Blog Templates Reviews

I decided to spend 25USD to experiment with paying for traffic to this blog. After seeing what StumbleUpon can do after someone stumble your blog, I went and created a campaign with StmbleUpon. The charge is 0.05 cents per visitor, so I opted for the default value of USD25.00 which should buy me 500 visitors. I started the campaign at about 8.30 am this morning and on about 11 am, I received an e-mail from StumbleUpon that my USD25.00 has dried up and I got to add more funds in order for the campaign to carry on. I was ecstatic! Within 2 1/2 hours, 500 people have visited my blog! Well, THINK OTHERWISE!!

With excited fingers, I opened this blog, expecting to find some comments or feed backs and what did I find? One miserable comment. I could not believe it! 500 hits and 1 comment? There must be some mistake. So I headed over to check my stats. It showed I had only 144 unique visitors then last one coming in at about then time I received the notification to top up from StumbleUpon.

Not happy with my findings, I went back to my campaign page to double check. The statistics there differs greatly from my own Stats. It shows that I have indeed used up my 500 visitors quota.

Now, either I don’t understand how StumbleUpon define their so called 500 views or the statscounter that I am using is not reporting the correct figures. If they say “views today” is defined as Page Views and not Unique Visitors, then I feel I have been short changed. I mean, anyone can come and view more than 10 or 20 pages can’t they? Either way, Statcounter only recorded 166 pageloads over 137 first time visitors. That means, nearly all the 137 who came, all left after taking a peek, without checking out other posts.

There is no avenue for me to argue, nor to I plan to argue with StumbleUpon. It was suppose to be an experiment after all. I consider it an experiment gone awry. Just for fun’s sake, lets just say, I did get 500 visitors this morning. Will they be ever coming back? I can tell you this. I don’t think so. One, I don’t think there is anything here that have captured their imagination enough to come back for more. Two, like all traffic of this kind, whether paid or someone stumbled you, it’s just a flash in the pan. It’s good for a day or two then it back to square one, unless you keep paying daily that is.

The conclusion I reached from an experiment like this is. No More Paying For Traffic. It is Just not Worth It. The old Formula still works best. Good Contents, then wait for free traffic. It might take years, but what you get will be almost all permanent and loyal readers.

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