StumbleUpon is one of the most underrated advertising networks on the market. It operates very differently from Google and Microsoft. Unlike pay per click or CPM model, StumbleUpon is a pay per view model. So you’ll only spend money when your page is viewed by StumbleUpon visitors. That’s not all though. You can get free traffic from StumbleUpon if people who have visited your landing page give you enough thumbs up. That means StumbleUpon can be a great traffic driver if you have a content heavy portal. It can also help lower down your conversion rates as the cost of each view is only 5 cents. The only knock against StumbleUpon ads is the fact that it doesn’t get too much love from SU. The service could be much more sophisticated and allow for more flexibility, but that hasn’t happened so far. The service is getting a upgrade in look and feel as StumbleUpon is testing StumbleUpon Ads beta. It’s designed to help you get a better feel for your StumbleUpon campaigns and get more out of it.

(more…)

Website such as Twitter and Facebook have caught fire in the past few years. I still remember when I joined Twitter only 2 years ago. In those days, a lot of top marketers were talking about how Twitter was a fad and was not going to go anywhere. Some even called the idea stupid and pointless. I was somewhat in the middle at that point. We were not realizing too much value from Twitter in those days, but at the same time, the community’s growth was giving us hope that at some point we may be able to monetize our efforts.

These days, there are no more doubts that social media is here to stay. Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter doesn’t really matter in the end. But the channel is going to be there for anyone who is brave enough to take a chance and invest in it. Keeping up with the social media may be more daunting that traditional media, but that’s a huge leveler, especially for small businesses. 2010 is going to be the year that social media networks finally start monetizing their work, and that could lead to more sophisticated advertising platforms and more solid communities. (more…)

Recently, I had a chance to write a piece on our sister website about Sponsored Tweets and how twitters are paid to post sponsored messages to their Twitter accounts. Twitter is one of the fastest growing communities on the Internet, but the community is firmly against spammers and those who are there to only market and provide little value. Sponsored Tweets is not about spamming. If you are an advertiser interested in this service, you can think of the whole deal is a sponsorship opportunity. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could sponsor some of the top tweeters around?

The service is still in early stages, but it certainly opens up another door for advertisers to reach out to those engaged on social networking websites such as Twitter. You can define how much you want to pay for your sponsored tweets, define the minimum number of followers you are looking for your partners to have. You can even filter out spammers who follow a lot of people without getting followed in return. (more…)

Twitter has gone from an obscure service that not too many knew about to one of the most popular social networking sites around the world. The service has improved slowly but surely from its early days, and it has implemented a few features that Twitterers asked for overtime. But the company has yet not decided how it wants to monetize its service. So it’s still deciding on the right business model. But you can be sure that Twitter Advertising will be available in the near future. It’s just the matter of time.

Third party companies have already tried to introduce advertising on Twitter. Featured Users is one of the services that let Twitteres to push their profile in front of people who take advantage of Featured Users’ applications around the web. You can buy impressions to push your Twitter profile and gain followers on Twitter. Twitter itself has been testing a few things here or there, though we haven’t seen ads being introduced on Twitter Interface.

(more…)

For months people have been talking about the potential of Facebook Ads, while complaining about the simple and not-so-organized interface of Facebook Ads that made managing ads more difficult. Facebook has listened and has given a make over to Facebook Ads. Now you can not only build your campaigns in a more effective fashion, you won’t have to jump through the hoops to track your campaigns either.

The new Ad manager displays your campaigns on the left side of your screen, allowing you to check on each campaign, run reports, and go through your billing information all in one place. The new service comes with in-line ad editing. So you can edit your campaigns easily on the main page without having to open up each campaign’s page.

The search functionality is improved as well. You can just enter the first few letters of the campaign you have in mind, and the search box will automatically show you all campaigns that match your input.

All in all, Facebook Ads is a great way to test new offers and get instant feedback from the community. I wouldn’t recommend it for every PPC project, but in some cases, Facebook Ads can perform very well. You should always test to figure out how Facebook Ads perform for you, and it all got easier with the latest Ad Manager redesign.

I have been using StumbleUpon ads for too long that I can remember. If you have been following the Web 2.0 services around, you have probably heard of StumbleUpon. It’s one of the best places to find the best content on the Internet and vote for your favorite stories. StumbleUpon makes it so easy to find and rank top stories to help others find stories that may be interesting to them. The more thumbs up you get, the more traffic you’ll receive.

Viral stories often get a lot of stumbles, and it snow balls from there. If your story gets a lot of votes, you are going to get a boost in traffic that will last for more than just a couple of hours or a couple of days. That’s just the nature of this community and why it’s one of my favorites.

Sometimes it’s tough to compete with stories that have gotten hundreds of stumbles already. Besides, not everybody knows how to work the community to get more stumbles for stories. That’s where StumbleUpon Ads come in. StumbleUpon Ads is an innovative service that lets you advertise your website in front of StumbleUpon community and get the votes you need to go viral. The service is unlike anything else on the market. You are not paying per click or per keyword. Instead, you pay per each view. So your site is going to be viewed as long as your account’s balance is more than zero. Each view only costs $0.05, so it’s very cheap if you think about it.

StumbleUpon Advertising does come with a few options to help you target your audience. You can choose how many times you want your page to be shown each day. You can also choose the location, gender, and age of your ideal audience to make sure you get targeted traffic.

The service has a lot of potential. It’d be great if StumbleUpon allowed dayparting. It would also be nice to have the chance to schedule or stop campaigns at a particular date. These are options that are available on more sophisticated services such as Adwords and Facebook Ads. Even as it is, it’s a wonderful way to get traffic to any website and go viral. With StumbleUpon, those thumbs ups that you get really count. So after you have collected enough thumbs up, you can turn your campaign off and still get traffic to your site from the community. The service has a lot of potential and could be even better if advertisers are provided with more control as not all views are equally beneficial to advertisers. At the same time, you only pay $0.05 per view, so you don’t have too much to complain.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, there have been a lot going on in the search industry. First, we have Facebook pickup Friendfeed, and then change its advertising system to allow you to target others by their birthday or their connection to your pages. And then we have Google showcasing Google Caffeine. You can’t forget about Google Adwords latest changes to include related ads in the sponsored section. So let’s see what has changed in detail:

Facebook:

As you can see, Facebook has added a few new fields to its ad form, making it so easy to target customers by their birth date. So you can essentially give out discount coupons for their birthday. Another interesting Facebook Ads feature is two brand new fields that help you target people who are and are not interacting with your fan and product pages. For those who are not part of your fan club, you can use Facebook Ads to target them and give them some incentive to join your club. And for those who are a part of your fan page community, you can put up ads to make them interact more with your pages. (more…)

When you talk to people about PPC, everybody assumes that the only networks that matter are Adwords, YSM, and MSN Adcenter. These networks can drive you a whole lot of traffic, and the traffic that you get are more targeted here than some of the 2nd tier networks out there. But there is more to life than just Google Adwords. They are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to a website, and as long as you are in the PPC game, you need to test these methods out to find out which one works the best for you and your business.

Here are some top alternatives to top search advertising networks:

Facebook Ads: a great way to reach out to Facebook community and advertise your business in front of them. You can get a whole lot of Facebook users to come and visit your website, but be ready to walk them through what you have to offer to retain these users and get their business.

StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a great way to get your feed wet with social media advertising and drive a whole lot of cheap traffic to your website. Each impression costs you only 5 cents, but if your visitors favorite your site, you are going to get a whole lot of free traffic from the StumbleUpon community.

ClickRiver: ClickRiver is an advertising network that allows you to get your product/services in front of Amazon customers. Amazon is one of the top web properties on the web, and you can’t afford not to test ClickRiver to see how it works for your business.

LinkedIn:LinkedIn Direct ads are another great way to get your product or website in front of more people. LinkedIn is another top social networking website that is worth testing if you are looking for more traffic.

YouTube Ads: advertising on YouTube is a no brainer these days. You’ve got to be ready to test things out to find out whether YouTube is the right market for you to be involved in. You are not going to be short of traffic, so you may as well try.

There are many other places that you can put your ads on to drive traffic to your website. Your goal should be to test all these different networks to find the ones that give you the best results. There is no such thing as too much traffic. The above networks can drive a whole lot of traffic to your website if you play your cards right. You just have to track and test!

Twitter is one of the hottest web 2.0 services available today. The community may be fairly new but it is growing fast. In fact, it’s growing so fast that the folks behind the service have a hard time handling the expansion. Twitter allows you to reach to folks interested in products in your niche and even find partners. But if you are just getting started with Twitter, you are going to have a hard time getting 100,000 people to follow you. You can always start by providing valuable information to your Twitter followers and reach out to folks who may be interested in what you have to say. You can always give away things to gain more followers. Or you can just promote your Twitter profile and advertise it in front of people who may be interested in your products/services.

Featured Users is an ad network that allows you to promote your profile on top Twitter services such as Friend Or Follow. Folks who use these services are looking to get more done with Twitter. They are looking to do research, find more friends, or manage multiple accounts. Whatever the case, by putting your profile in front of these folks you can get them to check out your profile and become a follower of yours.

Advertising on Featured Users network is not that expensive either. Here is the pricing plan:

• 1,000 impressions = $10 (CPM).
• 10,500 impressions = $100 ($9.5 CPM)

That’s not too cheap, but it’s not that expensive either. Especially knowing that you are putting your profile in front of a targeted community. Featured Users also provides you with appropriate reports to help you decide whether you are making a progress.

Ultimately, you want to make sure you define success before taking advantage of Featured Users. Are you in it to gain a whole lot of random followers or just super targeted followers? How much money are you making per each Twitter follower. What is your conversion rate? How much traffic are you getting, and how does your Twitter traffic affect your overall average visitor value. If you are interested in expanding your Twitter presence, Featured User is certainly worth testing. It’s not that expensive, and you’ll know whether your campaign is working after a couple of thousands impressions.

Your take: how big of a role Featured Users has played in your progress on Twitter?