Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Advertisements, Advertising, Advertising Networks, Blog Marketing Journal, Paid Advertising, Paid Bookmarking, Paid Media, Paid Placement, Paid Stumbling, StumbleLove, StumbleUpon

I quickly realized that StumbleUpon is the coolest and hottest social bookmarking service nobody has heard of.  I love it but I don’t nearly use it enough: either as a stumbler or as a marketer. I found this on Blog Marketing Journal and thought I would open it up to you:

In case you are not familiar with the concept, StumbleUpon allows you to pay for visitors to your pages, five cents per visitor or click. The question is, do you consider this to be a simple form of paid advertising, or paid social bookmarking.

I have done some experiments with paid Stumbling and what BMJ says is true:

If you set a limit of $20 per day, you will get 400 visitors. They may stay on your page or they may spend five seconds and disappear. Where the situations changes is when they thumbs up your page. That’s a stumble and can lead to more than just the 400 visitors.

So, in this case, content is key, and good content will result in conversions and interest.  If you just throw money at it without thinking your content or strategy through, you will be disappointed with the results, especially since there’s nobody on the planet more savvy than the gang from StumbleUpon — these are earl-adopters and are just the people you want to love you but these are the worse people to piss off. Just because you’re paying to have your content promoted doesn’t mean that people are prevented from digging the content down (thumbs-down) or writing scathing comments.

Read more…

No Comments » Posted on July 6th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Google, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Google Search, Paid Media, SEM, SEM and SEO, SEO, SEO and SEM, SERM, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo!, search

My guess is a tentative, temporary yes.

If you aren’t clued in yet, Yahoo! and Google have come to an agreement that allows Yahoo! to display Google paid search results on keyword queries on Yahoo! Yahoo! can now tap into Adsense and Adwords. The agreement is for 10 years and is not exclusive, meaning that Yahoo can create similar agreements with other parties.

There are pluses and minuses to this agreement. But for now, let’s focus on smaller agenices that serve smaller businesses and smaller businesses themselves.

The upside is that there could be less to learn and more reach for small advertisers. Using paid search can get you results on Yahoo! It may be unnecessary to do anything broad-based. That’s a good thing. It may make it easier to enter the arena of local search.

As AdAge points out:

When Google search ads are mixed in with Yahoo search ads for a particular search query, Google will almost always win the better placement, according to search marketers, because it has a better ad-matching and monetization engine. And if Google consistently wins, marketers may be less inclined to bother using the Yahoo system, instead choosing to put their optimization efforts toward a single system. In other words, less to learn, less to manage.

That’s the good part.

Now the down side. It could get more expensive to place search ads. Google’s system tends to be more expensive - and effective than Yahoo’s! That expensiveness will now be extended into the Yahoo! sphere, likely devaluing Yahoo’s! own paid search results.

My thoughts are that, at least initially, this will bode well for locals who are looking to add paid search to their mix. I’m thinking that because I’m guessing the biggest barrier is lack of knowledge on how start off effectively…as opposed to cost.

But that benefit may not last for long if competition becomes to intense for localized keyword searches. Because this does decrease paid search alternatives.

No Comments » Posted on June 17th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn


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