If your are looking for some free traffic – look away. If you don’t mind spending a few dollars – well ten to be exact, then read on.
I have seen several services around that offer to Stumble your posts for a fee. I know one that will give you 100 individual stumbles for around four or five dollars. Trouble is, StumbleUpon soon works out that these are bought stumbles and effectively kills them, along with your post.
There is a legitimate to do it. It must be legitimate because StumbleUpon are the ones offering it. You can buy from StumbleUpon extra traffic at the rate of five cents per view – if you like, five cents per click. That is a bit cheaper than Adsense and many others. It is not keyword targeted like Adsense however. You can target an audience based on age, gender and category.
What does make this interesting is the possible viral nature of this offer. StumbleUpon will show a page to say 200 different individuals for the cost of $10.00. They are shown under normal stumble conditions so if the viewer thumbs it up, it stays live in the free section as well. The more thumbs up you get, the longer it stays in the system.
I tried it out several days ago to see what sort of response I got. From 200 paid views, I ended up with over 500 actual views extra on the day – nearly all from StumbleUpon. That is over 300 more than I paid for. The following day I received around 150 extra visitors so it hung around a little longer than the one day.
You can buy the traffic and set daily limits so it is spread over several days – not just surging on the one day.
Are there any benefits to this for extra traffic. The negatives first. Did I get any extra subscribers? Four. I cannot say if this was from the natural traffic or the stumbled. Did I make any extra income – about $4.00 – again from natural or stumble – I do not know.
The upside. My Alexa rank is now the best it has ever been. The daily rank go to 67,000. The average is now down to 114,000 (a drop from 127,000) – at this rate I may break through that coveted 100,000 mark.
As I did not set any targets it is hard to know if I gained much apart from the extra traffic. Is it worth the ten buck? That is hard to say. However, to see my traffic spike up as it did was quite interesting. With targeted traffic you may get much better results when it comes to subscribers and revenue.
I think the real key is to wait until you have a real top notch article (post) that is stumble worthy. If you then target the article to the correct category, age and gender and perhaps spread the paid stumbling over a couple of days, the end result may be quite good. It is certainly good for the ego to see all that extra traffic. The article I selected was not great but it certainly got some traffic. Is this for everyone? Probably not unless you are prepared to wait for the right post.
It was an interesting experiment and of course, completely above board.
that’s really interesting! thanks for sharing it
I stumbled the walk the walk post, faved it to Technorati and put it on del.icio.us yesterday. I may have messed up your experiment.
CyberCelt: It wasn’t that post. But since doing the experiment my traffic has stayed up by around 150 so either it is still lingering, or some of the stumblers are coming back, or I have just been lucky. Either way, I am not complaining. Some times a blog needs a little push and the momentum keep it going for a while. The weekend is always a quiet time for me traffic wise so it will be interesting to see how the numbers stack this weekend.
Thanks for your comment.
cheers = les
Hey sir, the post I made today on feed flare is getting some great responses, where do I find the link in stumble to do this.
Oh ya, wicked post man great job.
Hi Collin
here is the link: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/
That’s interesting. I’ve tried the sponsored stumbleupon and didn’t get anything over what stumbleupon sent me. What percentage liked it?