Monetising StumbleUpon traffic
Author: Tim NashYou visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?
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?
Rob
from Technology for Humans2007-11-02 20:08:24
Is that site still up? Can you provide a link to it as an example of what your landing pages looked and what the copy looked like?
admin
from Webdigity webmaster forums2007-11-02 20:17:07
Interesting article. I never tried to use paid traffic from SU as it look too expensive to me (I mean you can buy quality CPC traffic in that price) but your experiment looks good.
I would love to see that site, but I guess that’s your little secret, right?
Tim Nash
2007-11-02 20:57:49
The site mentioned was sold a week ago hence why I used it as my example but I will be launching 2 mini sites for Christmas both using the same technique if people are interested in this technique then I’m sure I will knock up a Christmas extended technique for my Christmas variation of this style site
Tim Nash
2007-11-02 21:00:03
Forgot to add $0.05 is as you say expensive but given how targeted the traffic is its worth the extra couple of cent I think on the downside CPC visitors are already “pre warned” and know what to expect so have a higher conversion rate.
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Nico
from ONLIMA Online Marketing2007-11-03 23:35:02
Nice read Tim! I will have a closer look at paid stumble traffic, sounds like they have very fair rates for their targeted traffic.
Bill
from Bill Hilton Media2007-12-19 12:57:44
Really interesting results.
But $20 for a copywriter? He must have been either:
(a) an 11-year-old from the slummier end of Mansfield, after some pocket money
(b) foreign, with English as a second language
(d) mad
Either way, it might explain why your conversion rate wasn’t as good as you expected. If he were based in the US, UK, Canada or Australia he’d have to win and work on ten jobs like your every day to earn even a basic salary.
For the kind of standard you get for that kind of money, you’d be better off doing it yourself!
Tim Nash
2007-12-19 18:11:21
@Bill .E a University student, to be honest wasn’t a huge amount of copy and the copywriter was doing several jobs for me so I worked out a rough per word figure.
However the copy was of a very decent standard and was geared at 20 year old lads, so who better then a 20 year old lad to write it!
Bill
from Bill Hilton Media2007-12-19 19:05:54
Ah right - that would explain it. Still, if he did a good job you got yourself an amazing deal. If he’s half bright it won’t be long before he twigs he can charge other clients a bit more than that.
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