Pay per click – worth it? Case Study: Stumbleupon

A big question that is frequenting internet marketing forums at the moment is the benefits or drawbacks of using PPC (Pay Per Click) as a companion to any mainstream SEO you may be practicing. The main drawback for most people is the costs involved with PPC, but, if one takes a closer look at some of the better value PPC solutions, there does not have to be a four figure budget attached to this kind of marketing.

One consideration (that a lot of people are jumping on) is Stumbleupon ads. Stumble is a fantastic way of marketing your site if it has some viral ‘punch’, meaning if it has the capabilities to go viral – Stumble will make it happen. With a static charge per view of your site ($0.05), the cost can be easily calculated and monitored for results. It does require some special attention to your copy and the type of images you should use, because the Stumble upon visitors are a different kind of visitor. They are mostly relaxed web surfers that are not looking for any commercial interaction with a company – so if you are selling something, then it had better be a very clever way that you are selling it! Stumbleupon is very good for getting and retaining visitors to your site. If this is indeed what you are looking to achieve, then a quick test on Stumble ads would not be too costly.

Whilst Stumble traffic is not necessarily commercially viable 90% of the time, you can of course retain these visitors for a later sale. For example, a T Shirt site which produces and retails T Shirts would be able to take out a PPC account with Stumble and start sending people to their pages which rate the best T Shirts. The Stumbler would more often than not bookmark the site if they liked the shirts. Compare this with a car insurance website, the retention would drop significantly.

The best thing to do is join Stumbleupon, browse for an hour – and you will have a great idea about what will and will not sell over there.

Marketing software you may have heard of…

SEO and marketing software has become quite prolific in the last few years, as more people want to get a web presence that will actually bring visitors in, rather than being an online document thats only good for directions to a company’s offices. Amazingly, people assume that the more you spend on SEO software, the better it is. It is quite the opposite. Some high priced software actually has the same features as a couple of free tools – and that’s the truth. You will have heard these two names mentioned a lot on SEO forums, and Internet Marketing sites.

Traffic Travis and SENuke.

Let us first look at SENuke. This software bypasses SEO altogether and virtually brute forces your website on to Google’s page one by creating hundreds of links and web 2.0 content with your backlink attached. Not only will over-use of a system like this get you sandboxed by Google, but it may also happen when you least expect it (like 3 months into having a good ranking position and after you have earned Adsense money). By creating hundreds of backlinks too quickly, you are openly telling Google that you are indeed using sites to gain links – and this is against Google’s TOS. Whilst SENuke is a massively popular tool that works – you need to use it carefully. SENuke costs over $100 per month.

Another piece of software that is still doing the rounds is Traffic Travis. Whilst this tool does not optimise your site in any way, it goves you a clear cut advantage over some competitors by telling you how their site got to page one in the first place. You will find out how many backlinks the site has, and how many outbound links – along with the age & pagerank of each site in the top 10 or 20. This allows you to put together a campaign that will simply out-link and out-perform what your competitors have. Traffic Travis is available as a free tool with an upgrade being optional.

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