Your Website Profit

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It is generally thought that traffic from the social media - Digg, StumbleUpon etc. - is difficult to monetize. Stumblers don’t click AdSense ads. That is true, but there are ways to make money with StumbleUpon traffic.

You should first look at the ways you monetize your website at the moment, and compare traffic stats for a day with increased Stumble traffic with the earning stats. If the average earnings per visitor is the same as for other days, there’s nothing to worry: you are monetizing your StumbleUpon traffic fine already.

If, on the other hand, your average earnings per visitor are significantly lower for days with increased StumbleUpon traffic, you need to monetize it more effectively. The following ways work for Stumblers, too.

Make Them an Offer They Cannot Refuse

While Stumblers are less likely to click AdSense ads, they are also more tech savvy. If you can make them interested enough in a product or service, they may well buy it. This means that affiliate programs, or better yet, your own products are the way to go.

The success depends much on grabbing the attention and making a great offer. Stumblers are going to leave instantly, if they see nothing interesting, and are not going to fall for “one time offer” baits as easily.

Monetize Traffic, Not Visitors

Though that may sound contradictory, it is an easy way to monetize Stumble traffic. If you use Google AdSense for your advertising, you are trying to lure the visitors into clicking ads. CPM ads or monthly ad spots are sold based on traffic instead of individual visitors.

The problem is that most CPM networks only accept high traffic websites. Therefore it may be best to sell ads on a monthly basis, if your site does not get high traffic. You can do this yourself (like I do) by creating a page where you sell the ads.

Use SU for Link Building

The third way is to monetize the traffic indirectly. Use StumbleUpon to popularize link bait articles. If your content is good enough, those Stumblers who have their own blog or website may link to it. Those links are not direct money to you, but worth money for SEO reasons and traffic.

Even if you don’t get links, the fact that some of the stumblers will like or review your page gives you links from StumbleUpon. Those links are nofollow, but they will still affect your page’s relevancy and increase crawler activity.

In Conclusion

Monetizing StumbleUpon traffic is less straightforward than monetizing search engine traffic. If you succeed though, you can take full advantage of social media marketing. The same principles apply to traffic from other social bookmarking sites too. The ways above are only the ones I consider most effective. If you have more ideas, please share them in the comments.

by Sutocu | November 30, 2007