Archives for September 2011

StumbleUpon


StumbleUpon is a tool that helps people discover and share sites on their particular interests.

It's different from a search engine in that the pages they serve up have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of over 15 million other websurfers with interests similar to you.

StumbleUpon

But the reason you should be using it is that you can submit pages and sites of yours for free for others to share.

You can join for free by filling out the profile at StumbleUpon or you can connect your Facebook account to StumbleUpon.

It's a quick process to get started, and then you can begin Stumbling pages and sites.

After you have created your account, you can Stumble sites at StumbleUpon.com or use a toolbar to do it with your browser.

Stumble a site or page

I would suggest going relatively broad with the topics you choose to describe your submission.

As you might imagine, the more popular topics get more attention through StumbleUpon, but it's also a great source for free, targeted traffic for niche sites.

Flickr Links


I use Flickr to host a lot of the photographs I feature in blog posts.

flickrThe reason for this is that Flickr pictures often get indexed well in search engines, and sometimes people will steal bandwidth through a technique called inline linking.

Anyhow, it's fine to host your own images for a blog. I do it sometimes myself, but Flickr is a good alternative.

But the merits of Flickr are not limited to being a quality photo host. It can also be a traffic source directly to your affiliate site or through one of your affiliate links.

The way it works is that you've got an area to write a description of a photo, and you can either include a full URL or add in the HTML code to create a link out of a phrase in your description.

If you take a look at the yellow area below, the phrase “Toby Keith” goes through my Amazon affiliate link to the results for his name on Amazon.

Flickr description

In order to optimize your photos on Flickr, you'll also want to enter a descriptive title and relevant keywords.

If you're going to use Flickr, I would suggest going with a Pro account, which has lots of benefits, including unlimited uploads and storage and stats on your account.