So on Friday I invested $25 in some Stumbleupon Ads to promote my new religious social networking website, Relphy.

To be honest I wasn’t really expecting that much from the service as the site is currently a mess. Not forgetting that I was only paying $0.03 for a click. Also, feedback of the effectiveness of the service has been mixed across the web.

So how did my campaign work out?

Over the course of 12 hours the site used up it’s 500 Stumbles, receiving 15 thumbs-up and 7 thumbs-down attaining a 67% feedback ratio overall. Not bad.

However arguably the best thing about the campaign is that Relphy is continuing to receive traffic from Stumbleupon. Whether this will continue or not is another thing altogether. I’m currently receiving about 20-30 visits a day from Stumbleupon. Before the campaign this was more like 0-5 a day.

Am I cynical in thinking that Stumbleupon might filter the amount of free traffic going to your website just to ‘encourage’ you to invest more in their campaigns?

Probably.

Impressions

I’d tend to agree with Naffzinger in that the service works well because of its simplicity. It’s also strangely compelling watching the graphs move. If you’re anything like me you’ll spend hours on end refreshing the page.

Overall I think my campaign worked so well because the site wasn’t already popular with Stumbleupon users. I’d definitely recommend it to people who have just recently launched sites that have no presence in Stumbleupon.

If your site is already popular in Stumbleupon you might see more mixed results. Still, I think there are worse (and less fun) ways to invest $25 on promoting your site.

And I’m currently trying to integrate my blog properly into my website. At the minute my site is in quite a state but I’m gradually getting there.

My portfolio site is run off the CakePHP rapid development framework. It’s pretty cool all-in-all but I’m worried about it’s performance. Hopefully it doesn’t slow down too much just in case SOMEONE actually decided to visit the page.

Anyway I think that’s enough yammering for now. Back to work on the site.