Startups & Online Business

I have only been using Stumbleupon for a few weeks, but in my never ending quest to find cheap targeted traffic I had to give it a go.

Using it for one of our online magazine sites we picked up 1000 actual visitors for $50USD (which is almost the same as AUD now). These were all targeted people ie they subscribed to the entrepreneur channel.

At .05c per visitor this is massively cheaper than I could attract people to the site using Adwords, which for all the business terms we were after was more like 20-30c and much more work.

Given the site makes .05 for every visitor just from CPM ads on one page view it seems like a good model.

So far I cant see any problems with this model, obviously they need to be careful they dont over promote paid stumbles and poison the user base, but each site you submit is manually reviewed so I guess they are screening out blatantly commercial or inappropriate sites to protect the user base.

Unlike other paid advertising there is a potentially very positive long term upside to their advertising.

Stumbleupon traffic is cheap and targeted so this is good, but here is the kicker, when you use Stumbleupon paid traffic Stumbleupon users will give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Assuming you have a good site (which is on topic ie the channel you advertised to) users will give you the Thumbs up thereby promoting your site up the stumbleupon list for that category and thereby generating more traffic for you after your paid subscription traffic has finished.

Whats the lesson here? Use Stumbleupon paid advertising if you want to launch a new site or drive cheap targeted traffic. I think the only gotcha is that this wouldn’t work for highly commercial sites but if you are promoting sites that are highly useful to your users then this could be a great way to score a new customer base.