How To Get StumbleUpon Traffic
When you want to get fast traffic to your blog social media is a great way to get a lot quickly. StumbleUpon today is one of my favorite sites to get traffic from because it’s very easy and can send you quite a few hits pretty fast. So below I’ve written how to get StumbleUpon traffic to your blog.
First things first, if you haven’t already, you need to install the StumbleUpon toolbar. Download it here.
Now that you’ve installed it check if your website is listed on StumbleUpon yet or not. You can do that here. If your URL is not already listed in StumbleUpon then use your toolbar to submit it and review it. Just click the ‘I like it!’ button and fill it out then submit it.
Once you’ve done all of that you need to start being active and testing with things. When you post a blog post, submit it to StumbleUpon. Just don’t submit your blog posts or pages from your websites or you could be banned. You need to submit other pages from other sites.
How To Get StumbleUpon Traffic
Now that you’ve got the toolbar installed and have started being active, it’s time to get some traffic from StumbleUpon. If you have any friends that you know that have a StumbleUpon account, then you should add them. Also, if there are other people that are in the same market as you and have a StumbleUpon account add them as a friend as well.
Once you have a few friends, it’s very, very easy to get StumbleUpon traffic. Once you’ve made a blog post, and you think it’s worthy of being stumbled, tell your friends about it and ask them to Stumble it. Who knows, they might send it to their friends and tell them to Stumble it or maybe they’ll make a blog post with a backlink to your article.
What Quality is the StumbleUpon traffic?
When getting traffic from StumbleUpon it can be poor quality traffic that won’t stay on your site for more than ten seconds. So how do you avoid this?
1. Have A Great Design – When people are using the toolbar to stumble other websites, they aren’t usually going to stay and read. With StumbleUpon traffic, first impressions are very important. If you have a nice design there’s a better chance that they’ll stay and have a look around or perhaps they might revisit another time.
2. Easy To Remember – You want your site to be easy to remember. For example, you want to have a URL that is very easy to remember so they won’t forget it. You also should have a unique logo that makes them remember your site as well.
3. Don’t Have Too Many Ads – You don’t want a website that has just a bunch of ads all over the page. This makes your page look newbie-ish and they won’t want to stay long. By having a bunch of ads, a first impression will mostly think you’re just trying to make money and your content isn’t worth looking at.
4. Great Content & Enough Of It – You want great content and enough of it so that when they visit they enjoy it and will want to return to get more of it. Also you don’t want it to be that they can read all of your content in one visit. That’s why having enough of it is important.
If your site fits into those points then you should be fine and the quality of the traffic from StumbleUpon will be better.
So there you go, that’s how to get StumbleUpon traffic and a lot of it. It’s very simple and easy but it works.
If you would like a friend for StumbleUpon, feel free to add me 
http://cadengrant.stumbleupon.com
Posted in Traffic
Best Posts On Caden Grant
Sorry for the lack of activity around here as I was on vacation and didn’t have access to a computer. I don’t even have a laptop so I couldn’t write on anything. So it’s been about 8 days since I’ve posted anything and I feel bad since I try to make a post daily.
Anyway, today I thought I’d write a quick post about recent best posts that I’ve made here on Caden Grant dot Com. So here they are.
Make Money Online
Top 10 Ways To Make Money Online From Your Blog
Affiliate Marketing
List Building Techniques
5 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products
Blogging Tips
20 Things All Bloggers Should Do
A Step-By-Step Guide To Starting A Profitable Blog
10 Useful Tips For Writing A Blog Post
5 Tips For Never Running Out Of Content To Post On Your Blog
Add A Link To Digg
WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins to Increase Your RSS Subscribers
10 Great WordPress Plugins I Recommend
So those are just some topics I touched on over the past 2 weeks or so. Hope you find these useful and you learn something.
Posted in Miscellaneous
List Building Techniques
So in my opinion, having a mailing list is vital to making money online. When you have an email list, you can generate quite a bit of money pretty easily. You can send emails about affiliate products and get paid. You can send emails telling about your own products. By sending emails with links to products that are relevant to the subject of your list, your readers will have a reason to buy these products and you get paid. Duh. Below are 5 simple techniques to building your email list.
1. Offer An Incentive – This is a great way to build a mailing list. The whole point is to offer something for free in return of signing up for your mailing list. For example, you can create an eBook or a few videos or something and tell them that if they sign up for your mailing list, they will get your eBook or video for free. By giving away this free content, you can make money from it in the long run!
2. Get Emails From Your Commentators – When readers comment on your blog, they’re by default leaving their name and email already. You can turn this into email list susbcribers.
With the Action Comments plugin, when people comment on your blog they have an option to subscribe to your mailing list. I recommend this plugin it’s great and it works. Download Action Comments
3. Use the LightBox Form Option – If you have Aweber, I suggest you use this method. I’m not sure if other mailing list services have a LightBox like Aweber but if they don’t I’m sure you can find some kind of software or something that will do it for you. What this does is when somebody visits your website, a form to sign up for your mailing list will fade in to the page and give them an option to subscribe or not. You can choose how many seconds it takes to fade in and also how often it displays. I suggest only using once per visitor otherwise it can be annoying to your readers and drive them away.
4. Make Your Form Visible – This is a no brainer. Make your subscribe form really visible. Try to make it stand out over everything else. This way their eyes will be attracted to it and there’s a better chance of them signing up.
You can use images like the cover of your eBook or use colors that stand out (not in a bad way). You could also add some media like a video telling why they should subscribe to your list or something. One example of this you can see at Entrepreneurs Journey in the sidebar on the left.
5. Use Landing Pages – This one is pretty obvious. You can create a landing page with your email form on it telling the subscribers what they’ll get for signing up. Like I said earlier, offer them something for free in return.
The good thing about this is landing pages are targeted to doing only one thing which is get your visitors to subscribe. On blogs, people can get too distracted with everything else and not subscribe. That’s why on your landing page you don’t want to have anything to distract them. Just have your signup form and maybe an image or a video or a few testimonials. Try not to put too much on.
So those are a few techniques you can use to start building your email list. If you haven’t, I strongly suggest you start a mailing list if you plan on making money online. Out of these techniques I recommend landing pages the most so try it if you’d like!
Posted in List Building
Top 10 Ways To Make Money From Your Blog
1. Membership Programs – I’d say this is definitely the best way to monetize your blog. If you set up a program where you offer people a premium program where they will get even better content that will help them out, you can charge a monthly free. Let’s do the math. If you start a program that costs about $9.95/month, and over some time 500 people sign up, you’re generating $4,975.00 every month! That’s enough for you to live off of. Maybe not as nicely as you’d like, but over time more and more people will sign up for your program. Think about it. If over time 500 more people sign up then you have 1000 people signed up. That equals $9,950.00 per month. That’s $119,400/year! The good thing about this is if you keep your program open to new sign ups, your income will only keep going up.
2. Coaching/Services – This is another great way to make money online that a lot of people do. What you can do is set up a program where you teach your readers who pay certain stuff that nobody else can get for free. Since this isn’t as easy to keep taking new sign ups like membership programs, you can charge more. Let’s do some more math. Say you charge maybe $50 per person to tell them what you know and 100 people sign up. There’s a quick $5000 right there. It’s up to you what your coaching does and how long it lasts or how many sign ups are available. There are people who have done this but charged as much as $200+ and got more than 200 sign ups or so. That’s $40,000!
3. Selling Your Own Information Products – If you want to create an information product that will teach people premium-level stuff, like the membership programs or coaching services, then you can sell it and make a decent income off of that alone. The difference between selling information products and coaching or selling membership programs is once the product is done, there’s no more work. You just sell it. You don’t have to keep providing content like you do in the membership programs. Sounds pretty easy. Just don’t create crap products. Actually teach something.
Some more math? Say you create an information product that teaches something and you charge $47 for it or however much, and you sell it to whoever. If you get 30 sales a month (1 per day), that’s $1,410. Not much of a monthly income but that’s only selling 30 per month. Try 100 sales per month ($4,700) or more! You can create your product, make a page for it on your blog, tell your readers about it and market that page separately so you keep generating more traffic and sales!
4. Affiliate Programs – Once again a GREAT way to make money using your blog. If you want this to work as effectively as possible, you’re going to want to start a mailing list. So I suggest starting one NOW if you haven’t! 
How this works is you put offers on your blog to other products that offer an affiliate program, and that will help your readers out. When you go to blogs and see those 125×125 buttons on the sidebars, those are affiliate offers and yes bloggers make money from those. Also, if you offer a mailing list on your blog and get people to sign up to that, you can promote those products through your mailing list. Mailing lists = Money. I’ve heard people making as much as $70,000 from one email. I’ve even heard a story of one person generating $1 million from a mailing list of 8,000 people! That’s a shit load of money!
5. Product Sales – If you have any products that you want to sell like maybe books, art, whatever… You can sell them through your blog. Just put a page on your blog and a post or something letting people know about your product and giving them options to buy it. A great example is ProBloggerwho offers a book about ProBlogging and a book about 31 Days to Building a Better Blog for his readers to buy!
6. Sell Plugins/Software – This kind of ties in with information products but it’s different in a way. Instead of a product that teaches somebody something, you can create a plugin or some software that will be of some use to your readers and sell it as well for how much you think it should be sold for.
7. Direct Advertising – Direct advertising is a good way to make money from your blog as well. If you get a lot of traffic to your blog you can charge a lot of money to advertise on it. If you eventually get enough traffic you can even charge $500 per ad space or more. If you offer 10 of those spaces on your blog (definitely enough space), then that’s $5,000/month right there!
8. Banner Advertising – This idea can make you money but usually not the most money. The most common is probably Google AdSense. There’s also Kontera, InfoLinks, and Tribal Fusion.
9. Paid Reviews – This is one simple way to generate some income that is pretty effective. What you can do is offer paid reviews on your blog. What you do is set a price that you would like and offer to people if they want their product reviewed on your website so they can get some traffic in return. One great site that I recommend that determines the price of a review and takes care of it all for you is ReviewMe. John Chow does this and according to his income reports on his blog, it used to be his leading revenue source. He made up to $4,000 a month from it. If your blog gets popular and your reviews cost $100 or so and you do 10 a month, that’s $1000 right there.
10. Build And Then Sell – If you plan on keeping your blog and keep on growing it and growing it as time goes on, then this isn’t for you. This isn’t the best way to make money as building blogs and getting them popular or getting decent traffic takes some time. What you can do is start a blog, write quality content, get subscribers/followers, and some decent traffic. Once you’ve done this you can go sell your blog. One great marketplace is SitePoint.
So there you have it. The top 10 ways to make money from your blog. I personally recommend numbers 1, 2 and 3. If you have something to offer your readers that will benefit them, you can make a lot of money from it. So, get started making money from your blog!
Posted in Make Money Online, Monetization Strategies
20 Things All Bloggers Should Do
If you’re new to the world of blogging and you want to have a successful blog, whether that means making money from it or just helping others and creating a following, then follow the steps below. I’ve listed 20 things that all bloggers SHOULD do to help them be successful. If you haven’t done one of these things, I suggest you start now! Take action!
1. Write Quality Content – This is the most important thing about making a successful blog. You have to have quality content so people will read it and subscribe.
2. Use your own site – If you want to have a successful blog that you plan on making popular as time goes on, you need to have your own host and blog instead of using free hosted sites like Blogger.
3. Have an attractive, unique theme – Try to impress your new visitors with a nice attractive and unique theme to make a good first impression.
4. Have a logo – You should really have a logo. This makes your blog unique as well as having a nice theme. Try to make your blog different; better than the other blogs. Be creative.
5. Sign up for Twitter – This is a must for bloggers. Twitter is great and I definitely recommend it. It’s my number one traffic source and it’s the easiest traffic to get to your blog fast.
6. Sign up for Facebook, MySpace and other Social sites – By using Facebook and Myspace or other sites similar, you can make friends and share your stuff with all of them. This makes it easier to get loyal readers and subscribers.
7. Create a mailing list – If you plan on making money, creating a mailing list is going to be very important. If you don’t have a mailing list, I suggest you start one right now and get people to sign up.
8. Be consistent – When posting, try to be consistent. Don’t go posting every day for a week then leave and not post for 2 – 3 weeks. Try to be consistent. If you notice all of the successful blogs out there, they’re consistent and keep updating with quality content.
9. Teach others – Teach others what you know. By doing this you gain loyal subscribers and people who like you. You can teach others what you know either for free maybe in return of signing up to your mailing list. You could also make a product teaching what you know and sell it to your readers and make some money from it. If you don’t teach your readers anything they don’t really have a reason to listen to you.
10. Be positive/optimistic – I think this is very important. Successful people have successful mindsets. You have to think positive. Tell yourself your blog will be popular and make you thousands of dollars in the future. If you don’t plan on making money from your blog then that’s cool too, but you still have to think positive to be successful!
11. Offer your readers content in forms of eBooks – Like earlier when I said teach others, you can teach them things through eBooks. You can sell eBooks or give them away for free and get people to sign up for your mailing list to make more money in the future.
12. Use media (video, audio) – Like using eBooks, using media is also very important. Everybody likes videos. Think about it. If you visit all the very successful blogs like David Risley, John Chow, Problogger, Yaro Starak, they all use media. You will find a video of something on every single one of those sites. Videos are what’s in these days. By using media you can also get more traffic to your site by spreading videos around.
13. Comment on other blogs – Commenting on other blogs is a good way to get some traffic when you’re first starting your blog. Interact with others and be an active part of the community. You’ll become more widely-known and get more traffic.
14. Make guest posts – Make guest posts on other successful blogs in your niche. This is a great way to become more known and get traffic to your blog.
15. Hold contests – Hold contests on your blog. This is a great way to get more subscribers for your blog. You can give away cash or cool toys like phones, cameras, etc. You can get traffic this way. For instance, telling your readers that in order to join the contest, they have to retweet something, or they have to subscribe to your blog, and so on.
16. Get involved in forums – Getting involved in forums can bring you some decent traffic to your blog. I suggest creating an account at Digital Point. You will learn a lot here and get traffic to your blog. Interact with everybody. Help people by answering questions and being nice. You will make friends this way as well and they could become loyal readers to your blog.
17. Help other blogs or people – Help other bloggers or people in your niche. By helping others, good things will happen in return. More people will do things for you.
These last three are very important to success online.
18. Set goals – In the world of the internet, if you want to be successful you need to set goals so you know where you’re going. Set goals of how many subscribers you want, twitter followers, how much money you want to make. Set these goals and try your hardest to achieve them. This makes things a lot easier.
19. Take action – Once you’ve set some goals, take action! I even have problems with this. I think this is the most important step online to be successful. Take action! Don’t tell yourself, “Oh, I’ll start a blog this summer,” or “I’ll do it tomorrow or next week.” No! Start now. You can get your blog up within a few hours! Stop being lazy. You won’t get anywhere putting things off online. It’s that simple.
If you’re planning on writing an eBook or doing something new to make money online, just do it. If it fails, then you’ve only learned how not to do it. Start over again and keep trying. Don’t give up.
20. Work hard – And of course, work hard! Once you decide to take action, you need to work hard to get things done. The harder you work the easier things will become and the faster you’ll see results.
Think there’s anything I left off this list? Add some things below.
Posted in Blogging, Blogging Tips, Traffic
5 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products
Today affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. You sign up for affiliate programs and promote other peoples products and make sales. It’s simple, but it’s not the easiest thing to do.
Think about it. There are a bunch of companies out there that want to sale as much of a product as they can. Therefore, they offer affiliate programs so they can spread their product even more and make even more money. If you really want to make some good money through affiliate marketing though, you’re going to have to work hard. Below are a few ways you can promote other products and make money with them.
1. Use A Mailing List – This one is obvious. I always talk about mailing lists and how important they are. They’re so important because they can generate a lot of money! How? Well by getting people to sign up to your mailing list, you can send out emails promoting affiliate products. If your subscribers are targeted and they have some use of the product you’re selling (hopefully you’re not selling a product that doesn’t have to do with your list), then you can make some good money sending emails about these products with your affiliate links or whatever. To build a mailing list, I suggest you give away some free content as a reward for people signing up.
2. Use Your Blog – If you get a significant amount of traffic to your blog and have loyal readers, your blog can be very effective. You can make a blog post telling all of your readers about a product. Tell them what you think about it, how it will benefit them, etcetera. Then you can include an affiliate link telling them where they can buy it. Check out this technique to help make money with affiliate produts using your blog: click here.
3. Use Twitter – Twitter can also be a good way to promote affiliate products. Since using Twitter your links are cloaked by using URL shortening websites, nobody can tell it’s an affiliate link. This is a good way to send some fast traffic to an affiliate product. John Chow reveals here how he once made $306 with Twitter in 24 hours. $306. Not too shabby
4. Advertise Your Affiliate Link Through Other Websites – This is another way you can promote affiliate products. If you go to a website that is relevant to the product you’re promoting, you could advertise on their site with your affiliate link to bring in some extra sales.
5. Advertise Your Affiliate Link In Forums – If you’re an active member in forums, you can promote your affiliate link through them. In forums you have an area that’s called a signature where you can put some text or links or whatever. You can put your affiliate link in your signature with whatever anchor text you’d like and maybe get some sales that way.
Those are just 5 simple ways to promote affiliate products. I recommend numbers 1, 2 and 3 over 4 and 5 because they can make the most money. Try some of these out if you haven’t. Promoting affiliate products can make you some good money if done right. Good luck!
Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Make Money Online
5 Tips For Never Running Out Of Content To Post On Your Blog
1. Write A “Bundle” Of Posts – When first starting your blog, I suggest you write 5 to 40 articles or more. Yes that’s a big gap I know but it depends on how much you care or how easy you want to make things. Before starting your blog, I suggest you write a bunch of articles (as many as you can) and save them as drafts. This saves a lot of time in the long run.
If you write say 10 articles in a day, then you’re done with your work for 10 days! That’s if you post every day though. If you post every 2 days or 3 days that means you have 20 – 30 days of work done! You get the point. This makes things easier as well. Sometimes bloggers get overwhelmed and and want to give up because they’re not seeing success so they won’t feel like writing. This way it takes very little effort to publish a post. So if they’re not seeing success, it won’t be hard to just go and publish a quick post.
2. After That, Continue Writing “Bundles” Of Posts – After your 10, 20 or however many days is up, spend another few hours to write another 10 or however many articles you want. This always makes things easier. This way, when it’s time to post on your blog you don’t have to think and think about what to blog about. You already have posts written down and ready to be published. This is actually my 4th article I’ve written today. I plan on doing a few more. It sure makes things easier!
3. Keep A Notepad/Journal – I find this also makes things easier. When you get an idea that pops into your head, write the idea and a few details about the post into a notepad or a journal or anything that you have access to wherever you are. If you don’t have access to a journal because you’re in the car or out to eat, or at the zoo or whatever, maybe write the idea in your phone or any place you can. I find that when I think of things and don’t write them down they don’t tend to come back to me. It’s frustrating because they’re great ideas but I forget them.
When it comes time to write your “bundle” of posts, you will have a some ideas listed on your journal so it’ll be a piece of cake on finding out what topics to write about.
4. Check Out Other Blogs – By visiting other blogs in your niche you can get some good ideas from reading their posts. I definitely do not advise you to copy their content though. Maybe if they have a top list of ways to do something, pick one point on that list and elaborate. Or you could write a post that covers the same topic but tell what you think about it and share your knowledge on that topic. But seriously, don’t copy other people’s content. You won’t be successful.
5. Spend Time Thinking Of Posts – Try taking maybe just 10 – 30 minutes out of your day to write down as many post topics as you can. This way when you need an idea on what to write about you can just look at what you wrote down. This goes with keeping a notepad/journal to write down your ideas but instead of writing when you get an idea, you take some time out of your schedule to just brainstorm post ideas.
Those are some simple but effective tips that help me with not running out of content to publish on this blog. Follow these tips. Trust me, it will make your blogging success come easier. If you just write a bundle of articles, and schedule them to post at a certain time and day, you can just spend your time on marketing and other important things. This will save you a bunch of time!
Posted in Blogging
A Step-By-Step Guide To Starting A Profitable Blog
Today there are so many new bloggers just getting started. According to Technorati, 7.4 million new blogs were made in the past 120 days. That’s 2 new blogs every 3 seconds. That’s a lot. All bloggers want to generate traffic and followings, and most bloggers want to make money from their blogs. So, below I’ve created a guide to help new people start a new blog that I would go by if I had to start a new blog again.
1. Decide What You’re Going To Blog About
This is the most important part of starting a blog. Without it, you couldn’t start a blog. You need to think of a passion you have. Something you really enjoy doing. This will make it easier for you in the long run because creating content for this topic should come easy. Once you pick a market, you need to do some research. Find out if it’s profitable; if there’s enough people interested.
2. Get Web Hosting And A Domain
Next of course, you need some way to get your blog online. You need to buy web hosting. I recommend CreativHost where you can get web hosting for your blog for only $4.50 a month which is very cheap. That’s $45/year. Then you’ll need a domain name. If you order your hosting from CreativHost, you can get a domain with your hosting for only $10 so it all adds up to $55/year.
3. Install WordPress On Your Site
Now that you’ve got your web hosting and domain name, you need to install WordPress. If you don’t know how, look up on Google how to install WordPress or something. It’s really simple. Also, with CreativHost, you get Fantastico which is software that can automatically install WordPress for you with a click of a button. Once you’ve installed WordPress, I suggest you install a few WordPress plugins to make things easier. Check out some of my older posts 10 Great WordPress Plugins, and WordPress Plugins to Increase RSS Subscribers.
4. Get A Blog Design
Now that your blog is up and running with some nice plugins installed, you need a nice design for your blog. If you know XHTML/CSS I suggest you code your own WordPress theme; it’s very easy. If not, I suggest either going to Unique Blog Designs or something like WooThemes. They both have very nice WordPress themes that I recommend. If you don’t like any of those just browse around Google. You’ll find something.
5. Start Writing Great Content To Launch With
Now that your blog is up and running with a good looking theme, you need to start writing QUALITY content to launch your blog with. You need the best quality content you can write so when people visit your site, you make a good impression. Don’t copy others writing, it will get you nowhere. If people enjoy your content, they’ll most likely subscribe to your blog which is always good!
6. Write Great Content For Later
After you’ve creating that quality content to launch your blog with, I suggest you write a few articles to make the following days, or weeks, easier. I suggest you write about 5 – 20 articles and save them as a draft in WordPress. This way, you don’t have to write an article every day. You can just write articles and set them to post at a certain time using WordPress (WordPress is awesome, huh?). This makes everything easier. I always suggest having articles saved as drafts that you can publish at any time.
Blogging can be overwhelming and sometimes you just decide to not post. With blogging, you have to be consistent if you want to succeed. It’s that simple. So by having drafts saved, it makes everything easier and saves time.
7. Create A Mailing List
This is very, very important to your success if you wish to make money online from your blog. As soon as you set up your blog, you need to sign up for a mailing list account. I suggest using Aweber. It’s what I, and majority of the bloggers out there use. There’s a simple equation for mailing lists. Here it is:
Mailing List = Money
It’s true. If you have a mailing list, you can make good money from it. Obviously, you have to have targetted traffic that will sign up for your mailing list. You don’t want people signing up for your mailing list that could give a crap about your market, you won’t make money. Once your mailing list is set up, put the form to sign up somewhere visible on your blog so others will see it and join!
8. Launch Your Blog
Now that you’ve gotten WordPress installed, some plugins, a theme and some quality cdontent, it’s time to “launch” your blog. Publish an article and make sure everything is ready to go. Then once your blog is online it’s ready. Tell people about it. I’ll mention some traffic techniques below.
9. Sign Up For Twitter
If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter. This is very important. My number one source of traffic is Twitter. This is probably the fastest way to get traffic when starting your blog. It’s great because you can send people to your blog very quickly and easily. Using Twitter, you can use updates that are 140 characters or less telling people about your blog or whatever. We refer to this as “micro blogging”. Once you’ve published a post, make an update on Twitter telling people about it!
10. Start Generating Traffic Other Ways
Now that everything is ready to go for people to see, you need to let others know about your site. A good way to spread your link around so people can visit your site is by finding other blogs in your niche and commenting on them. When commenting, you can leave a link to your site in one of the fields. This links your name to your website so when somebody sees it, there’s a chance they’ll click your link and visit your site. This can also be good because some blogs have a ‘Top Commentators’ section for everybody to see. If you’re active on different blogs and are a top commentator, you can get some easy traffic from that. It can also get you quality links to boost your PageRank.
Hope you find these tips useful and if you plan on starting a blog anytime soon I suggest you follow these steps.
Posted in Blogging
