Link Soup :: Help Steven Aitchison Become a Pro-Blogger

Link Soup is your rundown of what’s hot in the blogosphere. This week’s theme is bloggers shooting for the stars.

Steven’s Going For It!

Steven Aitchison of Change Your Thoughts has written an e-book with the goal of selling 20,000 copies at £4.99 a piece in order to pay off his mortgage. If he does so, his wife will let him quit his job and become a pro-blogger!

Change Your Thoughts was one of the very first blogs I subscribed to when I decided to get involved in the blogosphere, and I was fortunate enough to get to know Steven when he and I were two of the founding members of the Positive Blog Network.

Not only is Steven an insightful and intelligent writer, but he’s an genuinely great guy! His sincerity resonates throughout everything he touches.

Steven’s e-book is a compilation of 39 of the best posts from Change Your Thoughts. At only £4.99 (roughly $10), he is practically giving it away. Most e-books are at least $20 and some are much more. Considering the amount of benefit I have already received by visiting Steven’s blog, I was happy to pay him the money.

My favorite articles are:

-Clear Your House to Clear Your Mind,
-Letting Go to Get What You Want,
-Attracting Money Into Your Life,
and of course,
-50 Best Personal Development Blogs, (because Genius Types made the list!)

If you have a blog or website, Steven is offering a 30% commission on any affiliate sales. Click here to check it out or sign up for the affiliate program.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About StumbleUpon

Maki at Dosh Dosh wrote a fantastic article called A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon.

I was absolutely blown away by the amount of detail put into this article. It’s loaded with pictures, suggestions, lists, and everything you could possibly want to know about StumbleUpon. I can’t imagine how long it took to put together.

I think that a lot of bloggers are starting to realize that StumbleUpon is a force to be reckoned with. I see it as a much more blog-friendly social site than Digg or Reddit. While other sites are dominated by social cartels, StumbleUpon seems to have a more democratic approach that allows the average blog a much greater chance of finding success.

Since StumbleUpon is built into your browser, it’s almost effortless to give a page you like a thumbs up. Many of my articles were submitted by StumbleUpon users without any promotion on my part, while trying to get people to Digg or Reddit posts is like pulling teeth.

The traffic can be huge, but there is a downside. Since StumbleUsers are “Stumbling” onto your site instead of seeking it out, they are much more likely to “bounce.”

The average number of pages visited by StumbleUpon users is usually lower than other forms of traffic, but hey, it’s a numbers game. If you get a huge amount of traffic, at least some of those people will become regular readers.

Full Disclosure

I love reading reports from bloggers about how much money they are making, and I have two great examples. Yaro Starak at Entrepreneurs-Journey broke down his earnings in his article How I Make Money Online.

He made over $6,500 online last month, and only $875 of it was from Google AdSense. Yaro seems to be the master of affiliate programs and direct ad sales.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jesper from BloggPro.com revealed all in his article titled How I made $3 From Adsense in One Month, and he did it with absolutely no apologies. I wrote a post a while ago called Don’t Apologize for Yourself, and Jesper must have been the only one that read it!

I applaud his honesty and think he will soon be making much more than 3 bucks!

That’s it for this week’s soup, have a great weekend!

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