I’ve been involved in online business long enough that I’ve tried pretty much every single form of advertising you can do on the Internet. With ad blindness on the rise, it’s up to webmasters and site owners to constantly be on the bleeding edge of innovation in order to get decent ad conversions.
Top Posts @ the WhyDoWork Blog
Before we get started, take some time to mouse over the “Top Posts” at the top left of the page. It will show how many readers have read each post. If you’re an RSS or email subscriber this means you’re going to have to actually visit the site to participate! The top three articles on this blog have all been read more than 18,000 times.
Keep in mind that all these articles are less than 3 months old and that is an amazing statistic. I credit this success entirely to StumbleUpon Ads. Well maybe my writing played a role in it, but it was StumbleUpon that was the spark to get things going.
How to Effectively Use StumbleUpon to Advertise
If you’re not sure what StumbleUpon is, take a break and check out this demo. StumbleUpon gives users a way to quickly “channel surf” the web and find sites they might not have normally visited. With their advertising program, you can pay $0.05 cents a visitor to have someone look at your page.
If a visitors gives your page or site a thumbs up, it will be shown on their homepage and it’s likely their friends on the site will see your page too. Check out this graph of a few days of my campaign:
Important things to note in the image above are the text in blue, green, and red. Blue is the number of visitors I paid for, green is the percent of visitors that gave the page a thumbs up, and red is the number of visitors who gave the page thumbs down. Ideally you want the green bar (and the number of thumbs up) to be much larger than the red.
Having users give your content a thumbs up can translate into thousands of additional visitors. With a small budget of $10 per day and choosing to advertise specific articles (instead of just whydowork.com/blog) I’ve seen some great results!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Loading ...
Your do-follow blog list is miles ahead of the second placed most popular post. Maybe it would be a good idea to do a follow-up post to get the information more up to date?
Just a suggestion! Cheers mate!
Yeah, an update for the do-follow list would be appreciated!
Have you been able to track whether those visitors brought you newsletter signups/rss followers/any income.
Traffic is nice and all, but if it’s not adding to your bottom line, isn’t it just a waste of money?
I think you make an important point about directing readers to a specific post rather than the site at large – I’d sooner click on an article about something I specifically wanted to see than a page that looks vaguely related.
Is it possible to tell the number of thumbs up and thumbs down if you don’t pay for their advertising?
Jacques has a great idea. I often read posts and would like to hear more about something a little further down the line and it rarely happens.
This kind of advertising is such a good idea- it’s pretty original, and the best part – to me – is where users can give your site the thumbs up: I think recommendations from site visitors are so important.
I think you make an important point about directing readers to a specific post rather than the site at large – I’d sooner click on an article about something I specifically wanted to see than a page that looks vaguely related.
I never would have thought that you’d used stumbleupon to get this amount of visits.
I was especially surprised about the cost of the clicks so to speak.
I’m going to look into this in the morning, thanks for the ‘head’s up’
That is intelligence, thank you very much
I joined Stumble upon for 3 months and did not get one hit !
Really great idea. i try. thanks again.
My site, MedicalSpaMD.com, is on the Do Follow list on this site. While I’ve got an active community of plastic surgeons and dermatologists, spams a problem. Every comment is vetted and anything with a link is both deleted, and reported to spamming watchgroups. Happy to have thoughtful comments but if you’re spamming, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.
“read more 18.000 times” ohh Really good
I was getting good visits once for my account. Later they disabled it.
Now I opened new account but dont get that much of visits.
Medical Spa MD – it’s good to know that they deal effectively with spam, too.
I don’t know why people think that spamming could be a successful form of advertising… it’s just going to annoy your potential customers!
thanks for the tip
Could i add some new idea?
i tried StumbleUpon but it doesnt work for me. why that?
thanks for the tip
thanks for the tip ….
I used Stumbleupon to promote my blog, but got little results – and those results were not sustained. However, I did not know of their advertising program. A big thanks for sharing this info…I think I’ll give it a try.
Excellent Post , I never had the chance to get into that , knowing somebody else had success doing this makes it easier, I wonder if they take paypal.
How sticky do you feel the stumbleupon traffic was to your site? Were you able to measure new subscribers from this traffic? I’ve tried stumbleupon in the past and have had some success. It has not dramatically increased my subscribers but I believe I have increased returning visitiors.
Side note: I tried a wordpress plugin for Stumbleupon visitors to highlight giving a thumbs up and it had the opposite effect! I deactivated the plugin quick.
Stumblers don’t tend to stick around very long. I’d say < 10% make it back.
Yes, and that’s why you must use a funnel.
Actually, the best websites aren’t those that say “come and stay here”, but those that say “come, and bring with you some more friends, too”
Even Twitter missed somehow that point. I think Google did it better, by creating “invitations” for bringing new Gmail users, so everyone thought that’s a great favor to have a Gmail account in the first place ! That means to be a marketing genius …. They played “hard to get” so everyone craved for being accepted
)
Really great, i will try. thanks again.
I wonder if they take paypal. !
They do take pay pal.
It really works.
This is some great info thanks for sharing.
I have just signed up for SU ads – currently pending approval. I’m going to try it for a month on 3 of my sites and see what happens. I never even knew about SU advertising before. At 5 cents a click it’s almost free customer acquisition.
Jacques has a great idea. I often read posts and would like to hear more about something a little further down the line and it rarely happens.