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We would like to welcome our newest sponsor TNX.net one of the fastest growing text link brokers on the net at the moment.

Many of you will already be familiar with TNX from their Digital point thread offering free text link ads. But for those who are not their service they are a traditional text link broker offering advertisers a way to affordable get their links on multiple web sites indeed they go so far as to claim for as low as $11 a month you may get up to 10,000 static links to your website!

Like many link brokers TNX are concerned with Google recent and highly talked about Paid Link war, though they believe they have a series of tools that will help even the most paranoid person out there. Sadly for publishers they still use Google PageRank for their many metrics something that I suspect they will be changing very soon.

Finally for all those of you interested in cashing in a different way TNX have an affiliate program, this system is based around their TNX Points but can be cashed in, in a variety of ways and are worth checking out if you are looking to diversify particularly if you also want to use their advertising services.

Why don’t you think about becoming a community friend its a great way to reach out just like tnx.net have done. So everyone please welcome TNX Payment Blogger latest community friend.

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We recently discussed a simple way to get highly targeted traffic through Stumbleupon based on stumble ads, well Stumbleupon is not the only Social Media site offering this level of targeting Facebook is also offering targeted advertising.

Walled Gardens

At first glance Facebook is offering just another PPC service for advertisers and while the rates are currently cheap they will no doubt rise quickly. So why is advertising on Facebook a good idea for affiliate marketers?

Facebook is a huge walled garden full of unsuspecting people easy pickings for a marketer at least it is at the moment, Facebook Ads launched yesterday and since then 100,000 ‘ad pages’ have been created an ad page is the free part of Facebook ads, its the second part we are interested in. However this says that we are not alone in seeing the pickings in the garden and to get maximum benefit you will need to work fast.

Getting your Mini Site ready

Lets take a simple example site (please note unlike the Stumbleupon post I’m still testing and have no accurate figures) same principle as before, aim it at British males in there late teens early 20s with the same style submit and site. For more information on the case study see the previous post.

If your lucky you already have several of these style sites ready to go and maybe you were testing Stumbleupon ads. If not get going I know I spent some money but even with $50 or less you can get up a half decent site.

Setting up a campaign

So lets get going, Like the Stumbleupon ads we want to geo-target as our Email submit is also geo-targeted. We also want to define a gender and age range, though we are less worried about picking subject matter this time as we will be writing an actual ad.
Getting an ad up is a 4 stage affair

1) Provide a URL of the site or page to send users to, notice you can also choose to target Facebook pages as.

2) Target users, selecting location, gender, etc notice you can also define right down to if they are in college and year shame its very Americanised so is not really helpful for us

3) Create an advert, if you have ever done any PPC you will know the deal, the important difference is Social actions, by clicking this you can create handles which have the potential to bring indirect traffic also notice you can attach an image, hmm I wonder what we will use?

4) Select if you want to run a PPC or impression campaign, again this should be familiar to anyone who has used any PPC before, bidding is currently very low but expect it to shoot up.

Start the campaign off, job done your bringing in highly targeted traffic I would at least while the prices low pay purely for PPC. Facebook has opened a huge door and no doubt the price will shoot up very quickly if you can be an early adopter then this is a huge opportunity.

What’s been your experience with Facebook ads, have you previously used Facebook flyers? which converts better for you?

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Well when Google took over Feedburner we expected them to start integrating Adsense pretty quickly and so guess what happened we were right.

What’s more its not just being restricted to existing Feedburner users with advertising but everyone even me as seen above, so will I be enabling it?

urgh no

Feed readers are your loyal readers they regularly visit your site at least in theory so should I attempt to monetize them? Its an interesting question but actually irrelevant to my reason for not activating Adsense, my reason is simple if Adsense doesn’t work on most blogs why would it work on a blogs feed?

So cheers Google I know many people will want this but its not for me, but it is nice to see Feedburner development continuing and I’m hoping for big and better things.

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One of the biggest problems with harnessing social media for your sites is it tends to have a rather adverse effect on your monetising strategy this is mainly down to people still relying on Adsense for revenue. Today I would like to introduce a simple case study on how to effectively monetise traffic from StumbleUpon in a way traditional affiliate marketers can cope with.

Zip and Email Submits

I wrote a piece recently on zip and email submits so will not go into to much details except to say that they can be an effective tool but only when you have the traffic to leverage them, also this traffic must be geographically targeted as most email and zip submits are country specific.

Using StumbleUpon Advertising

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece on The Venture Skills Blog covering the basics on setting up and running a StumbleUpon sponsored stumbles campaign but briefly

StumbleUpon allows people to pay for traffic to their site it arrives in the same way stumbleupon normally sends traffic but with a guaranteed number of minimum visitors. The cost is very cheap for targeted traffic at $0.05 per visitor.

This equates to 200 people for $10 which means I will need a relatively low conversion rate below 10% to make a profit depending on the submit.

Pretty Girls make all the difference

Stumbleupon advertising not only allows us to select several categories from which it will send interesting stumblers it also allows us to specify a location, gender and age range. I therefore selected a suitable Email submit with a prize of a digital camera each submit was worth $1.90 the submit was only eligible to people in the UK.

Next I created a small mini site, buying a very cheap set of 3 photos from a stock photo site of a pretty young lady, nothing to smutty here but certainly attractive I also hired a copywriter to write 3 short pages on coping with university life, and finished it off with 3 flash bear drinking games. The central point of the site was the email submit which would be paying for the site.

So far the budget has been:

• $40 for the photos and a quick email to the photographer and the photos were removed from the stock photo site
• $20 Copywriter
• $5 for the flash games
• $6 for domain name

Probably another hours work tying it all together, and creating 3 variations of the ???landing page??�

Sample testing stumblers

The next stage was to spend $30 on sending 3 lots of 200 visitors to each of my landing pages to see which converted best, remember each submit was worth $1.90 The results page 1 2% , page 2 7% page 3 5%, Or put more simply Page 1 resulted in a loss $2.40 Page 2, a healthy profit of $16.60 and page 3 a more modest $9

This basic testing of small samples showed the second landing page performed well and therefore was used a daily limit was set up of 400 visitors and a sizable chunk from my paypal account was deposited.
I ran this for nearly 2 weeks, the site also received some small organic traffic and even a few inbound links.

The results

The final conversion rate was closer to 5 then 7% but still a healthy profit was made I spent just over $400 in total, so you see with a little bit of thinking it does pay to use StumbleUpon.

Cautionary tale

The above is of course a success story meant to inspire you so now I want to throw some water over you, the above happened as accounted but a word of warning when I stopped paying for stumbles I perhaps naively thought that I would still get hits from StumbleUpon just like blogs do I was wrong, the reason is obvious once the paid for stumbles were over all that nice targeted traffic vanished and while I initially did get some additional traffic it was not all male, and in the age range I had been aiming for, consequently a few negative thumbs down appeared. The result was I have never been able to start an organic stumble on that domain since even for decent content. So if you are using very targeted traffic on StumbleUpon make sure its on a domain which does not normally receive StumbleUpon traffic. Also make sure you check the terms and conditions of both StumbleUpon and your Affiliate company, finally remember that spam is spam ad heavy MFA sites will not work regardless of targeting it doesn???t cost much to make a half decent site and the returns are far greater.

Have you had success driving traffic with stumbleupon?