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StumbleAds is the paid advertisement section of the free Stumbleupon toolbar. I have always received ample amounts of free traffic from the use and abuse Stumbleupon technique, but I have never tested the paid version until now. I decided to do a $60 test run to see what kind of results I would get and report them here.

StumbleAds charges a set price of 5 cents per unique visitor that comes to your site. This is a great price because the visitors are selected from the niche you relate to. I put the $60 test run to my WordHugger site to see if getting 1200 targeted visitors I would be able to sell one page and make my money back. In my past experience, I have around a 1% purchase rate (for every 100 visitors, one buys a word at $60) so by this statistic I should sell 12 pages and earn $720 revenue. I assumed I might even get lucky and sell more because rather than having 100 unrelated visitors, I would have 100 targeted (”Investing” niche) visitors who would be more inclined to buy something in their interest. If some of the 1200 visitors didn’t even buy a page but enjoyed the site, they could Stumble the site themselves sending even more traffic and customers to my site.

I was wrong… big time, and although I can’t prove it, it appears the system may have scammed me. The $60 budget was supposed to send 300 visitors (more if some of them stumbled the site) per day, but my Google Analytics shows 281, 249, 237, and 268 which means I paid for 165 visitors that I did not receive. The visitors only stayed on my site for an average of 29 seconds when the sitewide average is 2 1/2 minutes. I did not receive a single sale and no feedback from the visitors. For all I know, StumbleAds sent a few hundred robots to sit on my page for a few seconds and then close the window.

Well, it looks like I am not the only one who has had a bad experience with the Stumbleupon Paid Advertising Experience, so it looks like I will go back to using and abusing the website, but moving my paid advertising budget somewhere else.

I believe most of you have already realized that the posting schedule has been a bit slow during this holiday week. I will be trying to get back on my one-post-a-day minimum routine again as soon as possible.

Another reason that I have been partly neglecting my blog for a few days is because I have just recently acquired my first Facebook application. I am now the proud owner of the Online Arcade application. I have been spending a lot of time adding and configuring everything, but it looks like it should be fully functional and ready to market within 24 hours.

The application is pretty simple. It displays tons of free flash games that you can play in your browser (even inside your Facebook window). Nearly everyone has gotten bored on the computer and enjoyed a flash game at one point or another, so I know the marketing potential is big enough to go after. I am not sure what my final goal for the application is… whether to sell it, keep it, or use it to cross promote something else, but it was a cheap experiment that I might have regretted passing up so I decided to take the leap.

I will let you all know how the promotion turns out in a future blog post. I hope everyone had a great Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) vacation.

This is a guest post by Ethan Christ who blogs over at Poetry 2.0. Ethan is currently running an After Christmas Contest Giveaway with a $50 adsense voucher prize.

Without traffic, your website is just taking up space. If zero people read what you post, then why even bother posting it? Today I am not going to talk about various ways to promote your blog, but rather I am going to tell you what sparks a reader’s interests and keeps a surge of traffic coming to my blog. The answer is simple: Controversy.

If I were to give you two articles to read; one article being about how to tune a guitar, the other a very opinionated negative review of Hostgator and their abuse, which would you prefer to read or react to?

The first article of mine has had around 300 pageviews in the 3 months that it has been posted. The opinionated one was posted at the end of November and currently has had over 8000 pageviews. So is it worth it to write something that people aren’t necessarily all going to agree with? In my experience, it is worth well around 7,700 pageviews more!

Now note that while ‘Abuse Hostgator’ has had 8,000+ pageviews, that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you write a review of a popular company, you’re going to get that much traffic. Nothing in the online world is concrete, and things are always changing. One thing remains, people love controversy. How many times have you stumbled through the blogosphere to find a post that you completely disagreed with, and you told others about it as well? Now just imagine, based on the aforementioned question, what do you think would happen if you wrote an article others disagreed with.

Controversy in the blogosphere can become viral real quick if the content is good enough. Not every controversial article you write will get the same results, you have to pick and choose on what you think people will want to read about. Even though your article may seem as if others will disagree with it doesn’t mean they won’t read it.

So Do You Want Traffic?

• Write a controversial post.
• Type up your rough draft.
• Proof read it! (Don’t be like John Chow and use incorrect grammar)
• Publish your post.
• Submit to social networking sites (Stumbleupon, Mixx, etc…)
• Watch your analytics reports for the next few days

Once you get your article posted, you’re going to need to let people know about it. If you’ve already got a pretty popular blog/website, you probably don’t need to do this as some of your readers will probably do it before you get a chance. If you aren’t so lucky to have a steady stream of traffic that reads every post, you need to get some. Submit your post anywhere you can without seeming like a spammer. Write a guest post and cleverly insert a link to your post, but make sure the link is relevant to your post or else that just makes you a dirty spammer. If you think your article is good enough, email some of the bigger blogs and see if they’ll link to your post. Basically, promote that post just as you would your homepage.

This post isn’t telling you to go out and start writing negative reviews just for the hell of. It’s not telling to you lie. This post is meant to inform you of what attracts readers. It’s never a good idea to just post a bunch of lies, that destroys your credibility, but if you have a true story about a negative experience with a popular company or even a popular blogger, post it. You never know what the response is going to be.

So what brings more traffic? A bland article, or a hot story on how some big company screwed you over?!

If you would like to submit your own guest post to be featured on Mixed Market Arts, please visit the guest post page.

 Update: Looks like its set to private now,  oh well!

The SEO Blackhat Forums which normally cost $100/month to see are now free during Christmas according to their most recent blog post. If you are into unethical blackhat search engine optimizing, you can go register for their forums and skim over everything before it locks again (sometime tonight) and begins charging $100/m again.

I would never pay $100/m to join a forum when I am sure the majority of the material is on other forums for free, but I will gladly sign up and browse when the getting is good! They did not say if the free registration ended exactly at midnight, all they said was “for the next couple hours,” so you best hurry if you want a sneak peak.