Shane Navratil On PPC Engines

Hey, this is Shane and I write Zoomstart. I'm sure quite a few people are going to take advantage of Jeremy's open call to write a guest post here on ShoeMoney about PPC and many will probably write about AdSense. AdSense is easy. I like easy. And the easier the better. That's always been the real secret of Google's success. But it's also the secret behind StumbleUpon. The hardest thing about it is probably finding the ad page in the first place. Here's the ad page. Being a little difficult to find from the homepage makes it a little more valuable ... maybe ... sorta ... who knows what the thinking is there. But who cares. Let's get into it ... Stumbling With Dollars Paypal dollars that is. Once you sign up, it's a simple matter to create a campaign. Just choose the URL you want to advertise, pick a category and add funds to your account using Paypal. A Stumble costs 5 cents. So for 50 bucks you can bring in 1000 viewers. I usually throw 50 bucks at it once a month and divide that between 2 or 3 different posts. You have to assign your landing page to a category. The main categories are:

Arts
Commerce
Computers
Health
Living
Media
Recreation
Sci/Tech
Society

Each of those categories is divided into a lot of sub-categories. Since I write about business mostly, I'll usually select Commerce > Entrepreneurship or Commerce > Business. Once in a while I'll throw out a post about blogging and select the category Computers > Weblogs. Every campaign has to be pre-approved before it goes live. So submit your best stuff, and make sure you submit it into a relevant category. And it could take a couple days, so be patient. The Little Extra And The Big Zoom One of the great benefits of StumbleUpon is that if people really like you're post, they'll vote for it and review it. And that can stretch your ad dollars out. I've gotten 2000 visits for 50 bucks over a few days thanks to the StumbleUpon community. I'm sure others do even better than that. In addition, you can gain a few more RSS subscribers and receive a few links and comments on your post. Stumblers are a new media crowd. And if you really strike a chord like Freelance Switch did, you'll get the word out there on your pillar posts and your little Stumbling campaign will roll right on into Del.icio.us or one of the other social bookmarking sites. StumbleUpon is a little different than most PPC advertising options because it's surrounded by a social community. And that community is what gives it a special little edge and creates a unique opportunity potential. ... Course, you could always just write a guest post for ShoeMoney too.