Impact of StumbleUpon to Drive Targeted Traffic

Posted on May 19th, 2008 in Social Media Optimization

I loved and used StumbleUpon for several months before it suddenly dawned on me that I never did use it the way the designer’s intended. I was amazed to find so many other people who think like I think and knew what I knew. Where else can you find others who think like you? What other site attracts so many brilliant geeks?

Adding these awesome stumblers as friends willy-nilly, I did not realize they would be inundated with all the pages I linked in. I used it as a giant annotated bookmark site for organizing a huge amount of research on a wide range of subjects. While I regularly reviewed and added sites I found in other Stumbler’s blogs, I almost never clicked Stumble! and I have never stumbled only in any particular stumblers pages.

What is StumbleUpon?

Stumbleupon Official LogoStumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click StumbleUpon Stumble, they deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. Stumbleupon also has features where you can associate your account with other “friends” via the stumbleupon.com site. This allows you to see updates they make to their webpage, you can see also what they are stumbling.

Stumbleupon toolbar is may be what makes Stumbleupon really special form other social bookmarking website, stumbleupon users have the ability to give websites a thumbs up or a thumbs down as they surf the internet. It tracks the votes and then uses that information later when a user clicks on a stumble button on that same toolbar, stumble also this will take them to random WebPages that other users have given a thumbs ups for.

Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. By surfing the web and tagging or submitting specific websites, each user can keep track of which websites they like and share it with others.

StumbleThru - Site Specific Stumbling

What about you? Do you click Stumble? Do you Stumble-Thru particular sites or other Stumblers blogs? How do you use SU? I would love to know and I bet there are tons of others who would too so leave a comment or drop a link to your own posts about SU and/or to your SU blog. I will correct any format or length errors. Anyone who ends up here will be a serious SU fan so there is no telling who you can meet and what great blogs you will discover.

Atumble Thru

How much do you know about StumbleUpon? Did you know: When ebay bought StumbleUpon for about $75 million many wondered why and others started paying attention if they weren’t already. SearchEngineJournal shed light on why with an interview with StumbleUpon’s CEO titled StumbleUpon Defined vs. Digg, Google, MySpace and more and followed that up with Five Reasons Why Marketers Should Take an Interest in StumbleUpon.
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How To: Pull Sales Revenue Source by Keyword with Google Analytics

Posted on May 16th, 2008 in How-to Tips for Bloggers, Web Analytics

Knowing where your buyers are coming from can assist you in increasing your sales. This is a fast, easy way to compare PPC driven sales to organic sales. Monitoring these amounts can alert you to any significant changes in your conversion rates or drops in your ad positions or organic placement. This is especially useful if you have specific products or keywords that drive a large percentage of your sales.

There is no right or wrong split between organic and PPC. Which generates more sales for you will depend on how well you have optimized your traffic from each source. Large Search Engine Marketing (SEM) companies usually mention sales average 60-65% from organic and 35-40% from PPC. If you have focused on running a very effective PPC campaign PPC may be driving 60+% of your sales.

To view PPC versus organic sales revenue in Google Analytics:

1. Log into Google Analytics Account
2. Select the domain you wish to check
3. On the left click on Traffic Sources, then Keywords
4. GA defaults to Site Usage so that tab is highlighted. Click on the Ecommerce tab
5. This views how you the total revenue driven by each keyword for the time period selected.
6. Find Segment which defaults to Keyword and change it to Medium
7. This view shows you how much of your current revenue comes from each source.
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HitTail launched AdWords Optimization Product

Posted on May 15th, 2008 in Google Adword, Keyword Tool

Hittail Today, Connors Communications has launched new PPC search marketing product, HitTail Premium, which will allow you to export keyword suggestions directly into a Google AdWords campaign from the HitTail interface. Premium will also give users the ability to separate and examine their organic search hits from their paid search hits, allowing for even faster analysis of your site traffic. For AdWords users who are running ads with the Broad Match feature turned on, this is a particularly useful way to determine which terms are actually converting into clicks.

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How to Adjust Image and Text Placement

Posted on May 7th, 2008 in How-to Tips for Bloggers

The first issue many new bloggers (and anyone else building a Web page) will run into is how text appears next to an inserted image. If you already know how to adjust white space and wrap text around images you can skip this entry. I know it is old hat to you but some of us need this information. So, you figure out how to insert an image but it looks like this:

There is white space above this line and this text starts too close to the image. If you already know html this is easy to fix. If you don’t you may be stopped right there or just leave it that way. Getting more lines of text into that white space is called “wrapping” text around an image.

This is how to do it:

1. Switch to html view (a tab labeled “code” in WordPress)
2. Find the line that says <img src=” - after the alt=”whatever” add these words: align=”left”

Adding that align=left changes where your text starts and allows you to have multiple lines of text next to your image as you see here.
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Prosper202 FREE PPC Keyword Tracking Software

Posted on May 6th, 2008 in Affiliate Tools, Google Adword, Pay Per Click

Most of you have heard of Tracking202 from Wes Mahler. The main disadvantage was you needed to host you data on their server.

Prosper202 is a self-hosted PPC tracking solution, it is the same code used on Tracking202. It is an online tool to help you track you keyword and campaign performance with pay per click. This software is powerful, self-hosted and fast.

With Prosper202 you can upload your sale stats from affiliates into and also your paid keyword stats from adword into and be able to clearly see how you’re profiting or where you’re losing.

Prosper202 is a free PPC keyword tracking application from Wes Mahler and his crew. It’s the same people that created Tracking202 but Prosper202 allows you to host the application directly on your hosting account if your not willing or are feeling nervous about your keyword information being out there on someone else’s server.

It also comes with Export202 which allows you to duplicate PPC campaigns from network to network.

Prosper202 Key Features:

• Works with Every Single PPC Network Out There!
• Cloaks Keywords from Advertisers and Affiliate Networks keeping them a secret!
• Works with Landing Pages or With Direct Linking!

It seems like a great tool, I’ve only been able to play around with it for a little while but I definitely think you should check out the service being provided by Prosper202 if you’re in need of a great keywords tracking application.
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