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I love reading all the different blogs about using StumbleUpon. By and large, most of them are written by business bloggers, people who hope to, or are already making a living by blogging. Some of these business people LOVE StumbleUpon. They think it’s the best thing since white bread. Others say they can’t see what the fuss is about. They’re getting the hits, but that’s it.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I love learning. If I find a site where I can learn a lot, I’ll hang out often, trying to learn as much as I can about almost anything. I’ll freely admit I’m new to a lot of the ideas of Internet Marketing, and I’ve learned a lot in a short time by listening (or reading) as people discuss their own businesses. Recently, one of my IM friends mentioned that a good estimate is to figure that for each 1 sale you make, you need to have 200 people visit your site. So, if you want 10 sales, you need 2000 people to visit…that’s a lot of people!

Of course, that’s where the social web comes in. Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg can make a site rush to the top of the popularity chart and bring in scads of hits. The problem comes if you’re not really ready for those hits (I’ve watched the Digg effect in action…not pretty) or if you can’t use them.

And now I can hear some of you going, “But of course I can use them…its just that they’re not doing anything. They visit my page and then poof! They don’t even explore the site or click on any links or anything.”

I think the thing a lot of people don’t think about is that the majority of social sites are specialized. News or Tech sites like Digg are extremely specialized. If you want to sell something to those visitors, it needs to fit the page they’re visiting. Not the website, the page. For instance, I doubt I’d sell many copies of Stumbling for Beginners to someone who reached this page from Digg. On the pages geared towards beginners though, it would probably do well.

Sites like StumbleUpon aren’t quite as specialized. With SU, you have people visiting who are interested in a topic, not because they read an interesting title or the blurb about it caught their interest. So as long as your whole site is about that topic, you’re probably going to have people from SU visiting more than one page.

Here on SU Com, I discovered how fun it is to look at the number of visitors I get. I have several stat sites that I enjoy checking, seeing where everyone is from and even what operating system most of my visitors use. It’s fun getting lots of visitors and watching the numbers go up. The only problem is that sometimes the focus can become trying to raise the numbers instead of trying to take care of visitors. I am not a number. I am a person. I’m not entirely sure about you, but unless you’re a googlebot, I suspect you’re probably a person also. And as a person, you’ve probably come here because you want to learn more about Stumbling or something I said or did caught your eye.

Now, if you’re a googlebot, I don’t have to worry. You’re going to explore every page, probably in more depth than I’d like. If you’re a person though, I have to give you a reason to keep reading. Making a post that’s designed to attract Digg users or SU users without the rest of the site offering similar content won’t do me any good, even if it does raise my stat numbers.

Also, and for some people this is a very important point, bringing in SU users and probably Digg users as well, is unlikely to help increase your profits if you are relying on insta-ads (Adsense, etc.). I can’t find the statistic I thought I’d bookmarked before, but I believe it was 75% of SU users use Firefox. I can easily believe this to be true, since 97% of all of you who visit my site use Firefox. I also can’t find any stats for the number of firefox users who use Adblock (my research skills seem to be suffering today), but judging from the complaints I’ve been hearing about SU users on many sites, I’d say a decent percentage of SU users also use Adblock to block insta-ads.

So, where does this leave you if you are trying to make money by blogging? Well, first, I’d keep in mind this comment I came across while trying to find the above statistics:

People need to get past the idea that every single visitor needs to be monetized. Instead, recognize the indirect benefits of having more users. Even if a Firefox user doesn’t buy something or click on an ad, he or she may tell someone else about the site and they may click on an ad or buy something. Word of mouth is an ongoing process — and even if someone doesn’t directly contribute to the revenue of a site, the fact that they potentially could cause others to drive revenue is the key.

Second, I’d suggest looking at how Adblock works, specifically how an ad is disabled on Adblock. Why? Because it’s very easy for me to disable insta-ads…one click and I don’t have to see any ads that didn’t require the poster to do some work (yes, I am very outspoken in my dislike of insta-ads. For the majority of bloggers, it’s not hard to prove that the space given to the ad company would bring in a lot more profits if other ads were utilized). I know the Adblock site argues against putting any ads on your page, and by and large, it’s not that difficult to block every ad, but most people I know don’t do that. What most people I know of (and I’m guessing the majority of people) do is to block the big companies who overwhelm you with ads, and just forget about the sponsor type ads…and even, occasionally, click on the ads if there’s one that catches our fancy.

So, to sum everything up, how can this help you to market to StumbleUpon users?

1) Don’t try to draw the SU crowd with gimmicks. Yes, a lot of us like fun sites, and you’ll get a lot of hits if you put something fun on your site. But fun doesn’t equate to click-throughs, which you’re more likely to get if you draw me with real content.

2) Have several posts that reflect the content I’m there to see, and make sure whatever you’re selling on that page reflects that content also. Make the other posts on the subject easy to find, don’t make me search for the content I’m interested in…I’ll go somewhere else that doesn’t make me do that.

3) Forget about insta-ads. There’s a good chance we won’t even see them. Make your ads applicable to the areas we’re interested in, the subject of your articles. Don’t use pop-ups, pop-up blocking was one of the main reasons I first started using Firefox way back when.

4) (One I forgot to mention earlier.) Join SU if you haven’t already, then check out the reviews for your page. See what people have said. Look at the tags and see if the page is tagged right. If not, send a report and suggest the correct category (this is a very important step, since many of the stumblers who visit will come because the category is something they’re interested in).

Studying the stats for this blog lately, I have noticed a very interesting statistic.

97% of my readers use Firefox.

Now, to me, that makes perfect sense. I’m a die-hard Firefox fan. I fell in love with it the first time I discovered add-ons for it. The add-ons turn Firefox from a rather slow, memory hogging browser (yes, I’m aware of it’s drawbacks) into a system that can do everything I could want and then some. Plus, I first found StumbleUpon while looking through the Firefox add-ons.

One of my very favorite add-ons (and I’m sure it’s a favorite of many of you) is Adblock Plus. What it does is block all the ads that drive you crazy when you’re web surfing.

I’ve been using Adblock for so long that I don’t even think about it anymore. In fact, the only reason I’m talking about it now is that I’ve been studying the various types of web ads for a project I’m working on. So, I started talking to some friends who use Adsense and various other types of insta-ads on their sites.

While I was talking to them, I discovered something. Several were getting StumbleUpon traffic, but very little of the traffic was turning into sales. It wasn’t until one friend asked me to look at his site and tell me what I thought, that I started to realize what the problem was. I couldn’t see an ad on the whole site. Not one. Checking back over the other sites, I noticed the same “problem.” No ads.

Now, I don’t know if you’re like me. I can’t stand insta-ads. I love having the ability not to see them. On the other hand, I understand that there are people out there who work as hard at blogging or harder at blogging as many of us do at other jobs. They try to give their readers interesting and informative content, and hope that some enjoy their blog enough to click on an ad or perhaps buy a product. Understand, I’m not talking about spam blogs, I’m talking about many of the blogs we love, such as Coffee with Allan Cockerill or Ooh! Shiny!

I know my own opinion is that I will read a hand-written ad. I don’t even mind the sponsor ads in their little square boxes. And an interesting banner ad has the possibility of grabbing my attention, as long as it doesn’t use flash, since it’s unlikely I’ll turn flash on to view it. I just can’t stand pop-ups or insta-ads. But that’s just me, and after studying this some, I’m really curious. What do you think? Do you use Adblock or a similiar program? Do you mind the insta-ads? What ads are your particular pet peeves? What ads will you actually pay attention to? And why do people use space for insta-ads if so many people hate them?