Reading this post from wellmedicated.com on how he generated 100,000 page views for not a lot of cash ($25) via Stumbleupon got me thinking about my advertising experience with this less well known service.
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking service with more than two million registered users. Many bloggers use it to drive organic traffic to their blog (see the link at the botton of this post?), but did you know stumbleupon also offers advertising?
StumbleUponAds allows you to submit a page on your blog to be shown to StumbleUpon users as they go Stumbling. The cost is $0.05 per impression so for $5 you can have 100 SU users see your page.
This makes StumbleUpon relatively cheap, and you don’t need to create an ad, just a page to send people to. You can then target your page to be shown to different categories as well as specific demographics (age, location and gender). Its not uncommon for additional stumbling to happen, and if that happens you’ll end up with more impressions than you paid for.
Choose a post that relates closely to the category and demographic of StumbleUpon users that you are targeting and that you could see becoming viral.
The key with StumbleUpon is not to spend all you budget on a campaign straight away. Get your landing page/post ready and then set a small budget to see what results you get.
Once this is spent analyse how many people voted the post up and down. If there were few ups then edit the post, and run another small campaign to see what impact the changes have. Continue to do this until you have a page that is consistently getting voted up and then increase your budget. Bear in mind that you might only need to get a relatively small number of up votes before Stumbleupon starts sending you organic traffic – keep an eye on it and be ready to pause your campaign once this starts to happen.
Hi Emma, its a great way of target marketing on a budget isn’t it! I recently tried it and it worked very well. Great blog, think i’ll sign up! Cheers, gareth.