This is a guest post written by Mike.  Mike Smith is a regular guy who designs blogs for a living at Blog Theme Machine and is currently trying to shift into a full time social media marketing career through his website iamMikeSmith where he blogs about social media, marketing and blogging.

Stumble Upon can be a beautiful thing, especially when used by the right affiliate marketers, for the right reasons. Some people over-do it and abuse the system, but when it’s done right, its a piece of artwork. For those of you reading this blog right now that want to diversify your income streams and learn how to leverage social media websites like Stumble Upon for your affiliate marketing needs, this post is going to cover it all for you.

I’ve compiled 7 must read reasons why you, as an affiliate marketer should use stumble upon. In the end, it’s up to you to follow the road to added exposure and profits, but if you do read the reasons below and put them into practice, you’ll be improving your affiliate marketing profits in no time.

For those of you who already leverage social media websites for your affiliate marketing, drop a comment below and let us know. And for those of you reading this who think that mass spam to 1,000+ people is the right way, please leave now and never come back

1. Networking – Affiliate marketers tend to stick to themselves or a real close knit group of people and like to keep their secret niches to themselves. But by leveraging your network on stumble upon, you can gain some added thumbs up to your articles (tip – don’t network with other affiliate marketers or else they might steal your ideas haha).
2. Watching trends – Always wanting to stay ahead of the curve is a great way to run your affiliate marketing business and stumble upon is great for that. Check out the stumble upon tag page and see recently hot tags as well as the all time hot tags. Click the tag and see what websites and topics are hot in that area and start an affiliate campaign on the ones you think would be profitable.
3. Targeted (FREE) traffic – You use PPC because it’s targeted traffic. If you’re a blogger, you buy ads on other peoples websites because they’re in the same niche as yours and the traffic is targeted. Why wouldn’t you want the free, targeted traffic that stumble upon can send you? One article I wrote on my blog has received over 100,000 unique visitors in the past month, all because the post went popular.
4. Watching competitors – Keep your friends close and your enemies closer right? Well, with social media sites like Stumble upon, you can see what your competitors are doing. When you’re logged into your account, you can search a specific topic and find sites related to them. You’ll stumble across some genuine sites that are built by passionate people in that niche, but a lot of them are definitely affiliate marketers websites. Find out what they’re doing, see how many reviews they’re articles got on stumble upon and build your site 10X better
5. Increase influence – Do you run a lot of campaigns in the same niche? Stumble them all and increase your influence over what the people searching for your niche find when they click the search button. Instead of only having 1 page for them to see, try getting 10 in there. If you’re a blogger as well, you could also get more reach by getting popular on stumble upon and gain the exposure and traffic benefits like I mentioned above.
6. Quickly test niches – Got a niche you’d like to test out but not sure if dumping 200-300 dollars into it is worth it? Stumble your page and shoot a message to some of your network in stumble upon asking them to review it. If they like it, you get two positive results; you get their thumbs up vote which helps get it exposed to more visitors and you also get the possible sale from the original network people you sent it to.
7. SEO benefits – I am not sure I’ve seen other people mention this before, but I know for the few posts on my blogs I’ve had hit the popular page on stumble upon, it’s also done crazy things for my rankings in google. All for the low, low price of ZERO and usually in far less time then it would normally take to rank for the keywords I’m #2 and #6 for

Still wondering if stumble upon is worth your time? Well, go sign up, put these things into practice and if it doesn’t work well over the next week or two, come back here, cuss me out and let me know how much of an idiot I am. But I doubt that will happen, because I, as well as many others have seen the benefits that stumble upon and other social media websites can bring.

If you liked this article, would you like me to run through other social media websites like Twitter, Delicious, Reddit, ect? Drop a comment and let me know and if Derek approves of it, I’ll write up some follow up articles for you.

Popularity: 32% [?]

In the First Part of Using Twitter to Raise Brand Awareness, I covered the following points:

* What is Twitter?
* Tools to Make Using Twitter Easier.
* How to Have Your New Blog Posts Automatically Post to Twitter.

In this second part I want to cover a few points including how to gain followers on Twitter.

Lets get started!

Why Do I Want People Following Me?

In order for you to use Twitter effectively and for Brand Building or Traffic Building you must have people following you on Twitter. Why is that you ask? Whenever you post a comment on Twitter whether it be Via the Web, IM, SMS, or Using one of the Tools we talked about in the first part, the only people that will see that message is people who are following you for the most part.

So in order to build brand awareness or increase website/blog traffic, you must have a following.

Okay, so here’s your next question I’m sure… How do I increase my Twitter Followers?

Follow and Thou Shalt Be Followed

Most people don’t realize that the best way to get people to start following you once you signup for Twitter is to simply start following others! Following people is very easy and most people, even the big names out there, will return a follow.

There is one thing I would like to mention. Don’t follow people just to follow them. You need to find and follow individuals that talk about or are interested in the same things as you. The reason for this will be explained a few points down.

What I have found works the best is to follow about 30 – 50 people, preferably people that are considered respected in your area of interest and have quite a few followers them self. Again more as to why will be explained a few points down.

Watch Others Twitter Replies!

If you just signed up with Twitter after reading Part One to this series, then you’ve had a few days to play around with it. You’ve probably noticed in many people’s messages Twitter Replies. What are Twitter replies? They look something like this.

@problogger Yeah, your totally right and I agree with your blog post 100%

Take note of the part in bold. This is someone replying to something that problogger said on Twitter that they read. The great thing about this is when someone does this not only does it allow the person to know they are talking to them, but it also makes a link going to the persons twitter page.

So for example in the above @problogger would be a link that would take you to http://twitter.com/problogger

The great thing about replies is that normally people following people are normally interested in the same things as that person. So as I said above once you have 30-50 people your following you’ll see them using @someone and you can assume 99% of the time that person is also interested in the same things so you can follow them, which takes you back to rule one. Follow and Thou Shalt Be Followed!

Easy Right?

Get in The Conversation!

Again this part has to do with @replies. A great method to getting more people to follow you is to have people talking back to you using @replies. The reason for this is because anytime someone says something to you and uses the @reply everyone that is following that person now has a link to your profile page where they can follow you!

So, again as the bold print says, make sure you get in the conversation. If you see a couple people talking about something make sure you reply and get in the conversation. By doing so, you’ll have people responding to you as well.

That wraps this little Twitter series up and I hope you found some helpful tips in these two articles. Make sure you Sign Up at Twitter if you haven’t already and then be sure to Follow Me On Twitter!

Popularity: 18% [?]

So like you’ve been reading on alot of blogs lately, everyone is really starting to get into Twitter, and just about everyone and their mom is joining. However, one thing I notice is that most others blogs are simply saying to join and then follow them.

So, I’ve decided to change that and not only invite you to join Twitter and to add me as a friend, but also show you some of the great things about using it and also some of the great tools out there to make your twitter experience more fun and productive.

Be Warned though Twitter can be very addicting… very addicting indeed!

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro blogging system. Although, I personally would consider it to be more like an IM program if you download any of the great twitter tools I’ve listed below. Anyways, Twitter allows you to post to anyone who is following you and share what your doing, share great sites you’ve found, network, etc.

One great thing about Twitter in my opinion is the fact that your messages can only be 140 characters long! This keeps people from going off on tangents and keeps everything straight to the point when your having a conversation about something.

Tools to Make Your Twitter Experience Easier – Great Twitter Tools

Now if you’ve signed up for Twitter, you have probably already made your first post using the web interface that you see once you sign into Twitter.

However, its very hard to keep track of incoming Twitters and also posting Twitters while working on your websites, reading blogs, reading forums, etc. So how can we make it easier to interact with other Twitter users?

There are several Twitter Clients that basically makes Twitter like an IM (instant messaging) program like AIM.

The first Twitter Client I want to talk about is called Twhirl. Twhirl works for both Windows computers as well as Mac OSX. This is the client I use to post and read twitters from other twitter users. Its an excellent program and in my opinion the best one for any Windows computer. Twhirl is also a free program, doesn’t cost a penny!

The second one, called Twitterrific, is only for Mac OSX. If your using a Mac computer I would recommend this one over Twhirl for the Mac. This program is also free, but unlike Twhirl, you will have ads on your program. You can however, pay $14.95 which I think is a steal to remove the ads. It also helps support further development of the product. If you can afford $14.95 its definitely worth it!

Post your Recent Blog Articles Directly to Twitter

This section covers a few tools that will automatically send a tweet via twitter whenever you make a new post on your blog. This allows you to gain exposure and traffic to your blog by people following you receiving the tweet and following the link to your site.

There are a couple tools, none better than the other in my opinion, just do it in a certain way. You decide what you need as I’m sure you’ll be happy with any of these tools!

The first tool is called Twitter Tools written by none other than Alex King. This tool will post a tweet each time you make a new blog post for all your followers to see.

Another tool that does the same thing is called WordTwit. Again it will post a tweet to twitter each time you make a new blog post.

Now, if your like me and don’t like to have a ton of plugins on your wordpress blog there is another service called Twitterfeed. You simply sign up and give them your twitter username and password and then set how often they should check your blog for a new post. If they find a new post, it will automatically get posted to Twitter.

Stay Tuned and make sure you subscribe to our Blog for when we release Part Two of Using Twitter to Raise Brand Awareness where we will be discussing how to quickly gain friends, network, and increase your brand awareness and traffic.

Popularity: 17% [?]