I’m sure you know how great StumbleUpon is for sending tons of decently targeted traffic to your website.

The problem is that to get a lot of traffic, you have to have really good quality content. Many people don’t have the time, or even the know how to sit and make content that is good enough to succeed on StumbleUpon. We’ll here’s my tip for you, don’t.

One thing I’ve been doing lately is taking great YouTube videos and embedding them into pages on my own site. WordPress is probably the easiest option for doing this. Once you have your site/page set up with some videos, it’s time to do some stumbling.

Now maybe what I’m about to tell you is obvious, but I’m hoping that this will help some people out. It sure helped me once I figured this simple method out.

Here’s The Key

The easiest way to get your page noticed on StumbleUpon is by getting a large amount of “likes” right at the beginning. What I do is I go to a forum and post looking for people to stumble my page for me. The idea is to get a good influx of “likes” early in the game to boost your rank. What you’ll see is you’ll start getting some pretty serious traffic pretty quickly.

The next step is where most people screw up. The only way to keep the traffic going is by continuously getting “liked” or stumbled. If people dont like your content, they’ll give it a thumbs down and from there the traffic will die out pretty fast. This means you need to have some pretty good content that people are going to want to keep thumbs upping.

You can’t just use terrible content, you need to pick something good. That’s why for me, to consistently, easily get good content I use videos. The rating system on YouTube makes it easy to see which videos are the most popular and high ranked.

Conclusion

It’s really easy to get something like this up and running in a short amount of time. The nice part is that it eliminates the need for you to create your content yourself. I haven’t been able to fully exploit this yet, but at one point without much work I was up to around $10/day (off of multiple pages) just by using Google AdSense. I know there are much better ways to monetize, and I’m sure that if you give it a try you can do much better. This would also be a method you could use to supplement your current website or blog.

Bad example of what I've been able to accomplish with little work using this method.

I’ll be sort of following this up with some PPC tips in my next post. Also, make sure to Subscribe if you haven’t!

This is actually a guest post, or should I say video,  from my brother. He just got one of those new iPod Nanos with the video camera. He wanted a way to mount it to a tripod but it doesn’t seem like anyone has come around to making one yet. This is what he came up with.

I should also mention that yes, I am back. It has been awhile since I have been serious about making posts, but I just got a creative vado so I am planning on making some videos that I’ll be posting on here. Stay posted.

Also, I don’t want to scare any of you guys away by posting completely off topic so I’ll plan to stick to the usual web development marketing stuff as best as I can. With the exception of a few random videos thrown in of course.

Looking forward to getting back into this!

If you haven’t yet, here are 6 reasons why you should subscribe!

An upset affiliate recently stated that Hydra Network screwed him out of $25,000 because the advertiser said that he was sending bad leads. The affiliate contacted Hydra Network, but apparently they wouldn’t give him any of his money back. This is definitely a bad sign and means that Hydra Network must not be looking out to well for their affiliates.

That’s a lot of money to be lost and if you are an affiliate I would urge you to stay away from Hydra Network so you don’t get screwed over yourself.

For more information check out the WickedFire Hydra Network thread. ]]> http://nicklarson.com/watch-out-for-hydra-network/feed/ 3 http://nicklarson.com/watch-out-for-hydra-network/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nicklarson/~3/J6wAUN6hV1k/ http://nicklarson.com/analyzing-businesses-with-fermi-problems/#comments Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:32:23 +0000 Nick http://www.nicklarson.com/?p=161 Continue reading →]]>

Hey how’s it going?!  Just got done with a hectic week of finals and now I’m ready to head back to the Twin Cities and relax for Christmas break.  What are your plans for Christmas, anything cool going down?

I spent a little time looking around at this relatively new site called Theme Forest (part of the envato network).  It’s a bad ass site full of really cheap, yet awesome templates for sale.  They prices range anywhere from $8-$25. You can even become an author for them and sell your own templates via their site.

One thing that really bothers me about Theme Forest though is that they take up to 75% commission every time your template is sold!  This bothered me right a way because it made me wonder what would happen if sites like eBay and Amazon charged that much commission every time you sold something.  That’s right, they wouldn’t exist!

I decided to register under the usual “nickclarson” and start a thread about the issue.  It sounds like a lot of authors on the site are bothered by the really high commission price because it seems like Theme Forest is doing little to no work yet making most of the money.

I also proceeded to analyze their business further with a Fermi Problem.  The following is a summary of the analysis I made.

Calculating total Revenue:

Based off the november popular users and how much they sold lets be conservative and say 1300 templates were sold in November. Looks like the most popular themes are the html templates which sell for around $10-12. So if we consider that some higher cost wordpress and joomla themes were sold as well lets have the average price per theme be $15 (also a relatively conservative estimation). That comes out to $19,500 revenue in november.

Calculating Costs:

Based on a few factors that we discussed in the thread  we can conclude that the maximum being paid out to authors is 37%. Lets just use the 80/20 rule and say 80% of the authors are selling 20% and 20% of the authors are selling 80%. Lets over estimate (to make up for our underestimates) then and say there is an average of 30% being payed out to the authors per sale. So that’s only $5,850 paid out to authors compared to their $19500 revenue.

Also can’t forget about another main cost which is to have reviewers review the templates. There are currently 490 templates at TF and taking lets say a cost of $5 to review each template, that comes out to $2,450 TO DATE cost of reviewing the templates. This is based on paying reviewers a high $25/hour to review and assuming they can only review 5 templates per hour.  So even if they reviewed 100 templates in November that’s only $500.

Calculating Profit:

That means based on our Fermi Problem, $19,500 (revenue) – $5,850 (authors) – $500 (template reviewing estimate) =  TF made $13150 in profits during the month of November. (Please note I tweaked a few numbers from the actual thread to make them a better estimate)

Analysis of other costs:

Other costs would include anything like advertising, development, reviewers. As far as advertising goes, my guess is envato uses most of their network sites to advertise TF for free. Even if they spend 3k advertising a month that’s still over 10k left over for other things like development work, blog posters, and what ever else you can think of.

Conclusion:

Here’s our final estimation involved: “There’s a very high chance that Theme Forest is making a ton of money and there’s no reason why they can’t offer the authors a higher commission.”

The goal of this post was not necessarily to complain about a random website that you don’t care about, but rather to share with you an example of how quickly you can pull apart a business using a Fermi Problem with a predictable amount of accuracy.  The idea is to make an equal amount of over estimations as underestimations.  The more accurate you do this the more accurate your outcome will be.  Fermi Problems are great for estimating things like this!

I hope you learned something new and  hope that you are able to apply Fermi Problem to something you are working on in the future.

Just read about this tip the other day.

Instead of setting your alarm for a certain time every day, you can use a kitchen timer and set it for a certain number of hours.

That way you are getting the same amount of sleep every day.  Once I get around to getting myself a timer I’m going to start doing this.  It seems like my sleep varies so much something like this is definitely what I’ve needed.

Give it a go!

Nick

P.S. how do you like my sweet clip art that I found?

I know a few people who are making BIG money with affiliate marketing, but working hours upon hours to get there.  Do you think it’s worth it?  Ask almost any of these big affiliate money makers how many hours they put in to their “business” and if they don’t tell you 24/7 it’s usually really not to far away from just that.  I think that’s why after awhile a lot of marketers end up moving on to bigger and better projects.  Like Uber with Ubercamp, and Amit Mehta with ppc classroom.

If you love affiliate marketing then it’s no problem.  However in mine and a lot of other people’s cases, we may like it a lot, but we just don’t LOVE IT.  I honestly hope I never have to put that much time in to my business and probably never will.  My goal in life isn’t to see how much money I can have, it’s to have a good life while trying to get money out of the entire equation.  If any of you have read books like “Four Hour Work Week” you’ll begin to understand exactly what I’m talking about.

It’s called the “New Rich”.  The New Rich, aren’t the people with the big bucks (however it can be if you play your cards right).  It’s the people who are able to make enough money to have an incredible life while working hardly any hours to get there.  The “incredible life” part comes mostly from the fact that you aren’t spending all your time working.  This gives you much more time to do the things you really want to do like traveling and hanging out with family/friends.

Of course I’m not saying working that many hours is bad if you really, truly love what you do.  Except if you’re like me, you’d rather be doing a whole list of other things before sitting on the computer for up to 12 hours a day like some people do.

Nick

P.S. not sure why my last couple posts have had so much to do with The Four Hour Work Week, but I guess that style of life is something I really believe in!

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 RC1, and let me tell you, it’s amazing so far.

When WordPress had changed their admin layout the first time I wasn’t really impressed, but this time WOW.  It’s incredible.  They made everything amazing.

Here are a few of the things I found that were the biggest improvements over earlier versions of WordPress:

• The side menu added instead of the top menu, with everything at your fingertips
• You can install plugins automatically right through the admin.  Which means you don’t have to download the file first.
• Much better media manager.
• POSTS have their own category in the menu so they are separated from other things like links and pages
• Better comment administration with key shortcuts

And best of all the upgrade went flawlessly, just like I expect from WordPress.

Check it out: http://www.wordpress.org

Now it’s off to find some cool plugins!

Nick

Well here’s an easy fix I found:

• Open up “wp-admin/includes/update.php“
• Remove/comment the line that says (Line 44 for me): echo “<div id=’update-nag’>$msg</div>”; 
• Save it and you’re done!

I’ve been pretty busy lately with school and life in general.  It seems even if I have an entire day off there are always things to be done.  I switched my major for the fifth or sixth time the other day to Computer Science so i’m pretty excited about that.  I also have been in an extracurricular Adobe Flex related club so it’s been fun to mess around with that and get better at programming in general.

After watching Tim Ferriss’ pilot “Trial by Fire” last night, I got pumped up about my life in general and I am ready to make many changes!  It had been awhile since I heard much about Tim Ferriss and it couldn’t have come any sooner. 

Question:

What I want to know is:  What do you think about Tim Ferriss and his way of life (the four hour work week)?  If you haven’t heard of him check him out on http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog

Make sure to check out his Pilot if you haven’t yet!  I’m not sure of the future showing times but he should have them on his site.  It was a great show!!

Here’s a preview: