I wanted to write a brief response to this on two levels:
1. I wouldn’t claim that any form of advertising is ‘the best’ – however I know of a number of bloggers who have launched successful blogs off the back of StumbleUpon campaigns. I’ll share one below.
2. $50 CPM isn’t ‘cheap’ if all you get for it are 1000 visitors per $50 spend. However the whole point of SU advertising is that it has the capacity to go viral and set off an organic traffic storm. Your CPM for the actual traffic that SU sends will always be $50 – however in effect it becomes a lot less if you manage to do the two things that I mentioned in the last post:
- Trigger an Organic StumbleUpon Experience
- Convert SU visitors into loyal readers who come back time and time again
Keep in mind that StumbleUpon can potentially send tens of thousands of visitors to your blog. I wrote a post recently on how it sent me 21,000+ visitors over a 5 week period to one particular post. If you manage to trigger that kind of traffic your effective CPM is alot less than $50. The other thing that many using SU advertising find is that it can trigger traffic from other sources also (like Digg, Delicious and other sites/blogs).
An Example from a Reader
I’m not at liberty to share others stories without their permission – but let me share one that has already been told here in the comments of ProBlogger:
Max Pool from Code Squeeze has commented in the last two StumbleUpon posts by writing:
“On my blog, I wrote a list post titled 101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed on the highest traffic day of the week – Monday.
Then I took out $25 of SU ads, which brought me 500 hits. That traffic let to it getting getting on Digg. Getting on Digg, lead it to going viral. 100,000 unique visitors later I was able to capture about 500 subscribed users.
SU is a great ad tool, but be sure that you have great content to back it as Darren implies.”
Thanks for sharing Max. Feel free to share your own positive and negative experiences of SU advertising. I’d also love to know what you’ve found works and doesn’t work in terms of the content on your pages.
