Eli the Computer Guy

Archive for the ‘StumbleUpon’ Category

At some point yesterday a couple of pages from my blog ended up on StumbleUpon. You can see from this clip from my stats page that the resulting hits to my blog were quite significant.

This is completely free traffic that I didn’t have to do anything for.

Something to think about for SEO.  You can checkout StumbleUpon at http://www.StumbleUpon.com .

StumbleUpon is a curious service that allows users to “stumble” the web in search of websites that they might enjoy. To use the service you create an account and then install a tool bar in your web browser. The tool bar has a “stumble” button that sends you to sites that you might like. You can then give the site a thumbs up or down, and stumble again. The service tries to learn your preferences and then presents web sites that are more in line with your likes.

You can think of it like channel surfing on the Internet.

Now the interesting component for people trying to advertise their webs sites is their advertising program. When you create an account as an advertiser StumbleUpon allows you to create campaigns to target the interests of it’s users. For the campaign you are charged $.05 per hit, and you can spend as little as a dollar a day if you like.

StumbleUpon does try to make sure that your campaign is relevant to its users. When you create the campaign they have an approval process to make sure you’re not trying to foist off complete garbage on its following. The approval process takes up to 24 hours to complete, and is not guaranteed.

Once your campaign is accepted you can increase or decrease the amount you’re willing to pay per day. You can also geographically target your audience down to the city in many instances.

The short term results for this blog show that the viewers are averaging 1.5 page views per user. I spent $25 on the test run and gained 500 hits. From beginning to end it took approx. 3 hours to get the 500 new visitors.

For the short term I consider this a success. For a very reasonable amount of money I was able to drive 500 new visitors to my site. Not only do I have the benefit of more publicity, but by going through my stats I can see what posts visitors were most interested in reading. This will allow me to refine my writing so that I can improve my organic results through Google.

If you have a blog, or informational web site I would highly suggest you take a look at using StumbleUpon’s advertising service. Even if you do not receive a long term benefit from it the real world stats you can derive from a small campaign make the money well spent.

Take a look at http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

Update as of 4/1/09

Playing with StumbleUpon some more I have found that you have to use Internet Explorer in order to create a campaign.  There’s something funky with their web programming so if you try to use Chrome or Firefox the submission form will error whenever you hit submit.