Some of you will have heard of this, some not, but I’ve started fiddling with a new method of driving cheap paid traffic to my sites, both niche related and IM focused.
In fact some reading this may even have found this site by the following means…
You’ll all know about the social network Stumbleupon.com.
Basically it’s users install a toolbar in their browsers and when they want information about a certain thing, they select that category and hit this stumble thing, and a random site from the stumbleupon network loads in their browser.
The sites in the stumbleupon network come from other people seeing blog posts and websites and submitting them to stumbleupon – you’ll have seen icons like STUMBLE THIS under blog posts, like here on my blog. As a site owner you can get extra traffic just by encouraging people to ‘stumble’ your site.
ANYWAY, that’s the background but that’s not actually the method I’m talking about today.
There is also a paid advertising system on stumbleupon.com.
The way it works is that you pay a certain fee per impression – not an impression of your AD but an impression of your SITE – you pay for a visit in other words, similar to PPC.
You can pre pay for a certain number of visits, after which your site gets automatically put into the stumbleupon network as though someone had submitted it (so it seems natural, not forced and ‘advertisey’ at all)
So when those users go to your category and hit stumble, stumbleupon makes sure your site comes up as many times as you’ve paid for!
Oh and the best part – it only costs 5c per visitor!! No $10 per click crap like Adwords.
So basically it’s a way to drive traffic to your site for 5c a visitor – if your sales systems are setup well, that should be enough for you to make a good return on anyway…
But it gets SO much better than that.
You pay for these visits right… Then your page loads when the users click their stumble buttons…
Now when the users see a site, if they like it, they can choose to give it a thumbs up.
After that, it’s like digg.com and all the other networks, the more thumbs up it gets, the more people see it. If it gets enough positive ratings, it gets to the front page of certain categories on the stumbleupon and you’re in for MEGA traffic.
Not only that but alot the users on stumbleupon also use other social networks so getting a heap of stumbles can also lead to a lot of diggs, reddits and so on and so forth.
In other words, the amount you pay for visits on stumbleupon has the potential to start a massive viral tidal wave of traffic to your site.
Try doing that with Adwords…
Now if you’re going to do this there are a few things you should do to prepare/be aware of:
1. If you don’t have good content, you needn’t bother – the thing about user driven communities like this is that anything subpar just won’t survive. People clicking that stumble button are used to seeing content that other people have seen and submitted already, ie it’s probably pretty high quality or else it wouldn’t be there. If your site doesn’t have some good content you’ll waste your time.
2. Before you do it, get yourself a stumbleupon button. This is a plugin for wordpress that’s very easy to setup and allows people to stumble your posts after they’ve hit your site. The more stumblers that submit your posts, the more traffic you get and the more chance you have at creating that viral traffic effect.
3. Remember the goal of using this type of advertising is to convert as many of the stumblers as possible into ongoing readers and maybe later buyers if that’s how your site’s setup. You need to have a prominent feed subscription icon, list subscription icon, or features that encourage the stumbler to interract (posting comments if it’s a blog etc). An article with a click here to buy this product won’t cut it.
4. Test it gradually. You can start a campaign and choose to add as much funding as you like. You can also choose your daily balance – how much money per day you want to spend. Start small and watch your site stats closely. How many visitors are you getting (check your traffic stats too), how many opt ins, click throughs, and whatever else you’re trying to achieve. From there you can adjust your advertising as to how it’s working. If you’re converting, pile on the stumbles, if not, drop it back or give it up – test, test, test.
I hope that’s enough for you to both decide whether this might be a profitable source of new traffic for you and if so, make a start with it immediately.
I can tell you that so far it’s been great value for money from my tests but I’m still working on making tweaks to pull in more readers from the traffic, get the users to stumble more to create the viral effect and so on.
Oh and by the way – if this was valuable to you, don’t forget to ‘stumble’ it with the link below 
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Hello, interesting post. I just watched a video released by stompernet about social media traffic and it had some eye popping numbers in it. But today I read a post by Aaron Wall on the SeoBook Blog that made me think. Here is the link: http://www.seobook.com/can-you-trust-marketing-statistics
The problem I have with Stumble traffic is that most of it is general traffic instead of targeted traffic. A Stumble looks great for the daily visitors stats but rarely have I seen it convert to purchases or even ad clicks.
I just purchased Article Speed Writing and Niche Marketing On Crack and I have to say I am very impressed with them. I can actually churn out articles regularly in under 30 minutes and submitting them to the article sites will generally take me longer than the actual writing of the article. I am currently using the speed writing methods to establish a new site and am hoping to see results on it fairly soon.
Thanks for the great blog and I look forward to more posts.
Chad,
The thing about using the paid stumbleupon advertising is that you can select a category that people will reach your site through. For example for this blog, I can ask for people who are stumbling through the online marketing category only to see my site – THOSE are targetted visitors.
As for using the traffic, sure you’re not going to make a direct sale but the idea with this kind of traffic is to grow your reader base and increase exposure to your site. You have to convert viewers to readers then maybe someday readers to customers.
J Reed, thanks for the link, I’ll check it out. You don’t have the link to the stomper net video do ya?
Cheers,
Andrew
Insanely untargeted
Hi Andrew,
Good post. Here is the stomper net video link you asked for, just happened to have it in my clipboard as I was reading
http://www.stompernet.net/gn2/
The video is great and well worth the time (it is a long video, almost an hour in length)
Actually anyone reading this post later should be aware that link may have a different video by the time you visit, they always use the same link for their videos and show the most recent one by default. There is a little button at the bottom right of the video that pops a list of all previous videos, they are all good and worth the time…
Regards,
Brad
Hi Andrew, here’s the link to the stomper net video http://www.stompernet.net/gn2/
There is an excellent stumble upon tutorial on Dosh Dosh blog, google it.
Franck.
Hi Andrew,
I think it may be a good idea to take a look at the Stomper (Very Funny) Video and then come back to your Stumble idea.
I think the video also qualifies your point about not selling but giving (Very good Content) and then seeing the traffic flow back from social recommendations.
Good luck with the tests
Richard
How does this reconcile with other “expert” research?
e.g. Aaron Wall\’s piece found here > http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/01/08/what-is-social-media-traffic-worth
Hey Andrew,
I remember seeing this when I signed up for StumbleUpon but never tried it out. I agree with you that it’s not something you’d use for a typical sales letter site. Are you doing any kind of tracking at all? It would be an interesting case study to see what these visitors turn into. For example, with this blog, you may get more visitors but do you know if that increase is increasing your viewership, newsletter sign ups,etc. Do you see what I’m getting at? In other words, do you know what percent of StumbleUpon visitors become repeat visitors, newsletter subscribers, product buyers? Would that be possible to track with a hight quality tracking software like Kaizen Track?
Gregg
Gregg,
You’re totally right mate, and so far I’m only in the beginning stages of testing, certainly nothing conclusive yet.
As for how targetted it is? It depends on how you define targetted. If my site is on pets and I’m getting people from the pets category, that’s at least somewhat targetted in my eyes.
Are they buying traffic? Probably very few, just the same as if I got Search Engine traffic from the term Pets, or PPC traffic for Pets – it’s harder to convert it. You have to be smart with where you’re advertising and what pages you’re sending people to.
Anyway, here’s another interesting article on it at problogger:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/08/18/more-on-advertising-on-stumbleupon/
For me, 5c clicks that are ‘kind of’ targetted and have the other benefits mentioned above is worth having a play with – not saying it’s the best advertising method in the world (and in fact maybe the subject of this post is a bit strong haha) but if you can work it right, I believe you can benefit.
Andrew
Exactly Andrew!
At the end of the day it isn’t going to cost you a lot.
You’ll have a good idea of whether or not it’s working after a few hundred visitors which will only cost you a few bucks!
Hey Andrew,
Thanks for the response. I agree it’s worth testing. One thing I’ve been guilty of with my online business is not tracking things enough.
If I were to do this, I would send the traffic to my blog like you mentioned. On my blog I have my sign up form for my newsletter as well as links to my own products (my main business is non-IM).
The problem for me is that I wouldn’t know, ultimately, if any of the traffic that ended up monetized was from StumbleUpon.
If my only monetization model was a pay per click like adsense or YPN or Kontera, etc. you could figure out in a minute or two if the increased income outpaces the traffic you are paying for.
I have none of these programs on my blog. I only have my own products and a few others I recommend as an affiliate so it’s much harder to track.
Thanks for the problogger article. I hadn’t seen that!
Gregg
Thanks Andrew , I hadn’t a clue about this. And thanks all the others on this comment thread for their contributions to my education!