Promotion with StumbleUpon service
I work as marketing manager of PVS-Studio product and want to share with you company’s and my personal experience of promoting the product via StumbleUpon.
What StumbleUpon is
StumbleUpon is the largest bookmarking service where you get pages based on your default chosen interests and pages which are very similar to that you have already liked. In April 2012, StumbleUpon announced that it had over 25 million registered users of the service. Approximately 1 billion stumbles or in other words “Next Page” button clicks per month. I believe it is enough Wikipedia info to pay attention to this advertising channel and learn to work with it.
Free StumbleUpon promotion
StumbleUpon allows you to promote your site free. If your company spends time on writing interesting articles and have some experience in inbound marketing, I suggest you to start from free promotion. All you need is to post links to your site page. However, if you do not have any followers at StumbleUpon it’s better to post this article on twitter, reddit and wait while somebody shares your page on StumbleOpen. StumbleUpon has plugins for different browser that allow like pages without opening service directly. If somebody likes your page after sharing, this person’s followers most likely see your page too. Of course, if only you find the page interesting no one likes it or even dislikes after that it will not be shown to anybody.
The StumbleUpon website can generate hundreds of thousands visits. It works excellent with pictures of funny and cute cats or dogs. Our company achievements are much more modest. We implement C/C++ static code analyzer and share errors that we have found in more than 200 open source projects by PVS-Studio. During about a year and a half before we started to use StumbleUpon, we had got about 11 000 visitors from there. It’s few. But taking into account that we do not spend much effort on adding the bookmarks, it’s a very good source.
Paid StumbleUpon promotion
Paid way is more relevant for those who can’t start free promotion as do not have any followers on social accounts, or want to share something for mass audience, for example, a new ShowTimes serial.
Let’s assume that you do not have followers on twitter, reddit or stumbleupon, but you are sure that your articles are excellent. The easiest way to start your promotion is to launch the ad campaign. You can force the necessary customer segment to see your pages and if your pages are as interesting as you think, they will get many likes and go out from paid users to free users. The more likes your article will get the more people it will be shown free. You can start your promotion by funding 20 dollars to your account. Then it is necessary to create an ads campaign for a page, choose a customer segment based on gender, interests, location, devices, the day budget and price per stumbler/user display. The price per user display determines the display’s priority. For example, if you are going to spend much money but set the price at $0.05 per display, these displays will drag on for a very long time and you will fail to get necessary number of visitors per day. It is important to avoid situation when more expensive rates are offered.
Some words about our experience in paid promotion. We did this promotion about a year ago. We were greedy and were satisfied with $0.05 per user display. It took approximately three days to carry out one thousand displays. We estimate this result as good but not sufficient to pay constantly. May be we will return to this way, when accept a way to measure the usefulness of such displays (registration, social sharing etc.)
Right now we mostly promote free and sometimes we use paid promotion for testing purpose. StumbleUpon has ways to create different campaigns for the same page and compare campaigns results.
Important note about StumbleUpon promotion
No matter how you promote your pages by free or paid way it’s always possible to generate traffic from StumbleUpon to your site. What is important, that posted pages must be interesting to others. Otherwise, your site will be marked with many dislikes or banned at all.
What to choose: free or paid promotion?
Choose free promotion, if you already have advanced (with many followers) twitter, reddit or stumbleupon accounts. Do not pay money and simply share your pages with your community, you will see how people will like your pages via StumbleUpon.
If you do not have advanced accounts, post your interesting article and pay money for StumbleUpon promotion. If you are promoting something mass, intended for a wide audience, you will be doomed to success, get free sharing and your site will become popular.
Be courage and try new ways of promotion!
