Awhile back, I wrote a post on my internet marketing blog about the statistics of Facebook. I used Facebooks advertising targeting system to pull some data on users, such as their age groups, gender, education level, political views, and relationship status. Well, that post sure was useful, updated, and unique, because in less than 30 days, it has received over 17,000 unique visitors, over 30,000 pageviews, and links form Techcrunch, Adrants, and SEOmoz. In fact, the traffic is still pouring in, because yesterday it received almost 4,000 pageviews and today it's on track for 5,000 pageviews. So how did I do it? Well, I submitted it to Digg, Sphinn, and Stumbleupon. However, that wasn't enough. It's only received 11 diggs, didn't make it to Sphinns frontpage, and the stumbles quickly ran out. The blogger outreach is was put it past its tipping point. Yep, don't be afraid to email 20-30 bloggers every 2 or 4 weeks with a killer post you've written. I emailed 30 marketing blogs (including Techcrunch) and a large portion of them (about 12) wrote something about the post or linked to it. Not bad. Once the fresh, new traffic came, they stumbled the post and bam, I was up to 10,000 unique visitors. However, I wasn't satisfied with the category it was submitted under (Statistics), so a few days ago I went to StumbleUpon Ads and purchased $12 worth (240) of stumbles in University and Cyberculture. It was a great move, because those 240 stumblers stumbled the page and now it's on received over 9,000 visitors from those original 240. What I'm trying to say is, don't write crap. Write unique and useful information, even if it takes you 2-3 hours a blog post. It'll be worth it. Good luck!
So you think advertising with StumbleUpon would be an effective method of directing traffic to your site? I have a brand new site (up for about a week) and I'm looking to generate some quick traffic. I'm willing to put down $100 in StumbeUpon advertising. Would this be a good way to spend that $100, or should I go another route. Any opinions? Thanks!
Nice story. Although at the end I'd go with "Write unique and useful information, even if it takes you 2-3 hours a blog post ... and spend 2-3 hours marketing it ... It'll be worth it."
I'll have to ramp up my budget for StumbleUpon's ads. I haven't ventured there yet, but it sounds like a great investment. As far as the bloggers you emailed - do you comment on their blogs regularly? (as in, do they actually know you? Or do you just make sure that they're aware you're a regular blog reader? ) Just curious...
Are you stumbling a blog post or the main page? Stumble it yourself (for free) then gauge how well it's received. If you have 10 other people stumble, then it's worth it. Stumbleupon traffic is fairly poor, so you need others stumbling to offset this. If you have $100 to advertise a site, I usually like to bid on tail-end terms on Google for $.1/click. Though, there's a LOT you can do for free. I do consulting for a number of businesses on internet marketing. I'm not the cheapest, but I'm one of the best. PM me if you're interested. I'm usually a reader of 10% of the blogs I pitch, the others I find through Technorati, Google, and blog lists. If it has over 200 RSS readers, than I'll usually pitch. Here is an excerpt form a post I wrote on Search Engine Journal on linkbait: