Many of you will be aware of the social bookmarking site Stumbleupon, but do you know that it has a paid advertising option?

Running a stumleupon campaign is a good way to bring a lot of people to your blog in a short space of time  and hopefully convert them to readesr or buyers of your products/services.

Pay Per Stumble

The advertising model used by SU is a pay per stumble model, that is, you pay for the priviledge of having your selected page presented before someone using the SU system.

What Is A Stumble

Stumbleupon is a bookmarking service which allows you to share content with your “friends” and to stumble over pages which you may find of interest.

You tell SU what you are interested in, install a toolbar on your browser and click stumble.  This then presents a random page to you.  You can read it and perhaps engage with the site or click stumble again for another page.  Are you up to speed yet?  No, check out this video

http://www.stumbleupon.com/productdemo/

I think ofStumbling (as it is know) as channel surfing on the net.

Fixed Price

There is no bidding price war as there is on pay per click advertising you pay 5 cents per display.  You charge up your account in advance using paypal and the campaign runs until your funds are depleted.

You can control your daily spend by setting how many displays per day you want, for example 500 views is $25

Demographic Targeting

You can target your audience with the following demograpohic items:

• A stumbleupon category – these are created by SU and can be limiting
• Sex of stumbler
• Age of stumbler
• Country
• State
• City

Large Amounts of Traffic Quickly

If you place your campaign in a popular category and set your number of views to be high, you can rapidly expose your blog to a new very large audience.

Thumbs Up or Down

You can monitor how well your audience are reacting to your page by the number of thums up or down it receives:

Don’t Go Straight for The Services Page Jugular

Stumbleupon is a bit sniffy about service promtion (but they are happy to take a payment for a visit – go figure) so you may be better dropping people into your sneeze page or to a piece of pillar content. Then use your standard blogging techniques to bring them to your services page.

Quality Of Visits

This is a tough one to call, it is all dependant upon your niche and whether there is a StumbleUpon category to match.  I used to own a mountainboarding site, I matched this to the exteme sport category and got greate results. I also used to have a very specialised site on pay per click, click fraud , this bombed on SU because there is not match.

I wrote a blog post on Problogger about monitoring the quality of yoru SU monitoring the quality of paid stumbleupon campaigns, check this out for more details on monitoring quality.

Conclusion

It’s not for everyone, if you niche does not match the Stumbleupon categories, it will be hard to find your right people.  But if you can get the match you can very quickly bring lots of targeted people to your blog a lot cheaper than pay per click.

Check out the service at stumbleupon.com/ads