourself and your niche blog that you have created for making money online.

In this article, I am going to walk you through what I did with my newest niche blog, Debt Consolidation Book, which is being used in a competition against John Cow to see who can sell their blog for the highest amount of money.

Creating Your StumbleUpon.com Profile

Creating a profile on StumbleUpon.com is a very important step in shaping and molding your digital fingerprint on the Internet. Creating a profile on StumbleUpon is very easy, but you need to be careful with the public picture that you paint for yourself.

It all starts with your introduction about yourself that will be seen by everyone within the StumbleUpon.com community. You should write about a 150 to 200 word statement that explains your purpose for joining StumbleUpon.com, about your niche blog and what your goal is for joining.

You will want to include your website address in the form and check the boxes that most accurately explain your purpose for joining. Additionally you will want to upload an avatar which will become a significant part of your niche blog branding. Proceed to complete the profile form as best as you can. Answer as many of the questions as possible.

Adding Your StumbleUpon Interests

The next vital section that you need to update is your interests page. This is a very important part towards shaping and molding your digital fingerprint. You will see a categorized menu on the left side of the page. Each category breaks down into sub categories. Select as many topics that pertain to your niche blog topic.

For me, my niche blog is Debt Consolidation Book. This is a blog that aims to help people learn more about debt consolidation, managing their money, education about credit cards and tips on how to get out of credit card debt. So on my Debt Consolidation Book StumbleUpon interests page, I have chosen the following interests: Banking, Business, Financial Planning and Investing.

What happens next is magical. As you begin to use StumbleUpon and submit various pages that interest you according to the topic interest you have chosen, a section on your public profile page will appear explaining to people what you are interested in with a direct link to this topic categories.

Your StumbleUpon Interests In Action

If you click on one of the links such as in my case, financial-planning, a new page will load up that connects you with people as well as content that is totally related to your topic of interest. On this page, you can thumbs up the content listed on this page and review the people on the page and even add them as a friend.

Your StumbleUpon Interests Exposure

The people you add as a friend will receive an email notification of your request. from there they will review your profile on StumbleUpon and add you as a mutual friend. Depending how how much time you invest into finding friends and content related to your niche, you may find that your digital fingerprint starting to grow very quickly.

In the above screen shot, you’ll see that in only after one hour of creating my account in StumbleUpon my name is featured on the top of the financial-planning page for other members to see and check me out. I was able to land this page successfully after investing a little less than one hour using Google BlogSearch to find pages to add into StumbleUpon that was related to my own niche blog and digital fingerprint.

Making Friends in StumbleUpon

Making friends in StumbleUpon.com is very important towards enhancing your digital fingerprint as well as gaining more exposure to the content that you submit into StumbleUpon. Additionally, the more friends that you have in StumbleUpon.com the more of a chance that a friend will stumble content that you publish on your own niche blog. If that happens, you better buckle in because you’ll go for a huge roller coaster right and score a ton of traffic to your blog.

Keep in mind, it is never a good idea to submit your own content into StumbleUpon. Allow your friends the opportunity of being rewarded with the discovery. StumbleUpon users increase their own branding and reputation when they discover new pages that haven’t already been added by other members. Cheating your friends from this reward doesn’t sit very well with people in the community, so be sure to let your friends take the reward of stumbling your pages and don’t do it yourself.

Finding friends is very easy and making friends is even easier. As explained above, you can find friends by searching for them by your topic of interest. Simply click on their icons and view their profile page to determine if they share common interests with you. Their profile page is much like yours own where they have invested time into writing an introduction statement and have chosen their interests. You will want to only add people who share the same interests as you and also show a trend of submitting and voting on pages that are similar to the pages you publish on your own blog.

This is screen shot of my public home page. You can quickly see that my interests are about banking, business, credit card debt, credit cards, debt and debt consolidation. Additionally, you can quickly see the most recent pages on the Internet that I have either submitted or simply voted on. On this page, you can quickly get a snapshot in determining if I share common interests with you. The same goes for you. When you visit the pages of people in StumbleUpon.com, look at their tag cloud to see what topics interest them the most. Take a glance at the pages that they have submitted or voted on. Very quickly you’ll be able to determine if this is a person that you’d like to make friends with. As I said earlier, it is very important to make friends with only people who share common interests that are related to your own and the digital fingerprinting of your online identity.

Why Use StumbleUpon For Your Digital Fingerprint

You should use StumbleUpon.com for helping create, shape and mold your digital fingerprint simply for the fact that it works. In just a few hours of time you will have successfully planted the seed of your digital fingerprint and believe me folks, if you invest about one hour per day towards growing this seed, it will not only sprout but it will grow into a power house identity in no time. The key to remember is staying on topic related to your niche blog and the digital fingerprint you are creating.

Your StumbleUpon Reputation

The last and one of the most important parts about StumbleUpon.com is your online reputation within the community. Other members within the StumbleUpon network have the ability to add a review on your StumbleUpon.com home page. The more positive and encouraging reviews you get, then more your online reputation and digital fingerprint are enhanced.

At this time, I would love for you to visit my Debt Consolidation Book Stumble Upon profile page and add me as a friend, give me a thumbs up and add a review for my new profile. If you enjoyed reading this post and feel that I have given you some really helpful advice, tips and tricks in using StumbleUpon.com, please visit my profile page and offer me a review.

Win A Free $50 Dollar Advertisement On My Blog!

As a special incentive towards encouraging you to towards adding me as a friend, giving me a thumb rating and adding a review, I have a new advertisement service being offered on www.garryconn.com. As seen in the above screen shot, I have been inserting very customized and styled advertisements in my posts.

I am giving away TEN FREE IN ARTICLE ADVERTISEMENTS WORTH $50 DOLLARS EACH.

Whoever does the following listed above and drops me a comment on this post, I will provide your name will be entered into the contest for a chance to win this service absolutely for free on my blog. This advertisement service will eventually be provided at a charge of $50 dollars. However, you have an excellent chance of getting it free by simply adding me a friend, giving me a thumbs up and adding a review on my new Debt Consolidation Book StumbleUpon.com page.

Remember, TEN PEOPLE WILL WIN! The odds are totally in your favor. I am writing off $500 dollars of free advertising on my blog. Simply drop me a comment letting me know that you have done the above and your entry will be added into the contest. HURRY!!! and act fast, this contest ends on June 3rd, 2008.

Instructions:

1.) Visit my new Debt Consolidation Book StumbleUpon profile page to add me as a friend and give me a review.

2.) Visit my Debt Consolidation Home Page at:

http://www.debtconsolidationbook.com/

to give me a thumbs up rating in your StumbleUpon toolbar.

3.) Drop me a comment and let me know and you’re entered in for a free $50 dollar advertisement on my blog.

All Contests Have A Bonus!!!

As an added bonus, if you would like to have a double entry into this contest, simply download a copy of this article and publish it on your blog. The article has been put into a zip file. Simply extract the zip file copy the HTML code of the article and past it and publish it on your blog. If you’d like to add an intro paragraph, please do. Don’t forget to drop me a comment and let me know if you have a single entry or a DOUBLE entry into this contest.

Every blog needs massive RSS subscribers and Feedapalooza is going to help you do this. I’m a week late to this party on Feedapalooza it’s an RSS appreciation week that runs until the 15th of May. Feedapalooza is being hosted by Aaron Abber from Fulltiltblogging.com

Feedapalooza is different from most other RSS appreciation days in that it is actually run on a wordpress blog.

When you sign up you’re given log in information which allows you to create a post.

• describing yourself,
• blog
• and allowing you to add links back to your blog and asking thise who visit your feedapalooza post to sign up for your RSS feed, and or newsletter.

So this awesome service lets you do a bunch of things

firstly it is a promotional item for your RSS feed but it also gets you baclinks to your blog or website.

But thats not all.

One of the more popular ways to gain more RSS subscribers is by offering an incentive to your blog visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. That could be by giving away an e-book, software, Wordpress blog theme, or what ever it is you wanto use to entice visitors to Subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter.

Feedapalooza allows you to do all this when you write your RSS feed post.

Here’s how it works:

You sign up to be a FeedaPALOOZA sponsor and create a sponsor page. Your sponsor page describes your blog and offers some free gift for signing up for either your RSS feed or email list.

Between May 1st and May 15th dozens of bloggers–even some of the top name bloggers–will tell their readers about FeedaPALOOZA. Those readers will visit this site and be prompted to visit your sponsor page. If they like what you have to offer, they’ll sign up to your RSS feed or email list.

Because there will be tens of thousands of people visiting, it’s likely you will receive hundreds (if not thousands) of new RSS or email subscribers by May 15th.

Ok so what if you don’t have anything to offer as a give away, EASY, just include a bunch of your more popular posts. Maybe you have wriiten a series of posts, include links to them. The opportunites are really endless.

go sign up for feedapalooza and get yourself some more RSS subscribers.

Fresh content - The Holy grail of the Internet. Everyone NEEDS it on their site, everyone NEEDS access to it on other sites.

EVERYONE is hungry for it.

All the search engines are driven by.

But how do you create high quality content? And how do you ensure your traffic keeps coming back for it?

Do you buy it?

Beg for it?

Steal it?

PLR it?

Guest blogger it? 

All of the above would be correct.

Here’s a few posts from very successful bloggers to get you started in the right direction

adopt this powerful mindset for successful blogging - Yaro Starak

"I understood, even back then, that in order to earn rewards I had to give first. It was through helping others that I would eventually build a readership and then, at a later time, I could focus on how to make money"

How to write great blog content - Problogger

"there are some basic principles of writing great blog content"

Blogging

One of the most popular methods of creating constant fresh content is by blogging.
There as many different types of blogs as there are people. But they have one thing in common they produce content often, as often as several times a day. Seth Godin considers this to be noisy blogging, and he may be right how many blogs or sites have I dropped off of my rss readers because my inbox gets flooded by multiple daily posts? 

RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers

Here are just a few of the types of blogs and websites that offer Rss Feeds.

Private or personal web sites, it may often take the form of a diary, these are quite popular and many including myself follow the personal entries made by other bloggers on a daily basis.

On a business oriented blog, the content tends to be more formal in nature and is usually product oriented, again these blogs are generally updated daily or a couple of times a week.

One of the best things about blogging is that you can write all your content for a week and save it, setting entries to be released to the public daily or whenever you want them released. So you can maintain a daily blog even though you only work on it once a week.

This is better known as the 80/20 rule.

What?, Math? Don’t worry it’s not complex or even complicated. So what is the 80/20 rule?

"it means that 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs"

Blogs, however, are time-intensive and may be too much for a busy business owner to maintain.

So what’s a blogger to do? You could of course find an article broker like article underground

Why would I suggest them?, it all goes back to

• High quality content,
• Quality text links,
• Free search engine traffic, which if you add that all up = you making more money blogging.

What then? 

Build your RSS reader and subscriber base huge and fast!!

Why?, it’s the best defensible traffic strategy, and the Best Google page rank defense strategy.

I say this only because its what makes total sense. Think about it. Lets say you have been found guilty of selling text links on your blog, or website by google. What would be a good defense against the page rank degrade? HIGH RSS subscribers.

Look at tech crunch he has 619,000 rss readers, do you really think he cares if google slaps him back a bit? NO

Look at Johnchow’s and Jeremy shoemaker (shoemoney’s) RSS base, albeit after their RSS campaign. Do you think it matters to them if google decides to whack their site with a PR downgrade?

Do you think it hurt their income base as it concerns sponsors NO!!

Why? because they have huge RSS numbers.

Use RSS to syndicate your Article Content

You can also maintain fresh articles on your site weekly or monthly. Yeah but won’t I get penalized for using Rss to syndicate duplicate content if I do that? NO!! "As long as the syndicated articles link back to the source site you’re all right, says Matt Cutts of Google"

If you do update articles on a regular basis, make certain that the release date of the current article is prominently displayed somewhere on the article’s page so that the surfer can see that the article is fresh.

You should also maintain a dated archive of all the articles you’ve had on your site with their release dates at the top, so that casual browsers can also see you have a track record of maintaining fresh content. For this you’ll need an archives page. Most wordpress blog themes come with that or something similar. I personally like pearsonifieds wicked wordpress archive page

But many web surfers go to your site, click away, and never return. How can you keep them coming back?

You night consider this to be a sort of cake baking recipe, or the directions found on the back of any decent shampoo. But it is non the less a recipe for success used on many other successful blogs.

1. Popular subject: This goes with out saying. Every successful blogger already has their niche topic and sub niche topics. And they keep their finger on the pulse of their niche.
2. Multiple Authors: Having guest bloggers or running a blog with multiple authors has grown in popularity and you should expect to see more of it coming. Take this as a shape of things to come. Teams of bloggers adding unique content daily. This removes in large part alot of the burden off of just the "one man band" doing all the work" and is also very Web 2.0 UGC , (user generated content).
3. High post density: Again this is about content creation on a daily basis. Frequent posts or updates to the content.
4. Social network promotion: I think this goes without saying, get your blog on the front page of digg or stumble upon and you’re going to see a whack of traffic to your blog in a hurry. BUT did you also know that other than just those two that there also many other social networking sites. Why not post to all of them in a few easy clicks. You could try this list of social networking sites: Ok so thats a bit time consuming as well. Another GREAT option is socialmarker.

5) RSS subscription bribes:  I suppose you might call this customer loyalty acquisition, ok so that sounded a little high brow what this is essentially is giving your reader a reason the subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. And this usually comes in the form of a free e-book, piece of useful software, mini-course etc etc etc etc. This can and has been employed to great results by many successful bloggers and website owners. So I wouldn’t rule that out.

Newsletters

This is another option or an added feature to include on your site or blog. ChrisG has a great article on Aweber VS Feed Burner An emailed newsletter can be the most powerful tool you have to maintain repeat customers. It’s a simple concept. You compose the newsletter in either plain text or in HTML. With Aweber you can set it to grab your RSS feed

This Allows your customer to sign up for free to receive your blog posts in a newsletter format in their email every time it’s released. Collect the email addresses, compile them into a database, and send out your newsletter on at least a monthly basis.

But it is a little more complicated. After all, you want to drive traffic to your site. Instead of putting entire articles in your newsletter, consider putting a teaser to certain articles in the newsletter, with a link to the article in its entirety on your website.

Or insert a special coupon in your newsletter that the reader can redeem for special bargains or freebies on your website. Using Chrisg’s wordpress plug-in you can deliver that free e-book you want to get out there in the rss feed The plugin allows you to add copyright or download to RSS feed

You can include a "what’s new" section in your newsletter, highlighting any new products or developments on your website and directing the reader to appropriate links. And you can also allow other people to advertise in your newsletter, focusing on those with whom you have an affiliate relationship.

Another idea for your newsletter is to run a contest or survey.
Everyone likes to win stuff, and everyone likes to be asked what they think. If you have a large email newsletter list, you can offer a gift certificate as a prize, but require anyone interested
in participating to come to your website to sign up with their email. This gives you the added advantage of being able to compare the contest
signups with your email list; are they significantly different? Or is
it pretty clear who your best customers are?

That was a nice way of describing a squeeze page wasn’t it?

Set up a squeeze page.  When people are searching for your information and product, you set up a page where they must enter their name and email address in order to get the information.  Your squeeze page must have four necessary items:

1. An attention grabbing headline.
2. A benefit list of why someone should give you their name and email address.
3. A call to action telling them what to do and why.
4. An offer- what are you giving them in exchange for their name/email address.

Updating Content Frequently

Regardless of how you run your newsletter, you should never neglect your main site. Update its content frequently. Make sure all the information contained on it is correct and recent. Most importantly (though for a slightly different reason), make certain your home page has something fresh on it at least every month.

This isn’t for your customers. It’s for the web spiders. When spiders catalog your site, one of the things they’ve been looking for recently is differences from the last time they spidered your
site and what’s on your site now.

If you don’t have any differences this time, or the next time, or the next time, the spiders will decide you have a static website, and your ranking will go down. Frequent updates, or even just
shuffling things around, on your home page will prevent this from happening.

make money blogging