Stumbling social bookmarking and Ezinearticles

Finding your way around the Stumble Upon site isn't particularly intuitive. You wonder whether you're logged in or not (before realising that as you have a toolbar installed which has to be able to connect to the site when you make a review you are pretty much always 'logged in'). Its also just not straight forward to navigate. To get your profile/own part of the site you have to click 'home' even though you would normally expect home to be simply the domain name... it isn't.

However submitting your sites to Stumble Upon IS very easy once you have the tool bar installed and it can be easily hidden by using ctrl-F11 (in firefox anyway).

I've reviewed all my pages now and I think its about time I start networking with bloggers who are better established. Maybe people blogging about chess, or even about online business.

Another good thing is that my two newest articles have been approved by Ezinearticles and I now have reached 'expert status' (who says the online achievement is difficult)! Although it wasn't immediately obvious why I had achieved this status I did a quick search to find out (more important to me was what difference this could make to my exposure):

"Ezinearticles.com assigns its authors "expert" status if they demonstrate through their article writing--its style and content--that they have expert knowledge on a subject." Source

"Something else worth noting is the benefit of appearing as an “expert author” at EzineArticles.com. This is a powerful credibility tool and handy search engine optimization trick. Thanks to Ezine Article’s significant presence in search engines (high PageRank and lots of backlinks) web searches for your name will often pull up your author homepage. " Source

I'm also allowed to use these funky button things:


Great!

Promoting your site by using social bookmarking!

Yesterday I promised to try and get to the bottom of what this social bookmarking was all about and why it was of interest to webmasters... well to be honest I dont have all the facts but I think I'm starting to get somewhere.

There are many different social bookmarking sites including Stumble Upon. Stumble upon is like an extension to your 'favourites' in internet explorer where you can save websites and supply a review. However it doesn't stop there. Whereas your favourites on your computer are only on your computer, when you review a site with Stumble Upon your review becomes a part of the Stumble Upon site and community. You can think of Stumble Upon being a cross between a social network and an internet directory.

I'm going to start by giving a 'thumbs up' and review of my own sites and take it from there. You need to install the tool bar to start doing your own reviews. Once you've added your review (using your newly acquired toolbar) your site should have been added to the Stumble Upon directory. You can check here (you could try it by searching for www.cafepress.com/chessgifts)!

I also found two great articles about using Stumble Upon which you can see here: and here.

Tomorrow I will be investigating deeper into the world of Stumble Upon.

Adding to your Squidoo lens piecemeal

Today I have added a little bit more to my Squidoo lens on chess pieces. As it seems that many search engines prefer sites which are regularly updated I held back on doing the whole lot in one go and will add to it each day until its completed. Once completed I will go on to my next topic (something about opening play I expect) and will build it in the same way. I have also sprinkled in my Cafepress products from my Chess Gifts shop amongst my text so for example you can see one product between my section on knights and my section on bishops.

In submitting articles to online publishers you will find that they often give you some ideas on how to promote your articles better. One quite popular suggestion both from publishers like www.1888articles.com and Squidoo is to 'favourite' your URLs in sites like Technorati and Del.Icio.US (and others).

Although I'm not sure exactly what purpose this has yet I intend to find out and will let you all know ASAP!

Recycling material - repackaging for my new articles and promoting two shops simultaneously.

If you've read yesterday's post you will know that I now have two Cafepress shops to promote Tees for Grads and Chess Gifts. Today I posted a link to my Chess Gifts shop on my Facebook page and will be sending the link to all my friends who play chess.

Now to making new articles. You may remember from my other posts that I have been working with Squidoo to help promote my shops. I have two lenses related to graduation one which features my article Graduation Gift and another where I write about taking the first steps after leaving education - Life after Graduation.

You will also know that I'm a big fan of promoting your website by submitting articles to online publishers and including your link in the resource box. Needless to say it takes a while to find the publisher, log in (or register) and go through the process for just one article. Indeed often after submitting an article they ask whether you want to submit another. So this time I will! I will submit one for the Tees for Grads shop and one for my new Chess Gifts shop.

As they become published I will put the direct links to these articles below this post:

here basically... watch this space!
So in order of the fastest to approve my articles:

1. www.infocrystals.com (chess article)
   www.infocrystals.com (graduation/career article)
2. www.1888articles.com (chess article)
   www.1888articles.com (graduation/career article)
3. www.articleindex.com (chess article)
   www.articleindex.com (graduation/career article)
   
4. www.articlesbase.com (chess article)
   www.articlesbase.com (graduation/career article)
5. www.ezinearticles.com (chess article)
   www.ezinearticles.com (graduation/career article)
   

My second cafepress shop...

I can now proudly state that I have a second Cafepress shop. There are two reasons for having more than just the Tees for Grads shop. Firstly graduation is very much a seasonal market (people only graduate and specific times of year) and so I couldn't expect to do a roaring trade all year around. Secondly if you have two shops which are equally good then you should have more chance of selling stuff.

My new category is something that doesnt go in and out of fashion and is predominantly an all year thing...chess! Chess also has quite a faithful following around the world and has been around for much longer than Cafepress and will be here for many more years to come.

I have a look at some of the other chess T-shirt designs both on Cafepress and on the net generally and I wasn't particularly impressed. Mostly quite cluttered designs featuring the whole chessboard and too many pieces. I decided (as usual) to keep my designs simple and straightforward. I brain stormed slogans for a while before coming up with a few different ones which I actually used:

• Chess the sport of kings (fairly obvious one but one that I felt was at least safe).
• En passant...its not a made up rule! (one of the last chess rules that is learned and knowing it tends to show some degree of seriousness about chess).
• Its mating season! (although many people refer to it as 'check mate' the pros generally refer to it simply as 'mate' and discuss 'mating' and 'mating positions' so I hoped this would appeal to some of the more cheeky players out there!
• Chess...its a queen's world! (a take on its a man's world for women players).
• I can mate with a knight and bishop! (one of the most difficult end games when you have only the knight (horse) and bishop with which to win.

I've filled in the tags for the images I created (so people can search for them within Cafepress itself) as well as the titles/descriptions and store details.

Tomorrow I will be collating some beginner's chess notes I have previously written into an article and submitting it to online publishers as before.

If you would like to see my Chess Gifts shop you can do so here.

Get your article published

Today I have been submitting my article to more online publishers. It is a good idea to keep all the required information in with your article so its easy to copy and paste into the submission boxes. Most will ask for your title, a 'teaser', your article, your resource box and key words.

The teaser is a short (usually 2-5 sentence) introduction to your article which will explain what the article is about and encourage the reader to read more. It is also important to include keywords in your teaser/introduction. Your resource box is the part where you can include your own link and explain who you are and what you do. The keywords are similar to tags in squidoo and are important if you want anyone to be able to find your article as something relevant to what they are looking for.

For example you can see how I have set up my article on ezinearticles here.

Other places you can publish your articles include:
www.articlesbase.com
www.1888articles.com
www.articleindex.net
www.infocrystals.com

A new facebook group and adding to google base

Today I have found that my updated google base feed has been approved and my cafepress shop is live. Also I have started a new group on facebook called "life after graduation" including links about finding jobs in the UK (where I'm from) and also a link to my Squidoo lens about continuing to learn after graduation and about considering your first ambitions which led you to your degree in the first place.

Submitting to Directories

Submitting your Cafepress site to free directories should be one of the first things you do. Its free and doesn't involve much effort (unlike writting articles, etc).

Many directories will require you to do a reciprocal link (meaning that you include a link to their site on your page) also. If you have a premium Cafepress shop then thats fairly straightforward, if however like me you only have a basic shop this might prove to be a bit more tricky since you cannot edit the html. This is where having a blog or squidoo lens comes in handy. When these directories ask for a reciprocal link they ask for the site where the link will be and give you some code to put on your site. For example on my squidoo lens I added a text module near the foot where I can add these reciprocal links with the title saying something like "Post your site in these directories".

www.connectedinternet.co.uk/directory
www.tshirtaffiliates.com/submit.php
www.jf3000.com
www.ukstudentdirectory.com/submit.php

Articles and more Squidoo...

Welcome back! So continuing to promote my Cafepress shop I have continued to submit my article about choosing graduation presents to different publishing websites.

Today I submitted my article to:
www.ideamarketers.com
www.goarticles.com
www.searchwarp.com
www.articlesfactory.com

Some of the sites will publish your article immediately but most hold it to be reviewed before posting.

After getting the articles out there I went back to Squidoo to see if I could make some improvements.

I decided that like with articles the best way to get good traffic by squidoo is to offer advice for free and to include your links at the end.

I now have two squidoo 'lenses' one featuring my article about how to choose a graduation gift and one entitled: Ok, you've graduated...what next?!. This second lens features some advice which is aimed at students who are going to graduate and who aren't sure what they want to do. Rather than offering direct solutions its supposed to kick start the thought process offering ideas which hopefully will act as a catalyst to making a decision.

Squidoo a change of tack. Writing content instead of a pitch.

After reading a bit more about squidoo and looking at some other people's lenses I decided that I should make some changes to mine to make it better.

Rather than talking about cafepress and T-shirts for graduates I decided to write some real content which those graduating might actually find useful.

Then incorporating the T shirt designs around the content. I entitled my lens Ok, you've graduated...what next?!.

US and UK satisfied at last!

So following my recent problem with UK/US differences it seems I have sorted the problem out. I have replaced the UK designs on my teesforgrads shop with US equivalents and have set up a UK version with the alternate UK designs on a new cafepress shop - ukteesforgrads.

Tomorrow I will be delving deeper into ways to promote my cafepress shops and will be considering my target customer and what is the best way to reach them.

English isn't always english...

Today I suddenly realised that many of my T-shirt designs would not be suitable for the US market. Being English and having grown up in the UK where we refer to uni (university) where we study on average for three years I realised that several of my tee shirt slogans may not make sense to graduates in America!

With the US market being considerably larger (at least regards population) it is important that I try to find out a bit more about the terminology surrounding US education. So I duly sent off an email to my father who is in the US right now for some answers. If you are reading this and can help me then please add some comments how typical education works in America and what you call the different stages (and how long each one lasts).

Writing articles and trying to untangle squidoo...

Squidoo... wherever its everywhere! Whether I'm searching for something it frequently turns up first in google results. If I'm trying to find out about promoting cafepress shops its one of the most talked about ways to get more visitors and hence sales.

Only one problem, I still dont understand it! It seems to be a cross between a blog, an article publisher and social networking. I guess I'm going to have to look a little more at what I should be doing with it and how I can promote my 'lens'. Still thats for another day.

Today I've written an article about choosing a graduation gift for your friends who are graduating and have submitted it to Ezine. I'm not sure how long it take to become live but I hope that soon I will have a live article and will be able to submit it to other online article providers and write new articles as well.

Keeping Google happy by feeding it :o

After posting my designs on new Facebook groups and sending the teesforgrads link to everyone I knew who was a student or graduate I went back to Google Base to see if I could find out anything else about it.

Google Base is quite new and serves as an access point where anyone can submit information to be catalogued in the galaxy of Google! When you submit something you have to choose a category for it - I chose products. When submitting new data you can either use the web interface and manually add new items one by one or you can upload a 'feed'.

A feed is literally a stream of data which is packaged in a portable way that can be read by many different applications - in my case I wanted to package the information about my cafepress shop and submit it to Google.

I used Instant Cafe Feeder to create a text file which I then uploaded to Google Base. After uploading it it takes some time to process before you log in to see 'success'! Great succes, but what does success mean exactly for me and my teesforgrads shop? After reading some of the help topics within Google Base it seems that Google Base offers a more sophisticated way to submit information to Google that did the traditional method of submitting an URL and waiting for the web crawler to index it. By specifiying detailed information about your data (or in my case T-shirts) it helps Google to display your products to people to search for what you are offering. Products will also be more likely to appear within Google Shopping (formerly Froogle) also.

If you are submitting a product its important to know that your items will expire after 30 days and you will need to re-submit them. However there are other types of information which do not expire, these include reviews, recipes etc.

Next I decided that it was time I had another location for my blog so I opened a Wordpress account and imported this blog (in fact you may be reading this on Wordpress now!).

Next I submitted my cafepress shop to Google (in the traditional way), MSN and Yahoo and also submitted this blog to the Yahoo feed section.

Taking a break to read and looking at Google Base and Squidoo...

Working on Friday evening? Yes and it doesnt feel so good! Well today I continued with my usual Facebook action. I have got some good feedback on designs on my Goldsmiths T-shirts (goldgrad) and I posted my links in two new groups one relevant to the Goldsmiths shop and one which was for people who were looking forward to graduating (they got the teesforgrads).

The reasons for me doing so much work promoting on Facebook early on are due to both how direct the contact is, and how targeted I can be. Firstly I can target in on students who are either affiliated with the Goldsmiths network (for the goldgrad shop) or at least students in general or those who have already graduated. This means that I'm immediately reaching my target audience and am doing so directly without them needing to start searching for T-shirts, graduate presents or anything else. Obviously in the long term this would be difficult to maintain but in the short term I hope to get honest feedback as well as generacting some interest and maybe even a couple of sales.

After sorting out the Facebook material I went on to promote my teesforgrads shop by starting a Squidoo lens. I came across Squidoo only very recently although I had noticed several search results for things in Google coming up with Squidoo. Although I still know very little about Squidoo I have found that it was started by Seth Godin - a marketer who has written some excellent books including Purple Cow - which I have read. You can see my Squidoo lens here.

I also referred to the community forums on cafepress and read about someone who had used Google Base. Not knowing what that was I went over to Google and had a look. It seems to offer a platform where one can present ones products where they can be incorporated into Froogle or search results. I opened my own Google Base account and downloaded Instant Cafe Feed program to create a feed of my teesforgrads shop.

Tomorrow I will delve deeper into Google Base and will be submitting my shops to search engines.

More facebook and forums...

Today I spent another hour promoting my Tee shirts for graduates on Facebook. I got some good feedback on the designs and I set about starting to promote the cafepress.com/teesforgrads (generic) site by posting discussion topics in graduation and alumni groups.

We'll have to wait and see how this is recieved. I also posted links in some new student forums and will expect to continue with this tomorrow. I will also be looking into writing a couple of short articles to publish on sites such as ezine and so on including a resource box with the web link in it. I have a friend who has great success optimizing his sites by submitting articles.

Also I intend to start scouring the cafepress forums and to learn more about how the affiliate programme works before submitting my site (and therefore products) to affiliate sites.

If you are reading this and are thinking "why doesn't he try..." please let us know! Any ideas welcome! Likewise if you have some ideas which you'd like to try yourself I'll give you information about the affiliate scheme and you can start making some money yourself with my designs!

Facebook starting easy...

Ok timer set...and...go!
59 minutes and 59 seconds to go! My first day trying to promote my new T-shirt designs for graduates is underway!

I referred to my (rather basic) marketing plan and decided to start with what network marketers call your warm market - or people you know. I went to university with a load of people who I am still in contact with (more or less) on Facebook so firstly I posted a link onto my profile including a picture of one of my designs and a short message explaining that I had made some T shirt designs for graduates and that I wanted some feedback. I think its important when you are doing this kind of marketing to avoid a hard sell - I mean be honest with yourself - are you going to respond to something that just says - Buy this!? By asking for feedback firstly you are more likely for people to take a serious look at what you are offering and secondly you might get some helpful advice or ideas that you wouldn't have thought of on your own.

I then moved onto creating friend lists of all my friends who had been to/going to Goldsmiths uni and sent them all the link with the Goldsmiths specific designs; again asking for feedback. One problem was that although you could make friend lists as long as you wanted, you could only message a list of up to 20 names, so I had to break up my original list into three sub-lists and do each of them individually.

My next task was to reach out to the relevant 'groups' for people who dont use Facebook groups are entities which provide information and connect people of similar interests. They have their own profile and message board. I already had a specific Goldsmiths group in mind where I posted my link.

Another neat thing about Facebook groups is that they list how many members they have so I then spent some time searching for Goldsmiths groups and noting down the names of the larger ones.

After doing a search for student forums related to Goldsmiths and posting a new thread (asking for feedback and including my link) my time was up! Phew - there really isnt that much you can do in an hour!

Tomorrow I will be starting to promote my generic site as well by targeting more Facebook groups and student forums.

No money and one hour a day to build an online business?

Business!
A word that means many different things to many different people. To many it conjures up pictures of wildly rich people who are richer than royalty, to others it means hard work and spending money without being sure that you will get anything in return, to some people it means fat sweaty commuters who spend all their free time talking about investments and playing with their blackberries. But to me business is the key to freedom which career, job-minded people will never experience.

There's a common saying that "business is business" but I'm not so sure it is. Sure being an investment banker is business, so too is being a self-employed plumber...but I have something else in mind...

In a 'freedom business' you should aim for two things. Firstly you should think about whether you business can be residual (or recurrent) and secondly if you are starting out small - is it scalable?

I'm not going to go into any further details right now but if you do some research on Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad you will get a flavour of what I'm talking about.

I'm starting a business with no money!
Being an enterprising sort of person I have thought about many different business ideas some of which I have dropped, some I'm researching and others I have stowed away so that I can start them in the future. One of the big reasons people never get started is that they are cautious about spending money on starting up a business which may not take off; and rightly so who wants to see their hard earned money disappear with nothing to show for it?

The internet has been a great innovation for starting up small business because online premises are considerably cheaper than renting a high street shop space. In fact I'm going to suggest that they are so cheap that they can be free!

I will be using cafepress.com to try and start turning a profit without using any initial investment. Cafepress is a website which I first read about in a book called Internet Riches where you can upload a design (pictures, graphics or even just text) and can then sell it printed onto various products including T-shirts via the website.

My friends at university are getting ready to graduate and I decided that I could design some good T-shirts for graduates. I started with very specific designs for the university I went to (Goldsmiths) and then did more generic ones for students everywhere.

Here is my Goldsmiths shop:

www.cafepress.com/goldgrad

and here is my generic one:

www.cafepress.com/teesforgrads

Cafepress offers two options when you start out - basic shops or premium shops. Premium shops are far superior to basic shops but you need to pay to open a premium shop so I'm starting out basic.

Now that I've got my shops and designs ready I will spend 1 hour a day marketing the sites for the next month and will see what happens!

Make sure you come back to find out how it all goes over the next month as I promote my no cash startup bit by bit!