How TO Run A Successful StumbleUpon Advertising Account

Long-term readers of this blog it is not a secret that I am big fan of StumbleUpon (SU). I find that SU traffic stays longer and views more pages than any other traffic source. This month I will receive more traffic from SU than from Google making me less sensitive to any algorithm changes that Google makes in the future.

Being such a SU fan I am always looking for new ways to get more traffic from the site. So when I saw that Darren Rowse at Problogger has written an article on buying StumbleUpon traffic I was very curious to see what Darren to say.

In the post Darren identified 3 ways to improve the success of your SU campaign. They are:

Make Your Content Appealing to SU users to get Organic Stumbles – While 5 cents per impression isn’t that expensive (it’s a lot cheaper than some other forms of advertising) it’s more expensive than natural traffic from SU. Your goal should be to start the campaign off with paid visitors and then let the natural voting up of content take over. To do this you need to create content that is appealing to SU users.

SU works better for some markets than others. As with any type of advertising, look at who is stumbling and visiting sites in your market and make sure that it matches your content and target audience.

Make Your Page Sticky – The other way to get extra value from a StumbleUpon advertising campaign is to get the visitors who come to your blog to come back again and become loyal readers. This is one of the biggest challenges that you’ll face with advertising using any means – but particularly on a service like StumbleUpon where users have their cursor hovering over the Stumble Button ready to surf on to the next site. Of course the best way to hook someone onto your blog is to create compelling content that they can’t live without – but also consider other ways of making them loyal readers by prominently offering subscription methods, driving people deeper into a blog.

SU visitors are notoriously sticky, but don’t take that for granted. If you develop some really good content for the SU visitor to see, you will be happier with the campaign results than if you sent the traffic to a generic page on your site.

Test and Tweak – The key with StumbleUpon is not to throw big money at a campaign straight away. Get your landing page/post ready and then set a small budget (a few dollars) to see what results you get. Once this is spent – do some analysis of how many people voted the post up and down. If there were more downs than ups you might want to change something about the post (title, add a picture/video, change your opening paragraph etc). Then run another small campaign to see what impact the changes have. Do this until you have a page that is consistently getting voted up and then turn up your budget a little. Keep in mind that you might only need to get a relatively small number of up votes before SU will start sending you organic traffic so be ready to pause your campaign once this starts to happen or you could waste your money.

Good suggestions here. When you start to drive paid SU to your site, the votes that you will receive will in turn bring organic SU visitors. So for example, you might pay $50 for 1,000 SU visitors. But those 1,000 paid visitors buy voting might bring another 1,000 free SU visitors, reducing your cost per visitor from 5 cents to 2.3 cents.

Next month we will be testing a paid SU campaign for small site and will post the results of that campaign here.