I recently attempted using paid advertising via Stumble Upon to promote one of my blog’s posts. In particular the blog post I tried to promote the Godaddy free private registration loophole post.

The main reason why I chose that post over all of my other blog posts for this paid Stumble Upon case study is because of the fact that I believed that it had the best chance at going viral as a result of how practical the tip is and how it would many people it would help. So with that as a motivation behind my campaign I set out creating it.

Selecting an Interest Group:

I decided to select weblogs as the niche I would target as it was the best fit for what I was trying to promote. If they would have had a niche like internet marketing than I would have definitely used that one instead.

Selecting Demographics:

I chose to only show the advertisement for male and female US visitors between the ages of 18 and 40. Again, this decision was based on the fact that I knew there would likely be less people over 40 years old that purchased domains than people that were under 40.

Analyzing the Results:

I only spent $10 on the campaign which gives 200 visitors because I know that would give me enough data to determine if the campaign would be scalable. Here are the results of that campaign:
As you can see from the image I was off to a great start. On average 3.95% of people liked the post by giving it a thumb’s up compared to 1.05% that did not like it. So with this data in mind I know that if I keep tossing money at this campaign on average more people will vote it up than those that vote it down. Meanwhile the results from Google Analytics show that the only traffic I received from Stumble Upon was from the campaign I paid for which I expected.

However, I wanted to try spending even more money to see if I could get the post to go viral. By going viral I am saying that the post would continue to display without having to pay as a result of the people that first voted it up during the paid campaign. So I spent another $20 and got similar results (more positives than negatives) but still no Stumble Upon traffic came after the paid campaign was over. I’m certain that if I continued to spend more and more money that there would be a tipping point where people would start to see the post regardless of whether I was paying for it or not; however, I didn’t want to spend $XXX to find how many positive votes it took to go viral.

Why I won’t pay for Stumble Upon traffic on a blog post again:

I won’t ever pay for Stumble Upon traffic for a blog post again because I have had free Stumble Upon traffic come in when people submitted my content to Stumble Upon on their own accord. Just a few days ago SuiteJ submitted one of my posts (Thanks Jay) and I got 67 Stumble Upon visitors naturally. Maybe some more of my readers should do the same 🙂 only kidding… but seriously do it please. (lol)

Anyway, I was using this case study as a tool to test Stumble Upon’s advertising platforms and go for an attempt at getting one of my posts to go viral. While I believe this can be done if you’re getting more positive votes than negative votes in your campaign and scale the campaign up by pay a lot of money it isn’t worth it. With that said, I would recommend using Stumble Upon to advertise a website that is trying to sell something (perhaps my WordPress themes?) or can quickly entertain a broad audience.

I’ll of course write about Stumble Upon in future upcoming blog posts, but in the mean time I want to continue to focus on increasing my Stumble Upon network of friends. If you like my blog feel free to add me as a friend! I’ll Stumble posts you write that I really like and I’d love for you to do the same for me.

The favorite posts I write on this blog are the case study style posts because I use specific examples of how I’m managing my network of websites, trying to make more money on my blog or discussing other practical ideas for success online. So if you like this post please share your thoughts in the comments below or better yet why not Stumble this post? Who knows maybe it will go viral for free? 🙂