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?

Advertising a product or service is always tricky particularly in a niche so when it comes to monetising your site you need to first sit down and work out what products and services you wish to promote, who they are being aimed at and how you will target them.

Niche products don’t sell in their own niches

There is always exceptions to a rule but generally a product such as an SEO book will not do well being promoted on SEO sites. Tad recently posted that Aaron Wall SEO Book does not sell well on his site. Now you may have glanced to the right and spotted we are also promoting it so does it sell here? yes but we will explain why in a minute.

First lets take a look at Tad site, its aimed at Search engine optimisers who have some knowledge and can understand Tads’ musings this means the majority of his readership will read a wide range of SEO orientated blogs I wonder what product is promoted on those blogs?

Aarons book has completely saturated the market almost every SEO blog that runs advertising will have at some point dabbled with his book, their is not an intermediate level SEO that has not heard of it, many will have bought it, plenty have blogged about how great it is for people at all levels its the perfect book for some one who wants to cover all bases.

Why does it sell occasionally here, well its a really good book for starters but the focus of this blog is not search engine optimisation but monetising sites we occasionally mention SEO techniques and ideas and recommend our readers dabble. The SEO Book therefore is a niche product but in a niche different to our own we are introducing the product to a new readership not the over saturated readership in the SEO community.

Say hello to your neighbour niches

Now that we have worked out that selling niche products in their own niche does not work how do we choose what products to promote after all promoting cooking products on an SEO blog doesn’t seem to be any better then promoting an SEO book. Look at your blog or site does it fit into a niche so to continue our theme Tads’ blog is clearly an SEO blog, its got a very narrow focus now we need to think of niches around SEO, I’m not going to list them all but basically SEO niche neighbours a wide range of web services and development including but not limited to:

• Web development
• Web Hosting
• Directories
• Online advertising
• Graphic Design
• Programming

Their are loads of others but you are getting the idea all these separate niches have their own niche products what’s more finding them is easy enough look for the products that are saturating the market. This tactic doesn’t always work to go back to Tad blog he mentions that he promotes Dreamhost a hosting company (use promo code TIMSEO (monthly plan)) but once more he has not received a single sale this is an interesting one the company has a mixed reaction with the community but does offer one of the best deals in term of goodies they also have very good support but still have at times come in for criticism that said I have an account with them so they can’t be that bad.
So why does Dreamhosts not work for Tad? Well I think its simply that most SEO’s have hosting and its a long term thing its a lot of hassle to move hosts and Dreamhosts lack of dedicated servers does not make them the choice for those looking to expand. Would Tad be better promoting a different web hosting company? Possibly but Tad has a level of integrity which will ultimately drive through the promotions, when he promotes a product he is promoting something he knows works be it tool or service. While he would have more success promoting a service offering dedicated servers or resellers he has no experience of either (as far as I know).

Getting the products to the users

So how can we help Tad? Well lets first look at his current products he is promoting:

• Search marketing Standard - a publication for SEO and SEM
• SEO Book - Aarons book
• Web CEO - SEO software
• Dreamhost - Web hosting

I have used Tads’ affiliate links on the above and I encourage you to take a look in particular Search marketing standard and web CEO may be new to many of you. Remember they come with the Tad seal of approval!

I would be tempted to drop several of the programs here in particular the Dreamhost, SEOBook and possibly WebCEO. Not because they are not great programs or services just they are already saturating the market. So what would I replace them with?

• Directories have become quite a big bone of contention recently but their are still several good affiliate schemes out there BOTW has been getting a lot of press recently and we will be covering their scheme soon as an interesting case study.
• Web hosting, this is a odd one I find promoting web hosting takes a long time people as I said earlier do not change hosts often and when they do its normally to go up the chain so it makes sense to promote schemes with dedicated or semi-dedicated servers and reseller accounts.
• Domain names this is not the way to make a fortune but I find that many SEO’s are slowly becoming domainers hoarding domains so promoting a registrar might be the way to go I tend to promote 123reg a UK registrar but its a good idea to look at a more generic registrar, you could even have a go at being a domain reseller yourself with a company like Enom.

Of course affiliate programs are not the only way to go, do you know a Graphic designer, landing page designer, web developer why not offer them space to promote their products? these are the sort of people who often don’t have an affiliate scheme, they are also the perfect people to advertise on your site as few people will have come across them.

Aaron book does sell in the right audience

Through out this post I have repeated the mantra niche products fail in their own niche but this is not always the case. Even within a niche their is a diverse audience within a readership, a product that sells to the enthusiastic amateur may not do well for the pro and vice versa. Sometimes its a case of know thy audience for example a great place to sell Aarons book is on a website devoted to rookie and new SEOs apart from the fact they are impressionable folk they also haven’t been conditioned by the mass of adverts.
There are plenty of examples of niche products selling in their own niches but if your struggling with product sales have a look at what your selling and ask yourself how many times have you seen that product before?

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Today a new advertising network, WidgetBucks has been announced. This looks as a good opportunity for publishers, as their ads look very clickable as they don’t look to what we are used to think of as an advertisement.

Why to use WidgetBucks ads

The best reason is that their ads have high CTR. Now according to their site you earn $3-6 CPM which is a great amount (if that is true of course ) They pay through cheque and the lower payment is $50 which is very reasonable.

The adverts are separated into 13 categories with each category having several sub categories, their is also the option for a pseudo contextual advertisements which they have called ‘MerchSense’ widgets themselves come in a range of sizes and colours which can be used to match a site or to make the widget stand out.

$25 bonus for signup

As an opening promotion they are offering $25 just for sign up, which makes the target of $50 much easier.

Last comment

I always look into testing new programs and this looks very promising. So I am going to test it and give you a full review later this month. In the meanwhile here is how their ads look like :

With a $25 promotion its worth signing up even if you later take it down as the offer is part of their initial opening and may not be around for ever to sign up to WidgetBucks takes just a second or two.

The idea that I am promoting the best web browser, and in the same time help to make internet a better place was always fascinating me. The bad thing when you promote Firefox affiliates from the adsense program, is the low conversions. First of all let’s try to see what are the reasons that cause this problem.

Why people don’t install Firefox from your site

• People usually don’t submit an offer because of a banner. You need more than that in order to convince them
• Some of your visitors already use Firefox, why display the firefox advertisement to them?
• Lack of motivation. IE users already use a browser that works for them. You can’t explain to the average user that IE don’t follow W3C standards. This is information useful only to web designers and web developers

How to promote Firefox

In my honest opinion in order to promote firefox you need to be intrusive. The first rule is that you don’t have to promote Firefox to any other than internet explorer users. To do this you will need to use a small fragment of code in HTML like :


<!--[if IE]>
Show the ad here
<![endif]–>


or if you prefer the php way, something like :


if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)!==false)
echo ‘Your firefox ad here’;


The second thing you have to think is how intrusive you are going to be. You can display a landing page to every IE visitor - instead of your regular content - and ask from them to install Firefox because IE has many security problems, etc.

This way works the best but you will lose a lot of loyal visitors that use IE. Of course this is your decision, and if you like to play with landing pages for IE users, then I will definitely recommend you to check the Explorer Destroyer, a web site dedicated to destroy Internet explorer

Now if you want to be less intrusive, but yet having conversions, here is how you can do it. Open your template file and after the body add this line of code:


<!--[if IE]>
<div style="width:99%;border-bottom: 2px solid red;background:gray;padding:5px;color:#FFF;">
<strong>Warning</strong>: You are using Internet Explorer. <a href="http://getfirefox.com/">Get Firefox with Google Toolbar for better browsing </a>
</div>
<![endif]–>


Of course you will have to change the link code with your affiliate code. I’ve took this style from blows hard and it still has some good conversions. Bellow you can see how it looks like :

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