Beachbody Affiliate Program

June 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Beachbody is a Fitness Industry Leader with $1 Billion total sales: achieved annual sales of $300 million in 2008 a 50% increase from 2007. The business plan is to achieve $1 billion + in annual sales within 5 years. The company is poised for explosive growth!

You may have seen the Beachbody infomercials, or worked out with some of their fitness products like P90X, Power 90, Hip Hop Abs, Turbo Jam, nutritional supplements, fitness gear and more. Beachbody has the perfect affiliate products to promote. Except for one thing: the BeachBody affiliate program ended with Linkshare on 12/15/06. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Get Sociable With the Social Bookmarking Plugin for WordPress

March 10, 2008 By 2 Comments

sociable plugin for wordpressSociable is an awesome plugin for WordPress that has been around for awhile now. I just got around to installing it and love it! Sociable adds social media buttons to your posts. The image you see above left is a portion of the backend, where you select the buttons for various social media that you want to display on your blog posts. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Social Bookmarking, Wordpress Plugin Tagged With: ,

StumbleUpon Traffic Surge on My New Blog

February 11, 2008 By 2 Comments

My inner gadget lover got me thinking that I need to start a gadget blog. With that thought, SmartHomeGadgets.com was born at the start of January 2008. With just a few posts and a fantastic WordPress Revolution Tech theme, SmartHomeGadgets.com entered the blogosphere along with the other 150,000 blogs that are born everyday! Do the math!

I heard that StumbleUpon gives great traffic and Smart Home Gadgets was the perfect blog to test the theory. On January 19, 2008, Smart Home Gadgets was Stumbled and within a couple of hours, the traffic surged in.

275 Stumble visitors later, I checked my Google Analytics to find the most amazing bounce rate! My Stumblers bounce rate was 33.09% with 1.80 pages per visit!

stumbleupon traffic surge

At least some of my StumbleUpon traffic looked beyond the first page of my Smart Home Gadgets blog. With a fabulous magazine style theme, one must look beyond the cover to see what’s inside.

On January 24, 2008, my blog was Stumbled again to the tune of 85 visits and a 36.08% bounce rate.

I thought I couldn’t have enough of a good thing so I decided to try StumbleUpon’s advertising campaign program. I figured that if the free traffic was so good, the paid traffic ought to have a similar result. And it’s a bargain at 5 cents per visitor!

On February 5, 2008, I got my StumbleUpon Advertising campaign going at a nickel per view. 157 visits and $7.85 later, my bounce rate was a whopping 82.80%. Wow, that was much higher than the free StumbleUpon traffic. I found it hard to believe and I am a glutton for punishment, so I continued a limited ad campaign over a three-day period.

The numbers were similar, with a much higher bounce rate.

So now that I am down about $25, I hope that a few Stumblers from the paid advertising will make a repeat visit to my blog again, but judging from the high bounce rate, I’m not so sure.

I also learned that free StumbleUpon traffic brings quality visitors who are more likely to go beyond the surface of a blog or website, and may even return for a visit or two or more. The paid traffic results, while seemingly inexpensive, were dissappointing.

What else could I have bought with my $25? More Smart Home Gadgets, of course!

Filed Under: Advertise, Social Media, Traffic Tagged With: , , , ,

Drive Traffic with Social Shopping

January 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Wikipedia defines “social shopping” as “a method of e-commerce in which consumers shop in a social networking environment.”


Web2.0 with Squidoo

Social shopping sites are a brilliant blend of social networking and e-commerce. Combining two of the Internet’s biggest activities, social shoppers engage in commerce along with socializing with like-minded people. The intent of social shopping sites is not to sell anything at all, just to provide a comfy environment where you can share great bargains, as well as advice about products that are great and not so great.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you are already familiar with the likes of Facebook.com and MySpace.com. Well, social shopping sites have followed in those footsteps, creating networking environments that are colorful and invite sharing of personal information, lists of friends, and interests.

Some notable social shopping sites include – I’m sure we’ll see many more of these in the coming year:

  • Kaboodle: Kaboodle is a social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products. Kaboodle’s powerful shopping tools allow people to organize their shopping through lists, discover new things from people with similar style, get discounts on popular products and find best prices. More than 2 million unique monthly visitors.
    It’s super easy to register and get started.You can install the Kaboodle widget in your brower’s toolbar to easily add any product web page or web site to your Kaboodle list. Recently acquired by Hearst Corp.
  • ThisNext: Real recommendations from real people. We blend two powerful elements of real-world shopping otherwise lost for online consumers: word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted sources and the ability to browse products in the way that naturally leads to discovery.
  • Wishpot: Wishpot is a free social shopping service that makes it easy to save and share interesting things you find in stores and online.
  • Stylehive: The Stylehive is a global social shopping community, dedicated to discovering and sharing the most exciting products, the stores that sell them, and the people that find them.

If you have an Internet-based business, be sure to participate in social shopping networks. At least join up and monitor the activity around your products.

According to Hitwise, the market research company, social shopping is still a small corner of the Internet and accounts for fewer than 1 percent of all U.S. Web visits. However, social shopping sites took an eightfold leap in 2007.

And, don’t forget that fewer than 1 percent is still millions of people. You simply cannot ignore that!

So, if you have an Internet business, get busy and involved with social shopping to gain more exposure to your products, and monitor activity surrounding your product.

If you are a shopper, get ready to find even more great products and spend lots money through all the great recommendations you’ll find in social shopping!

Filed Under: Social Media, Social Shopping Tagged With: , ,

Eleven Awesome Social Bookmarking Sites

January 8, 2008 By 1 Comment

Social bookmarking sites

Web 2.0 is a term that has been thrown around a lot lately. What is Web 2.0? Simply put, it refers to this ongoing transition of the Internet, often characterized as the second generation of the Web. The Web is morphing into an “always on” environment, bursting at the seams with creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. It includes a plethora of new technologies that enable you and me to commune in this place that we have come to know and love: the Internet.

With that in mind, here are eleven social bookmarking sites you should make a point of using. With social bookmarking sites, you can save your favorite bookmarks and then share them with others within a particular network. Tagging and categories allows other users of the same social bookmarking communities to find your bookmarks, visit those sites, and vote sites up or down!

You will, of course, need to register on each individual social bookmarking site in order to submit blog links and articles.

With social bookmarking, you have the potential to get a lot of traffic and attention!

Digg: get your site listed on Digg, and through sharing and voting, you may even make the homepage and get lots of attention!  Be prepared to pay for all that extra bandwidth from your Web service provider.
Alexa Rank = 135 

Technorati: Blog search engine that tracks over 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media (don’t get lost in the crowd!) Seriously, Technorati is an authority on what is happening on Web in real time. Always on, always updated! When I launched my blog, Technorati was on the case within 24 hours!
Alexa Rank = 383

del.icio.us: store your favorites of anything on the Web and share with the del.icio.us community.
Alexa Rank = 378

StumbleUpon: discover and share websites. StumbleUpon uses rating to form collaborative opinions on Website quality. If a popular “Stumbler” stumbles across your website and likes it, watch out! You’ll end up with hundreds, even thousands of visitors. This happened recently to a blogging buddy of mine, whose visitors increased to over 500 visitors per day – up from 20. All it takes is one Stumbler!
Alexa Rank = 294

Propeller: part of the AOL Network (Time-Warner company.) Submit stories and get votes from other members!
Alexa Rank = 1647

Reddit: Another source for what’s new and popular on the web. Vote submitted links up or down.
Alexa Rank = 1046

Slashdot: Slashdot is owned by SourceForge, Inc. Slashdot is for geeks. If you are one, head over to Slashdot and submit some good content.
Alexa Rank = 1041

Blinklist: I haven’t used this one. If you have, leave a comment. You can make lists and share, have them appear in your links on your blog.
Alexa Rank = 5431

Fark: An interesting news aggregator and collection of edited social networking news. Their slogan is, “It’s Not News, It’s Fark”. Head on over and join in the fun.
Alexa Rank = 2528

Newsvine: Now owned by MSNBC.com. Newsvine is a great place to read stories from established media organizations like the Associated Press and ESPN as well as individual contributors from all around the world. So the little people, like us, can publish our stories and get them read by the masses too!
Alexa Rank = 5854

Furl: Furl is part of the LookSmart family. Furl archives a personal copy of every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by searching the full text your archived items. Each member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items.
Alexa Rank = 5662

Have you used social bookmarking to boost your Blog traffic?  What’s your glory story?

Filed Under: Blog, Social Bookmarking, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,