A while back I had considered using StumbleUpon for directly Stumbling my own affiliate links. When you get a direct affiliate link for a product or service I figured there was probably no easier way to pimp it out than StumbleUpon right? Wrong.

Although, I had braced for the possibility that this was going to be frowned upon by Stumble so I decided to do it from a different IP address and account than I have my actual stumble account on. Just to be cautious.

Anyways, my plan was to use forums that had little Stumble groups to get a bunch of people to Stumble 4 of my affiliate links for various internet products. Each product was correctly categorized in Stumble for my target markets, with good buying term tags for them each. I probably was able to pick up a good 75-100 Stumbles for my links and was pretty proud of myself. This was really just a test to see if Stumblers actually went for these types of programs when they were randomly selected to see it.

After about a week I think I tracked approximately 1500 views from Stumble directly to my aff links. Really not quite as high as I had expected, but none-the-less, a pretty good picture of noticing a small trend at least. My purchase rate on these particular affiliates for PPC campaigns was around 8% so it wasn’t exactly a sure thing either way. How many sales did they create? Zero.

What else happened? Surprisingly there must have been a rash of “Thumbs Down” for my links because they fell completely off the map. Eventually my account was closed as well because I guess Stumble isn’t real excited about people submitting affiliate links into their system.

So…how else can Stumble be used? I am trying a couple different methods now. The obvious is directly writing blog posts and use it as articles (This is the recommended way), and the other, which can be more extensive is to try and create a number of lenses in Squidoo that I can simultaneously Stumble with basically the same content as the blog post, and even more related affiliates to the ones I am currently promoting.

Realistically there are better ways to go about this, but I figured I’d run some tests with Stumble and see just what I can and can’t get away with in regards to affiliate marketing. Squidoo is great for SEO regardless for any site so I figure at least that will be less intrusive to Stumble. IT also probably has a bit of a more professional look than many of the crappy sales pages for affiliates.

None of this is particularly a great way to work affiliates, but since3 I tend to use Squidoo and Stumble often for boosting SEO links I figured I’d try to combine them a bit and look for quicker ways to pump aff links out with out having to spend money on PPC, or write a ton of articles.