Wes Cutshall

If you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then you’re missing out on something awesome. StumbleUpon is a website discovery engine. You tell it what you’re interests are and it shows you sites you should like. You then “stumble” through a collection of websites by clicking a “stumble” button, over and over, viewing different websites – often for hours. Add all the standard voting and sharing options you would expect and you have StumbleUpon. A social, viral, website discovery engine. Getting a website to be popular in StumbleUpon has been compared to the Digg effect. If you run websites, you absolutely want to be stumbled.

What is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery?

Just like getting to the top of Digg, it’s not easy to get a high volume of stumbles. If you’re launching a new website, or simply need to boost traffic to an existing website, StumbleUpon offers a creative form of advertising called Paid Discovery. Paid Discovery simply means that StumbleUpon shows “sponsored” sites in some of the stumble slots, based on user’s “interests.” StumbleUpon sets aside 5% of stumbles to use for Paid Discovery.

When you set up a Paid Discovery campaign you choose (optionally) the interests and demographics you want to target for your stumbles. As your campaign runs, StumbleUpon users will be presented with your full website as they stumble. Most users will not notice that your website is a sponsored site even though StumbleUpon does mark each paid stumble as “sponsored.” If you have a website that “people just have to see” then StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is for you. Especially if you are launching a new concept that users aren’t yet Googling for.

My Experience with Paid Discovery

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a great way to try to get your website to go viral. This is the exciting part about Paid Discovery. If users, while viewing your paid stumble, “like” your site, you can earn free stumbles. If your website is popular enough you can even earn thousands of free visitors in one day. In a recent campaign Timeline Collage received 1,600+ free stumbles in a day while only paying for two hundred. Enough of the paid users “liked” Timeline Collage that we got over a thousand free views of our website. This happened twice over a 5-day test period. I have not been able to find an explanation on StumbleUpon of exactly what it takes to get free stumbles. When I contacted the Paid Discovery twitter account they replied to my query with a generic link that doesn’t go into much detail about the formula for getting free stumbles. In my experience the social interactions on StumbleUpon, in relation to your site, can result in large amounts of free stumbles when using Paid Discovery. As expected, the more viral your concept is the more likely it is to receive free traffic on StumbleUpon. Conversely, the less viral your concept the “more” you’re going to pay to get traffic from StumbleUpon.

Conclusion

There are a few options and features within Paid Discovery that I’m not covering here, such as the option to choose a “serving priority” that can affect your stumble price from $0.05 per stumble up to $0.25 per stumble. If you’re even slightly interested in Paid Discovery I suggest you sign up for an account and start a campaign to see what your options are. I expect over time StumbleUpon will be tweaking Paid Discovery to make it even more useful to those of use who are always launching websites.

Full Tilt Poker has an affiliate system that allows you to get paid on new player registrations. I won’t get into the affiliate payout structure in this blog, but it can be profitable to be an affiliate if you can successfully convince players to register and deposit money on Full Tilt. This blog post is specifically dedicated to one of Full Tilt’s affiliate tools, the private affiliate tournament. I ran into some issues when I tried to create my first tournament so I thought it would be helpful to share some information that you can’t find on the Full Tilt affiliate website.

Tournaments as an Affiliate Tool

The concept behind the private affiliate tournaments is that you can offer a private tournament that you can advertise on your website. Affiliates can use this tournament to entice players to register on Full Tilt in order to play in their special tournament. Because your goal as an affiliate is to get new players to sign up, one of the best ways to use tool is to offer a freeroll tournament where you fund the prize pool. This will entice new players to register with intentions of playing in your tournament with no risk. After they have a good time playing in your tournament the hope is that they consider depositing money in order to play in other tournaments hosted by Full Tilt. This is where you can start to make money as an affiliate.

Create Tournament

After you create a Full Tilt affiliate account you can request an affiliate tournament through the affiliate console. Simply sign in and click the Online Marketing > Tournament Request menu item. You have a few options when requesting the tournament such as game type (Texas Hold’Em, Omaha, etc) , Turbo/Non-turbo, 6-max, etc. This part of the setup is straight forward. If you are hosting a freeroll be sure to click “Money Added” and enter your Full Tilt username. You will need to have the amount in your account at the time that Full Tilt gets your request. Be sure to click “freeroll” or else the tournament will need a buy-in amount. After you have requested a tournament and are contacted by Full Tilt you will have a decision to make. Choosing a registration format is where the headaches began for me.

3 Tournament Registration Options

Tournament ID and Password

Full Tilt offers affiliates 3 ways players can register for private tournaments. The first option is a tournament ID and password that you share with your potential players. This sounds like a very secure option but I assure you it is not. I found out the hard way that there are websites dedicated to listing nothing but freeroll tournament ID’s and passwords. Players (or someone else?) leak tournament details to these websites and you can have hundreds or thousands of uninvited players register in your tournament. Since you can’t make money off of already registered Full Tilt players, this is not what you want as an affiliate. I don’t recommend this option for registration as it seems to have a large hole in the security. My first tournament had 500 (what was set as the max) players register overnight before I could even fully advertise the freeroll to my potential players. I’m not sure who leaked the information, but the first registration process definitely didn’t go as I had planned. Luckily I was able to have Full Tilt recreate the tournament with a different registration method. The Full Tilt support was good but most responses took 24-36 hours.

Affiliate ID Registration

Full Tilt offers a method of registration tied to your affiliate ID. This sounds like a great feature, but it’s implemented in a way that makes it not very useful. Since this type of registration is web-based, I assumed that only players who had clicked my banner ad, and therefore were assigned my affiliate ID in their cookies, would be able to register. This would prevent tournament ID and password scraping on other websites since the way these websites work is that they have their own affiliate ID’s that they are trying to push with their list of stolen ID’s and passwords. But, this is not what this type of registration is. Affiliate ID registration instead restricts the registration to only players who were associated with your affiliate ID when they signed up with Full Tilt. So this tournament can only reward people who have already signed up for Full Tilt after clicking your banner ad. Although it would be great to be able to fill up a tournament with 100% newly registered players, offering a freeroll tournament only to people who are willing to set up new accounts probably won’t show much success. I feel that it can be much more successful if you offer a freeroll to anyone affiliated with your website and just hope that a percentage of these players will have to register in order to play. Host a tournament that appears to be a reward for a long relationship with your website instead of looking like an out-right sales attempt.

Username Registration

The most secure method for registering players for your affiliate tournament is for you provide a list of Full Tilt usernames to the Full Tilt private tournament support staff. You will have to collect usernames and email them at least 24 hours prior to the tournament. Luckily when you request an affiliate tournament the staff does contact you through email so you will then have a way to contact them if you have any questions, or when it is time to supply your player username list. This is the registration method I now use because of all the problems I had with the other methods. If you can, send the list in a full week early so that any mistyped usernames can be discovered and corrected before the tournament.

Suggestions

The affiliate tournament request form allows you to request a standard tournament where players pay their own entry free or a freefoll tournament that is funded by your Full Tilt account. I can see how a website or business with tens of thousands of dedicated fans could run a monthly tournament where players are expected to fund their own buy-in. Maybe this is related to some type of poker league, or maybe a special bounty on an individual is offered each time in order to entice players. For most websites they will have to offer a freeroll tournament in order to get people to play in their special tournament. With the availability of tournaments at any stakes on Full Tilt you’re going to have to offer something special in order to get players to play in your game. I suggest putting a bounty on yourself and advertising this bounty to your players. Since your goal is to get new sign ups, and not necessarily to win the tournament, offer a $100 bounty for whoever can knock you out of the tournament – encouraging all players to gun for you. Find a creative way to inform your players of your Full Tilt username that they will need in order to gun for you. I recommend integrating Facebook “likes” in order to reveal your username so that you can get dual benefit from this tournament. Not only do you get a chance to sign up players for your affiliate account, but you can increase your website exposure through a bunch of new “likes” in your Facebook page from people looking for your username. You’ll need to learn a little bit about Facebook development to implement a fans-only tab, but it’s not that hard.

Thanks to Stumbleupon, I discovered this service about a week ago. ClickTale utilizes JavaScript cursor position (X/Y coordinate) tracking to generate both website user interaction “videos” and interaction maps for your website. Where Analytics can tell you a navigation path (page A, then page B, then page C), ClickTale can show you exactly what a user did on a page in between the clicks. You can replay a user’s visit to your website. You see the content of your website with a cursor moving over the site just as the user navigated the website. You can see mouse movement, clicks, page scrolling, and in some cases the characters that were typed into form fields (this only works on some recordings, so I assume it’s browser or OS-dependent, the majority of recordingss showed “?” instead of the exact character) in real time. This service can be very useful for solving website interaction issues, some that you don’t even know you have.

If your conversion rate is low you can see exactly where users quit using your registration or order form. If only JavaScript could also record audio it would be just like being there (“Ahh, too expensive.” <exit>). I tested ClickTale on Naming Force and found it very intriguing to watch people using the website. I focused on users who visited the New Assignment page. You can narrow down the recordings to view users who viewed a certain page, among other parameters. The recordings start as the users entered the website, so you get to see how they navigated to the page in question, as well as what they did on that page.

One of the most shocking things I saw was that most of the users scrolled all the way down the home page, when the home page was the site entry point. With so much talk about Above the Fold I was a bit surprised that the content was engaging enough that most of the users scrolled down the whole home page before using any of the navigation items. Pleasant surprise. As far as conversions on the New Assignment page, I haven’t yet found anything that has lead me to modify the form. Many users visit the page briefly without scrolling, which shows that they simply are checking the site out without much interest in submitting an assignment (yet). Very few users started to fill out the form only to exit the page. Of the users that started to fill out the form and then exited, most of them (less than a handful with my small one-week sample size) seemed to do so after viewing the (very affordable) prices. This has brought up the question of whether the package options should be moved to the top of the page, but in regards to conversions, I don’t see how this would matter one way or the other. The only interface change that has been made at this point due to watching ClickTale videos happened to be on a somewhat unimportant page. But, it revealed some interesting UI issues. Naming Force has a Random Name Generator for users to use. It consists of a large white box with a button underneath. You click the button, repeatedly, to generate random names that appear inside the white box. I watched one user visit this page and click 20-30 times inside the white box, in various spots, never clicking the bright orange button underneath, only to (I assume, frustratingly) leave the page. So, I added “click button below” inside the white box, as somehow it wasn’t obvious to at least one person. Hopefully I’ll find enhancements I can make to some of the more important pages based on these interaction videos.

One of the other features of ClickTale is the Heatmaps. Heatmaps take all the data collected, mouse move, click, scroll, etc and chart them on an overlay of your website. This gives you an idea of where people are concentrating their focus on your pages. Mouse move and click are pretty straight forward, you can see a heatmap of the most concentrated areas (see image below). Scroll reach is another heatmap that might need some explanation. This heatmap maps the percentage of users who scrolled down where the part of the page was in the browser window. This is where the Above the Fold theory can be tested for your site without watching hundreds of videos.

Mouse Move and Scroll Reach Heatmaps

Overall the ability to record user mouse movement and play it back is pretty incredible. The only problem I see with ClickTale is that the prices are a bit unrealistic for the majority of us smaller website owners. In order to view details for pages that are not my top URL on Naming Force, for example, I had to sign up for the subscription that is $290 / month. I don’t see myself continuing this service past a month, which is a real shame for ClickTale. I’d happily pay $30-$50 a month, but I can’t find $290 worth of modifications to make each month to make the subscription worth sticking with. I feel like this service’s business model should be to get users to sign up for an insignificant amount and allow them to “forget” that they have the subscription, or technically just to not care enough to cancel it and allow it to recharge them for years. Users won’t want to cancel a $50/month subscription, just in case they want to look through the collected data in the future, and ClickTale could make a lot more through long-term subscriptions, IMO.

As the owner for NamingForce.com (a website that allows entrepreneurs to get business name ideas) I often read descriptions of startup website concepts. From time to time, as Naming Force was getting started, I would receive an email suggesting that Naming Force should allow for more space to enter a product/website description. It was my response that if they couldn’t explain their service in 150 characters their was a problem with how they were explaining their product/service to the public. Although I eventually broke down and increased the text box length for website descriptions, I still believe that if you cannot explain your concept in under 150 characters, you have a problem. It’s important to be able to explain, usually in one sentence – or just a few words, what your website does.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with numerous members of the press about Fido Finder. I’ve found it important to be able to quickly explain the concept of the website at the very beginning of an interview in order for the media to understand the concept and subsequently ask the right questions. Although in it’s complete definition, Fido Finder is “a website that allows people to search and register lost and found dogs and receive email updates about newly added dogs that match” this isn’t an easily understandable explanation, and from a marketing standpoint it’s not very “sticky.”  What works much better is “a lost and found dog classifieds system.” Now, Fido Finder does much more than offer a static classifieds system, but that’s where the rest of the conversation fills in the blanks. In it’s simplest form the website is a newer version of a lost/found dog classified ad. Everyone understands this concept, and it’s a “sticky” explanation that can be understood and explained friend-to-friend, very easily.

If you’re working on a startup, or have already released your website, make sure that you have a short, canned, explanation of what your website does. Be sure to use this same explanation any time you first introduce the concept to people. Continually tweak the definition as time goes by, as industry terms and the public’s understand of them often changes through the course of a startup’s life. Although “cloud”, “crowd”, “social”, and “smart” are terms that potential customers know now, they didn’t start that way.

I usually use FedEx for shipping but have the occasional need to send regular mail. Stamps are a pain to keep around (never have them when I need them) so I looked into Stamps.com. It turns out to be a pretty awesome product. I ship “media kits” for Fido Finder / Tabby Tracker which include t-shirts and business cards, and sometimes counter-top displays, and FedEx had been my main method of shipping. With Stamps.com I can print sticker labels to put on boxes that I drop off at the Post Office. I haven’t compared apples to apples but some of the remote locations that I ship to can get expensive for a small 3 pound box, and I know that USPS can get it there cheaper (since I’m never in a rush). The use of FedEx was always a marketing thing, as people consider FedEx packages more important, but for customer-requested mail outs I plan on switching to using Stamps.com.

Stamps.com run as an application on your PC. You can purchase and print stamps right from your desktop. You can print directly onto envelopes or you can print onto special label sheets. If you order label sheets and print your stamps on them, then you’ll be paying more than the price of stamp, but the convenience can save you enough time that most people won’t ever miss the few bucks they lose on purchasing stamp sheets. The sheets come in a variety of kinds, which is one of the most interesting features of Stamps.com. The simplest sheet just prints slightly larger than normal stamps. Plain black and white with a 3D barcode. Then there are special sheets where you can get custom graphics for your stamp. Even better than those is the label and stamp combination sheet that comes with a shipping label sticker and return sticker / stamp. Print all 3 on one page and remove the stickers to place on your package.

The software is well (enough) done and easy to figure out. The sheets come with Serial Numbers to aid in printing the right stamps and you purchase stamps via the application. I was really impressed with the application and what it could do for me even though I rarely mail. Maybe if I mailed more it wouldn’t be so fun, but it works great for those of us that don’t like to run to the grocery store just to mail in a bill or send out a handful of 1099′s.

I’ve been chosen to be a Webby Awards judge this year. The Webby’s are the Oscars of the Internet. In 2007 Fido Finder was nominated for an award in the Best Web Services category of the Webby Awards, and because of this selection I was chosen to participate in this year’s voting. It was an honor to be nominated in 2007 and it’s an honor to be a judge and help to award top websites with a Webby. I won’t reveal what categories I will be judging but I will be participating in judging in 9 categories. Good luck to all those competing this year for a Webby Award.

I just finished reading the book Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.

Before I give my review I want to share how I discovered this book, because it’s a lesson in marketing all on its own. I was watching a Jake and Amir video with a character that I had not seen before. The guy was energetic and polished and the skit was funny. I was curious who this guy was, but wasn’t going to spend any time Googling him. The next day, and this is where my memory fails me, I saw something about Gary Vaynerchuk and his new book “Crush It”. I realized that was the guy in the video, and now the whole skit conversation made sense. I watched the video again, and then saw a “related video” that was a video review of Gary’s book. I watched the review and he gave it a good rating. Later that day someone I know on Facebook said they just got done reading Crush It and that they really liked it and it was going to change how they did business. That was enough for me to order the book and see if there was anything in it that I could incorporate into my business. It was an interesting series of events that lead to me buying the book, which I would have to argue proves the point of some of the things Gary says in the book.

I’ll start my review by disclaiming that I’m definitely not the perfect market for this book. I didn’t purchase the book for the reason that the book was written. I have a successful business, I’m not trying to turn a passion of mine into a new venture, I’ve already done that. Having said that, I still felt that the book was rather weak when it comes to giving people help in starting their crushing new venture. Most of the book is spent convincing you that you can make money off of your passion, instead of telling you how you can do this. Even when Gary does talk about how, it’s mostly pretty vague.

So what did I like? Gary made some very good points about using social networking sites to expand your personal brand (or your business brand). His book discusses creating your personal brand, but it’s easy enough to see how you can extrapolate that into your business brand. Before reading the book I wasn’t really on board with using sites like Twitter to do anything. I knew people used it, it just wasn’t for me. I use Facebook but mostly just to see what other people are up to. I had read some tweets of poker pros during the 2009 WSOP and found that most of them used Twitter too poorly to be worth my time. But Gary’s point is that you can build your brand by engaging in conversations that are related to your passion. Not just by posting links to your site. If you sell flower arrangements you can have conversations online with people who love flowers. Through these conversations, and profile links back to your site, you can expand your brand and increase your coverage. You become someone who people recognize on forums, blog comments, and Twitter feeds. This did lead me to realize how Naming Force could use Twitter to update users (and anyone else watching) when naming assignments get upgraded to larger awards, and how this would be better than just emailing registered users. The social sharing aspect of sites like Twitter increases the power and value of your message. Now I can acquire new users on Naming Force because their friends are following us on Twitter, and they start following us on Twitter – and using the website.

The book also drove me to finally use this domain name for something. I always thought I could probably find some good topics to blog about, but the book showed me I had a reason to do so. You don’t have to answer the question, “Who cares what I have to say?” you just have to realize that you have things to say on topics that individuals are interested in. That in itself can lead to you expanding your personal brand, and your business brand(s).

In the course of developing my business I’ve had only a few things that I haven’t been able to do on my own. I encourage small business owners to do as much as they can by themselves to reduce costs. There is nothing hard or complicated about submitting a trademark application to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Before I started my business I assumed that getting a trademark was both hard and complicated. I now have 5 trademarks for different websites and each one I submitted online without much work or knowledge. The process is pretty simple, you submit your name, choose the category for your trademark, enter some other details, and pay your fees. Sometimes, after submitting, you might be contacted by a law office working for the government that usually wants to clarify your classification. The classification is what your business will be using the trademark for, such as something like “personal computers and personal computer accessories.” Usually, at least in my experience, you just have to authorize them to change or update the categorization of your trademark. After the initial trademark submission you’re about 3 months away from getting your trademark registered. When you’re done you’ll get an official certificate for your trademark.

In some scenarios you might need a trademark in other countries. I’ve had two different experiences with this.

After I found someone in the UK using one of my trademarks in a domain name I decided to secure the trademark in that country in order to help me secure the domain name at a later date. Luckily the UK is part of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In layman’s terms the WIPO allows you to extend a trademark from your home country into another country, without submitting a trademark in that country. So you do not have to set up a business in that country, or hire a firm in that country, in order to get a trademark in that country. This process was also done 100% online, and in the end I received the trademark and eventually acquired the domain name after the owner abandoned it (I had encouraging him to give up the domain, which he refused to do, but then he didn’t renew it).

A similar scenario came up with a domain name in Canada. With help from a legal team (this kind of stuff I do outsource – usually because I’ve failed on my own) I was able to convince the domain name owner to turn over the domain. After attempting to transfer the domain I discovered that Canada’s domain names (.ca extension) work quite differently than our own domains. In Canada you can only get a domain name if you own a business registered in Canada, or have a trademark in Canada for the words in the domain. Also, Canada requires that your either have a business with a physical address in Canada or hire a company with a physical address in Canada to be your agent in order to register a trademark. This sounded like a real pain, but in the end I was able to find a law firm to represent me, submit a trademark application for the word mark, then transfer the domain using the submitted trademark serial number in my registration. Receiving the official trademark was just a formality as I mostly wanted the domain name.

In the end it was all worth the effort and saved me thousands of dollars.

A year ago this month I made the big jump. I had been working as a web application developer, and occasional graphic designer, for 11 years. I had written web-based applications for Conoco, Dupont, Shell, Texaco, Pennzoil, and Dow Chemical, among other lesser known companies. In 2004, after inspiration from Mark Cuban’s not very successful TV show, I developed my first website commodity. Mark asked the viewers, “Are you a dreamer, or a doer?” I was a dreamer, but wanted to be a doer. I had had many ideas in my life but never pursued any of them. Not too long before watching the show I had had an idea that was worth doing. The idea was FidoFinder.com, and to this day is my favorite and most well-known website. 4 years and 4 more websites (1 – 2 – 3 – 4) later, I was financially ready to stop working for someone else and be my own boss. Convincing my wife was another story.

The best advice I received was to discover what circumstances had to be present for my wife to be as comfortable as she possibly could be with me leaving the security of a full-time job. For her it was mostly financial, and we had to have a backup plan. She believed in me, but she didn’t trust that something couldn’t happen to disrupt the websites income. For all you poker players, she felt we were basically in a coin flip race. We’ve got pocket Queens and failure has Ace King.  It seemed like the longest 6-8 months that it took to let the business continue to build before we had met the self-inflicted requirements for us both to be comfortable with turning our backs from the hand that had fed us for many years. I was ready, but I know Leslie felt sick to her stomach when she thought about it, even if it was the “most” secure she was going to feel with the idea.

So one year later, and 2 more websites (1 – 2) in the portfolio, I’ve never second-guessed the decision. Of course, not having to get up at regular hours, drive in Houston traffic (an hour each way at just about every job I had), or meet deadlines makes the decision seem even smarter. Although there are things I miss about the job I left, in the end I don’t know anyone that would give up the work environment I have. So today I’m celebrating (roughly) a year or working for myself…and never looking back.