You may not even have realised that Stumbleupon.com offer an advertising option,

I didn’t until last week, when I found out thanks to Yaro Stark.

obviously I needed to go and have a play to see whether it’s an undiscovered gem of traffic, or not…

You can listen to my thoughts about the results I received on the short podcast below, it’s less than 4 minutes long, so you shouldn’t fall asleep..

But I’ll give a quick written summary of my results as well.

first it’s worth noting that you’re not paying for “ad displays” or even clicks on ads, you’re paying for actual visitors to your site, as your site is added to the selection of sites in your chosen category that are presented to Stumbleupon users to “stumble” and vote on

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well, it’s been long enough now and I’ve come to a decision on one of the traffic widgets that I’ve been testing..

I’ve just removed the Link2Blogs widget from my BlogTactics site as the results suggest it’s losing me far more traffic than it’s bringing in:

213 visitors sent to other blogs, and only 10 incoming visitors from Link2blogs.

I’ve replaced it with Jon Ledger’s Real Traffic Exchange to see how this fairs on the site, as I’ve been getting “Click Through Rates” (CTR) as high as 1.3% on other blogs that I’ve got this on.

RTE hasn’t actually sent me any visitors yet, but that’s simply because I hadn’t set up any “ads” for the system to display yet, as I wanted to build up some credits first..

I’ve now got a nice little credit balance with them, so I’ve just created an add for the system and I’ll report back here once I’ve got some results worth posting about..

I haven’t done an update on Neil Shearings Auto Smart Script Sites since Nov 30th last year, so I thought it’s probably time to check how they’re doing and post an update, so here it is…

As a quick reminder, the Auto Smart Sites script is only available as a “One Time Offer” when you buy Neil’s Passive Cashflow Secrets videos, which is an excellent product in itself, I use many of the techniques shown in the videos to make a good passive cashflow in my own business.

Now I happen to know that Neil is developing a new updated version of the smart site script, which I believe he will be selling on it’s own, but probably at a higher price, so I’d highly recommend you grab the original “OTO” and make sure you get the upgrade for free as soon as it’s available…

Back at the end of November last year I posted an article about protecting your webcopy from black hat sites scrapers.

I’ve now been testing this system for over 6 weeks on numerous sites and blogs of my own with great success, and we now have some other large site owners beta testing for us and it’s all looking very good.

In fact I was surprised by just how many attempts to scrape some of my sites there have been!

This tool also has the added advantage of being able to block unwanted spiders and bots (like the huge Chinese SE Baiduspider) from sucking your sites bandwidth…

CopyDefender is in the final stages of testing and we’re planning on launching the system publicly in March. There will be a fully functional free version, with a paid premium version for extra features, so if you want to get on the priority launch notice list simply visit CopyDefender and sign up there.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve taken the shoutbox off http://iamuncovered.com as it doesn’t seem to be catching anyone’s attention, and I’ve found something new to put in it’s place and test out - WidgetBucks.

although the ad I’ve placed on IAMUncovered.com is just for the WidgetBucks program itself, as the “widget ads” aren’t so well suited for the internet marketing “niche”, they do have some pretty good options available for other markets though, especially techie stuff like TV’s, Home Theatre, Computers, Laptops, Cameras etc.

I’ve added the targeted ads to a couple of my blogs in suitable niches to see how well they perform compared to the ads I’m running tests on for the NeverBlueAds network. I’ll report back as soon as I’ve got any significant results.

For the moment I would recommend getting in on WidgetBucks, as at the moment they’re offering a $25 bonus ofr signing up.

The Alexa rank of my sites and blogs doesn’t worry me too much, as I know from my traffic stats that what the Alexa rank does each update can be totally unrelated to what the traffic is doing, I’ve had sites increase in real traffic and have the Alexa score get worse, and vice versa.

Having said that, it can be seen as a form of “social proof” for you site or blog, giving visitors an idea of how popular your site is, inacurate or not.

It can also help if you monetize your blog or site through certain forms of advertising, such as PayPerPost or selling text links.

So increasing your alexa rank could potentially have a positive effect on the value of your site for both your visitors and advertisers.

With this in mind I thought I’d run a test on a Wordpress plugin that is supposed to help increase your sites Alexa rank.

I installed a shoutbox on one of my more popular blogs a couple of months ago to try it out and see what reaction it received and so far there has only been one comment made…

and the comment that was made is “I make webmasters money…”, which I assume is someone’s attempt at “Shoutbox” spam, although I’m not sure why someone would bother as there’s no link back to a site, only to an email address.

So I’ve gotta conclude that a shoutbox isn’t worth the space it takes up in my sidebar and I can replace it with something else.

I’ll be taking the shoutbox off the site shortly, but I’ll leave it up for a few days just in case this post generates any interest and you want to check out what it looks like, tyou can have a play with it here:

http://iamuncovered.com

BlogRush v RealTrafficExchange v Link2Blogs Traffic Widget Test

I’ve had BlogRush (from John Reese), RealTrafficExchange (from Jon Leger) and Link2Blogs (from Cody Moya) each installed on three separate blogs for the last couple of months to try and work out which is best for bringing in some new traffic to my blogs.

I installed each widget on three separate blogs with similar levels of traffic, in different markets to try and make sure the test was a reasonable comparison.

It’s not easy to compare the results as each system presents the “Stats” in a different way, with Link2Blogs being by far the worst for stats as there is no indication of the number of impressions your “ads” have had..

BlogRush is probably the best known of the three and the reporting is quite clear.

The average CTR (Click Through Rate) across all three blogs on BlogRush was a pretty measly 0.04%, and the highest achieved on any individual post was only 0.2%

It seems there’s a new player on the block that might be a very effective alternative to AdSense.

It’s called PayPerPlay Ads (http://www.payperplayadverts.com) and they’re already picking up some very big name advertisers like HBO, Taco Bell, and Harley Davidson.

To be fair, it’s not a new system, I did a bit of digging and it’s actually been around for over two years, it’s just getting a lot of news now as it’s being backed by a big search engine partner.

the basic idea is you add a bit of code to your site and when a new visitor lands on any page with that code they get played a 5 second audio advert.

the important bit is that you get paid for every visiter to your site.

Back on the 26th September I wrote about setting up some sites using a new script from Neil Shearing, it’s the “one time offer” for his Passive Cashflow Systems product (you can read the earlier article here - Smart Auto Site Builder).

As it’s been a month or so I thought I better go and check it out and see how well it’s done for me.

I’m happy to say it’s doing pretty darned fine!

The total AdSense earnings from the sites I set up with this tool for October were just over $30 and over $90 for november, which is pretty respectable considering the sites have only been running for 2 months and should still do better in the coming months.

I haven’t done any promotion for these sites, no backlinks or anything, although they were already indexed by google when I set them up.