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.!
Lizard Wisdom responded on 06 Dec 2007 at 11:21 am #
We did try using StumbleUpon Advertising. We definitely go the visitors, but they were not quality visitors.
According to Google Analytics, those that come from StumbleUpon did not stay around very long or look at many pages. They are by far the lowest quality traffic we get.
Maybe it is that our blog is not very conducive to attracting the StumbleUpon audience. Or maybe they have a really short attention span.
Whatever it is, we have decided that while StumbleUpon is great for boosting site visitors, they are not of the quality we are looking for.
WhyDoWork responded on 06 Dec 2007 at 12:15 pm #
True enough, because the StumbleUpon system is supposed to be like flipping through channels on your TV, its not likely that many visitors will stay on your site more than a few seconds — minute.
Our graphs of avg. page views and avg. time on site did show a negative slope in Analytics, but I believe you can make up for this by acquiring the small percent of visitors that do stay and read your article to join your rss, or become repeat visitors.
Jagdu responded on 03 Apr 2008 at 12:39 pm #
I’ve never used the SU advertising. I’ve used FaceBook a little. I’ll definitely check out SU, it’s better than begging for a few votes.
maldives holidays responded on 04 May 2008 at 7:23 am #
Very good info
Ngarag Rumors responded on 07 May 2008 at 8:44 am #
I didn’t know that SU can do this. I was just wondering how effective the traffic are to your campaign.
Thanks for the info.
Ngarag Rumorss last blog post..Is Sony Really Ordered to Stop Selling Playstation Gaming Consoles in the US?
WhyDoWork responded on 07 May 2008 at 8:49 am #
@ Ngarag:
The traffic is relatively effective at bringing new RSS subscribers, but according to analytical data, most “stumblers” only end up staying on the site for between 10-30 seconds.
The power of using them for advertising is for the sheer volume you can bring if you write a compelling and short article.