During a few research quests I’ve been on. I stumbled upon a site by Rob Abott who deals with user experience at Ribbit. He made a real interesting post about the YouTube video player and how it could be improved. Now I’m not looking to make the next YouTube or anything, but I do find his ideas very interesting. It also makes you want to take a step back on your own work and really look at it from more of a user perspective and see where you can improve it.  In any case take a moment to read his post.

Link: YouTube Video Player Redesign

At least these ones look new to me. I see them all day, so most of the time I’m completely blind to the entire thing.

Now google is playing with inline movable ads. Basically Adsense is able to serve up more ads in one shot. I have to admit I always have this stigma about clicking on ads. There is a certain sense of danger with Google so ban happy all the time. The little arrows on this ad are safe to click on(I’m not telling you to go out and click on every ad). Everything moves very smooth. I’m not sure if this will entice more clicks, but lets hope so!

Well I was greeted today with what I was surprised to see was an apology email from Andy Jenkins. It goes into how his newsletters had gone a little off topic as off late. He linked to a new video entitled Going Natural 2.0. Now let me say that I was merely looking for more written content from Andy and his crew. Rather I found a video that starts out with a very serious note on how StomperNet had gotten a little away from its roots of free content and how he wants to improve on that. He took the time in his video to talk about my post on newsletter marketing(link: Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon Newsletter Marketing).

Now of course I had to continue on with this video and see what it was all about. I have to say it starts out with one crucial piece of advise on increasing your natural traffic. Andy didn’t go into any SENSATIONAL CLAIMS(j/k Andy), he just talked straight about improving your websites traffic. Andy really takes John Reese’s advise on not just delivering whats expected, Andy goes above and beyond my expectations for a newsletter and for StomperNet overall. Now I’m not some huge eCommerce man, but I do find tons of value in what Andy has to say. Its great to see StomperNet going back to what it does best.

Take 30 minutes of your day and check out the video you won’t regret it.

link: Going Natural 2.0

Customer service is such a key point in internet marketing. Often times I will stumble onto a site where all I find is someone blatantly pushing people to click on Adsense. At times this is an excellent option, but more often than not its a poor choice because it just drives your customers away from the site.

Customer doesnt have to be such a retail phrase. Think of customer as a user on your site and I mean any user. If all you are doing is pushing Adsense and not providing that customer what they want all they are going to do is go away from your site to somewhere where they can find exactly what they came in for. They are looking for service. If you provide a good service for them then they will return and usually return with more people.

Lets take a real life example here. I went into a Pottery Barn Kids recently looking for some thing for my son with my wife. There were about 15-20 customers in the building. All my wife and I needed was a little help with some various questions about products, but all we found were a bunch of customer service reps standing around the store talking to each other about various little pieces of gossip they had heard. I must have walked right by three or four reps without even a hello from them. What kind of customer service is that, when you walk in and no one wants to help you get what you need. You know what that made us want to do? Leave the store. Do I want to go back there? No. Why? Because they failed to offer a service that my wife and I needed.

If you take the time to do a complete job on your service for the users of your website it will pay off. Always try to step back and see how the customer would look at your site. A good way to do that is have a friend of family member run through your site once or twice. Chances are you will see where you can improve the experience. If the experience is better you will almost always convert more sales or make a better impression on the user and that will cause them to want to come back for more.

Have you ever subscribed to someones newsletter? I have subscribed to more than I can count in my last 10 years online. I decided on a whim to subscribe to Andy Jenkins Stompernet newsletter at some point a few months back. Now what I expected to recieve was a bunch of funky emails with tons of ads or an email with a lot of useful information. Well the last I checked I have been recieving emails that were just ads for other peoples seminars on how to make money online and how its the next BIG thing. I have never subscribed to Stompernet nor do I think I ever will, but I do know that when I signed up for these emails I was expecting to get some useful information. All that was delivered were some massive ad letters on how fantastic this other service is and how much money you can make from it or how it will change your life.

Well I also noticed that every single email is just another way for these guru’s Andy and Brad to make a profit off of you or some newbie in the business by having you click on complex affiliate links. For every sale they send to some other guy, they make a profit. It is webmaster affiliate marketing at it finest. If you want to know how to make a great newsletter then read and study how Brad and Andy do it. Its amazing how easily they suck you in to think that they are even slightly helping you, then before you know it you are on someone elses site spending thousands on some new gimick for making millions online.

I’m not knocking these guys for doing what they do. They probably make millions doing it. Its probably one of the most lucrative markets to make money online. You make a convincing newsletter about how it will change their lives and then you send them off to someone elses site with your name or company as a backing. Its the deal for ebooks and video series. In reality you can get the same value out of joining a forum like DigitalPoint. I dont have the heart to sell some ebook to people for a profit. The only ebook I would ever consider buying is Aaron Walls SEOBook. To get back to the point, dont get drawn in to some crafty newsletter about the next big marketing thing. Take some time and try everything you can with marketing online. I bet you will get more value out of trying things yourself rather than buying into some $5k teleseminar or some fancy ebook about making a profit with adsense.

Stumble stuff! Thats it, the answer to how to get traffic from stumble upon. Its not really that hard. Stumblupon is a pretty basic user community. If you take the time to stumble other peoples websites,videos, and pictures they will take the time to stumble your sites.

I took the time to test it out recently. I went through three of some of my newer sites and found out that generally if you have a newer stumbleupon account you can get about 500-700 hits in one day. Now thats with me going clicking the “Stumble!” button about 50-80 times and either giving a site the thumbs up or down. It doesn’t really matter. Whats matters is that you take part in the community.

If you take the time to be a small part of it, it will reward you with traffic. Hopefully you can take those visitors and convert them to something great for whatever you are marketing. I was able to grab quite a few del.icio.us links just by stumbling a couple pages of one of my test sites. So take a few minutes of your day and use that stumbleupon toolbar to get some traffic.

StumbleUpon Traffic Analytics:

Almost on a daily basis I get to hear some great idea or the next BIG thing. Well the problem with that is its all talk but no walk. Now I have been just as bad at times. I come up with lots of ideas. Problem is I dont have time to act on all of them. I do however test the most profitable ones as soon as I can. I try to list my ideas in order of what will generally make me the most money.

I can’t stress the importance of testing everything you can. It doesnt mean you have to go all out from the start, but just try a small portion of it. Whats the worst thats going to happen? You will actually learn something by trying. The internet game is about experience. I learned everything I have so far by actually going out and making that website or trying that PPC campaign. So take at least one hour a day if you can, even 30 minutes, and try something new. Use a new program, play with the new analytics, or try out some new method for gaining traffic. Then try to figure out how you can improve those tests to make you better in your daily work. It will pay off.

Seriously? Right after Shoemoney and Dillsmack sold the business off everything dumped off. I was rolling pretty well with it too. I had a great increase in sales and everything was looking great. Then the sale went through and as soon as the text-link-ads.com guys picked it up it just turned into a big pile.

Now I’m not trying to call out the guys at TLA, because they know how to make a great product. My first guess is that they decided they wanted to turn AuctionAds into ShoppingAds and just switch the whole model over. In the process things got screwed up and everyone started losing money. AuctionAds works on a community system too. So the fewer people that use it, the fewer you make on it. Also another contributing factor could be that every reader you normally get is now blind to those ads and now they aren’t as inclined to bid on anything. So many questions…. I have taken them down from all of my sites for the time being. If I hear they are really pulling it together again, I’ll jump on it.

So I’m a shoemoney whore at times. I was taking a look at his blog and saw that he was giving EntreCard a try out. EntreCard seems like a good idea to sort of share traffic between bloggers. Now how effective it will be is really up in the air. I can see some people taking to it right away and some not so much. The dashboard is extremely easy to use and understand. For some reason though I get the feeling the idea is limited in some shape or form. I haven’t been able to put my finger on it. I’m giving it a shot, why not try it yourself and possibly get some free advertising on Shoemoney’s site if you’re a small blog with big ambitions then this would be a quick solution to some solid traffic.

Alright so usually when I am testing things out for the first time on this site I will toss it in the sidebar. Nine times out of ten I will put it in some low position to keep it out of your face and mine. Now when I do add something thats new, I like to toss a “?” right next to it and link it to a post where I’m usually blabbing on about it. That way you can easily voice your opinion about it. If I hear that its crap, I’ll most likely take it down. Unless in the rare case I’m doing something special with it. Anyways, voice yourself about anything new on here at any time. I will make my best effort to listen.

As it stands I just tossed BlogRush up on the site. Do I expect much from it? Nah, but if I do get some traffic from the BlogRush crowd, then Welcome to my Site! Otherwise enjoy the fancy widget in my sidebar and check out some other bloggers great work.