The new StumbleUpon Ads interface is more sleek and makes it much easier to find out how many free and paid clicks you are getting per campaign. You can also easily find out the effective cost per visitor per campaign. The new system also suggests the categories that you can list your campaigns under to get more traffic to your website and get more bang out of each buck spent.

There is no guarantee how much success you can have with StumbleUpon. In fact, even mastering the art of using StumbleUpon ads can take a bit of time. But your goal should be to get as many thumbs ups as possible. The more that happens, the better chance you have of getting free traffic from SU. That means you can potentially bring your costs down even further, but you need to have the right content to get the job done.

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.

Facebook already has Facebook ads, something that all marketers need to take advantage of to push their offers and promote their Facebook and external pages. There are plenty of other places that you can advertise your business as well. But here are a few steps online marketers need to take to push their businesses to new heights:

• Strategy: in order to get the most out of the social media, you need to have a real plan. Some marketers like to think of advertising as a separate channel. But there are synergies that your business can realize if your online marketing strategies are inter-connected and aligned.
• Networks: identify social networks that your audience hangs out in and try to reach out to them with ads and messages.
• Ad services: Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, and Facebook all allow you to promote your business in front of their communities. You can use third party services to get the job done on Twitter.
• Up and comers: the good thing about social networking websites is the fact that new ones pop out of nowhere by the day. Not all of them are going to matter to your business, but you should spend time to identify those that do matter to your business and are in your niche.
• Life beyond Adwords: Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter are still top services that you need to push your sites through. At the same time, there is life behind Adwords, and the sooner you realize that, the better off your business will be. Display media, social media advertising, and other channels can always help you balance your CPA and increase your profits. Never be afraid to test all the tools and services that are out there. It never hurts.

If you thought 2009 was the year of social media, think again. 2010 is going to be more exciting and more competitive for all those involved in this channel. The sooner you get involved, the better.

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.

What I love about this service is the fact that it tries to keep everything in the open and doesn’t allow advertisers to get away with everything. Even when you are giving your partners instructions, there are limitations.

Acceptable Advertiser written instructions:
“Tell your friends what you think of ACME Co.”

Unacceptable Advertiser written instructions:
“Tell your friends how much you love ACME Co.”

Sponsored Tweets is certainly an interesting service for those who are looking for another avenue to get the word out about their products and services. Working with those celebrity tweeters could be a bit tricky and costly, but it never hurts to get a mention from someone who has a few hundred thousands of followers. Don’t expect to build a business around this service, but it’s worth testing.

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.

Tweetmeme is another start-up company that is hoping to change the way we advertise online. The company has joined hands with Federated Media to allow people to retweet ads that they find fun or useful. Adtweets certainly has potential. It pushes advertisers to come up with more engaging ads and gets the community involved as well. Here is what the company had to say about this move:

The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts, and give the audience a chance to decide, and essentially vote, on what they like… Produce a good advert that your audience likes, and you can easily tap into the viral nature of Twitter and the ‘retweet effect’, which will then dramatically increase your reach.

It’ll be interesting to see whether people actually tweet ads on Twitter. The community is very sensitive to spam and ads that don’t have the potential to go viral can be considered spam. So the bar is set very high for advertisers. Anyway you look at it, social media advertising will be on the rise for the foreseeable future. And the community will be there to judge your ads. So if you are thinking about throwing an ad out there for the sake of getting exposure, don’t do it on the social media.

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.

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.

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.

Google:

There have been a lot of talks about Google Caffeine. After testing it for a few hours, I am very impressed with the speed and overall quality of results. In some cases, there aren’t too many differences between the old and new Google. But in many cases, there are some major differences, which should be exciting for SEOs. But I was most interested about was the changes that Google is implementing with Google Adwords. Now these changes have been going into effect over the past few weeks, but it’s interesting that you don’t have to actually click on the “related products” link to see related ads.

What these changes mean is you can better target your audience and provide better information for it to click on the ads and purchase products from you. I am starting to like Facebook Ads a lot. It’s getting so easy to target a specific audience with Facebook, and the latest features can only help. I wish StumbleUpon would pick up a few tips from Facebook, but as it is Facebook is a league of its own.

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?