How I Got 18,000 Visitors for $100

I’ve been involved in online business long enough that I’ve tried pretty much every single form of advertising you can do on the Internet. With ad blindness on the rise, it’s up to webmasters and site owners to constantly be on the bleeding edge of innovation in order to get decent ad conversions.
Top Posts @ the WhyDoWork Blog

Before we get started, take some time to mouse over the “Top Posts” at the top left of the page. It will show how many readers have read each post. If you’re an RSS or email subscriber this means you’re going to have to actually visit the site to participate! The top three articles on this blog have all been read more than 18,000 times.

Keep in mind that all these articles are less than 3 months old and that is an amazing statistic. I credit this success entirely to StumbleUpon Ads. Well maybe my writing played a role in it, but it was StumbleUpon that was the spark to get things going.
How to Effectively Use StumbleUpon to Advertise

If you’re not sure what StumbleUpon is, take a break and check out this demo. StumbleUpon gives users a way to quickly “channel surf” the web and find sites they might not have normally visited. With their advertising program, you can pay $0.05 cents a visitor to have someone look at your page.

If a visitors gives your page or site a thumbs up, it will be shown on their homepage and it’s likely their friends on the site will see your page too. Check out this graph of a few days of my campaign:
su-ads

Important things to note in the image above are the text in blue, green, and red. Blue is the number of visitors I paid for, green is the percent of visitors that gave the page a thumbs up, and red is the number of visitors who gave the page thumbs down. Ideally you want the green bar (and the number of thumbs up) to be much larger than the red.

Having users give your content a thumbs up can translate into thousands of additional visitors. With a small budget of $10 per day and choosing to advertise specific articles (instead of just whydowork.com/blog) I’ve seen some great results!