Innovation is the only way to survive in a hyper-competitive market. If you can’t stay relevant in your area of expertise, you may as well choose a different career. This concept applies to us pay per click marketers as well. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and all other search networks are changing all the time, and old methods won’t work in these new days. You are going to have to constantly innovate, optimize, and find other ways to grow.

But folks often think of innovation as recreating the wheel or coming up with something out of this world. The fact is, you don’t have to actually create a new box for yourself to continue your growth. There is such a thing as gradual, evolutionary innovation. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to add new search networks to grow your PPC business. It is possible to improve the existing campaigns and find innovative ways to increase your CTR, quality score, and reduce your bids.

It’s true that folks keep jumping on these new networks (e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn), and that is just fine, but that is not innovation. That’s early adoption. Folks who jump from one network to another are often left frustrated by their lack of success and keep jumping in hope of better results. But innovating is a few steps above adoption, so unless you take these extra few steps you are going to be an adopter and not an innovator.

Which one are you? Are you an adopter or an innovator?

I don’t know about you but I am in love with the StumbleUpon advertising platform. It’s not that complicated, and you basically don’t have many options, but boy it can deliver cheap traffic to a website. StumbleUpon currently charges 5 cents a visit (not a click), and that is a decent price for getting traffic to a new site. The system does not have complicated budget options and the minimum cut off for traffic is 100 visits. 

Like any system, there are major glitches in the Stumbleupon service. For instance, often your funds do show up correctly in the system. The approval process is long and rejection notes are often as vague as they come. But I can’t tell you how frustrating it is not being able to convert this traffic to sales. StumbleUpon is great for getting a lot of people to your site and just have them look around but don’t expert a decent conversion rate with these guys. I have gotten as low 0.1% conversion rate with StumbleUpon which is dismal. The traffic is cheap, and you can actually make money with it, but I recommend StumbleUpon for cool or heavy content sites and not for sites that only focus on sales. There are few strategies that help you increase your conversion rate on SU (I will talk about them in future posts), but don’t go around building your PPC business around SU alone.

You have probably tried the StumbleUpon service by now. It’s a Web 2.0 service that allows you to stumble upon interesting sites. It’s a very addictive service and extremely useful in finding good authority sites. But did you know that you can advertise on StumbleUpon? In essence, StumbleUpon allows you to take advantage of their pay per view system to get visitors to your site through their service.

Unlike Google Adwords, StumbleUpon allows you to pay per visit and not per click per se. So your site will load and the visitor will have a glimpse before you are charged the whole $0.05 for it. Not only that, StumbleUpon doesn’t work with keywords but categories. So the traffic is targeted but not by keyword.

The downside to StumbleUpon is that the traffic is not highly convertible. The traffic that you get on StumbleUpon is more interested in doing research in surfing and less in buying. You can obviously optimize your landing pages to get higher conversions with StumbleUpon but the conversion will never reach the Adwords level.

So is the pay per view model here to stay? I think so. The PPV model is suitable for businesses that want to get eyeballs to their sites and not necessarily convert them. Besides there is no click fraud to deal with and the traffic can be cheap. I am sure at some point StumbleUpon will increase the cost per visit and make this system more complex but right now you would be out of your mind not to try StumbleUpon and their PPV model.