The Stumble Rush Website is Live!

I’ve developed a home study course on the usage of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website. This project is the account of my progress in developing and marketing that course. The course is now LIVE, is called Stumble Rush and you can enroll right now at http://www.stumblerush.com/.

The Website is Live

Stumble Rush is the name of my StumbleUpon traffic course and I have now got a basic website up and running. It still needs a heck of a lot of work but right now I am concentrating on producing the course content so I will work on the site slowly over the coming weeks.

Even though the site is very rough around the edges I do now have an opt-in form setup (driven by Aweber) so I can start collecting the details of people who are interested in the course. It did take me a while to get my head around the Aweber settings for the list though. See, what I want to do is allow people to register their interest now even though the course won’t be ready for a while.

I want to be able to send a message to the list when the course is almost ready but once its released I want to be able to switch that list to an auto-responder sequence that starts sending the 10 basic lessons to all the people that are currently on the list, and to new people that sign up from that point onwards. I’m hoping I’ve set that up correctly!

The Stumble Rush Blog

I have included a blog on the Stumble Rush website - that is separate from this blog. There are several reasons why I have done that. Firstly, every blog post is fresh content so by putting out a short post every now and then, it lets Google know that the site has been updated. Secondly it allows people to leave their comments though I’ve also put in a contact form for that. I want to try to keep Stumble Rush stuff separate from this blog.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, having a blog will allow me to experiment with some Internet Marketing techniques. For example, I could write posts about Stumble Upon or traffic in general that are keyword focused and then experiment with social bookmarking and other link building techniques to try and get the site ranking better in the search engines. One of the things that I teach in the course itself is that you can’t drive traffic with StumbleUpon without having content. If I had left that site purely as a sales site, there is no content there.

Another technique that I intend to use is my tried and tested blog commenting strategy but this time I will be linking my name to the Stumble Rush site rather than this blog, and commenting only on posts about Stumble Upon. Of course, I’ll be sure only to leave comments of value.

Fun With Video

In an update from a few weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to be including video with the course. Since then I have been educating myself in the world of video, working through Camtasia tutorials that are in my Teaching Sells membership and I also read a pretty good free ebook called Viral Video Secrets by Len Foley.

I decided to experiment with video by recording a clip which was to accompany a blog post that I had originally intended to publish next week. The first attempt was a bit crap but I uploaded it to YouTube and sent it out via my Twitter feed to get a little bit of feedback. I then figured out how to edit it properly, add titles, music etc. Next week I’ll be publishing a blog post with a video in it, though its not the one I had originally planned to post.

So now that I know more about video, I’m actually finding it very useful to teach certain concepts from the Stumble Rush course. There are some things that are just so much easier to explain by showing with a video than by trying to document with text and screen shots. So far, I’ve created the first three parts of the basic course and there are accompanying videos with each one.

The Launch Process

I finally bought Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula and all this week I have been working through the content for module 1. I intend to put as much of this stuff to use with Stumble Rush as I can. I don’t know how much of it will be applicable though but we’ll see as I get further into the course.

For those of you who are interested in the PLF, there are 5 modules delivered on a weekly basis and each one consists primarily of a set of videos. Module 1 has 7 videos with 4 hours of content! When first released, the only content were the videos themselves but after some feedback from buyers, Jeff is now in the process of getting transcripts done which is great news for people like me who prefer to read. He has also posted up some mindmaps used in the videos and provided some copy that was given as an example. So far, I’m liking the content but I’m not into the meat of it yet so I still can’t judge it.

I wont be launching Stumble Rush until I have worked through all of the material in PLF and applied as much of it as possible / is applicable so I’m estimating that it will be released towards the end of May. I’ll have a better idea about dates, pricing etc about a month from now.

Share Your StumbleUpon Story

UPDATE: I’ve expanded this section to be more specific about what I’m looking for :-)

So far I’ve been using my own personal experiences with StumbleUpon as the basis for the course. I know there are lots of people out there who have had way more traffic than me and if that’s you I’d certainly like to hear from you, especially if your site isn’t in the Internet Marketing niche.

It would be nice to put together some case studies presenting a wide range of different sites that show how StumbleUpon has effectively driven traffic. What I am looking for is to hear from people who have already had success with StumbleUpon with an existing site. To be more specific though, I want to hear from people who are active on StumbleUpon and have had consistent results. I’m not talking about a lucky stumble that brought in one-off traffic!

If you’d like to be considered for one of my case studies then please contact me and let me know the site in question and what kind of traffic you’ve seen and we’ll take it from there. Any sites featured in a case study would obviously be publicised quite heavily.

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