This is a guest post by Mark Schumann, the owner of the Publicity Wheel.

Have you ever experienced Digg or Stumbleupon traffic spikes and been disappointed with their short duration and high bounce-rates? That’s because Digg users were only interested in a single page/article, and Stumbleupon users probably didn’t visit your site on purpose. Imagine if you could achieve a sustained traffic burst via targeted and natural clicks for several days?

Publicity Wheel is a new concept in website marketing that aims to deliver a huge boost in traffic and exposure for its members. It works by having everyone promote a single site (per category) via a standard 125×125 pixel banner ad on their own blogs for several days at a time. If your blog is the one being promoted, you’ll almost certainly receive a considerable number of targeted visitors who clicked on your ad, and will gain great branding exposure having your ad seen thousands of times across a large number of sites.

How does it work?

publicity wheel

After signing up, you simply fill in your profile, choose a category and upload a 125×125 banner ad to represent your blog. A small HTML snippet provided can then be copied and pasted to your blog to generate the current winner’s ad. Winners are selected based on “publicity points” - you’ll get 5 points every time someone clicks on the winner’s ad from your site, and 20 points for everyone you refer to Publicity Wheel.

Every 5 days, the wheel spins and a new winner from each category is selected. The more points you have, the better your chances, but you don’t necessarily need to have the most number of points to win. Winners’ points are reset to zero to ensure nobody dominates each spin. Of course, if you don’t win you keep your points so that over time you’ll have a greater and greater chance of being selected, which definitely benefits lower-traffic blogs.

Sponsorship Program

There is another option if don’t you wish to wait for your turn to be featured, prefer not to add the HTML code snippet to your site, or are simply not interested in participating. The Sponsorship Program allows you to sponsor a particular category of sites or entire community of sites for any length of time. In return, your 125×125 pixel banner ad will be displayed for a percentage of time (the rest of the time the winner is displayed). You have a choice of $2/CPM for all categories, $3/CPM for selected categories, or $0.10/CPC campaigns, with each option giving you the same advantages of winning without the wait and chance element. Given the categorization of sites, visitors are highly targeted and natural, which is vital for a successful advertising campaign.

Results So Far

Publicity Wheel has a very open philosophy, so it’s important that you’re given as much information as possible at every spin. Along with your Dashboard (which provides you with detailed statistics about your clicks, views and publicity points), the Exposure Table is a great indication of the levels of exposure the winners are getting. As of the time of this post, the “Internet” category remains the most popular, with over 12,000 ad views over the period of one spin (currently 5 days). Interestingly, the winner is enjoying this exposure having earned only 25 publicity points (5 outgoing clicks or 1 invite and 1 click), so it doesn’t take a lot to win.

The aim of Publicity Wheel is to provide a fun and unique way for publishers to increase their traffic and exposure. Unlike some traffic exchange programs, the system cannot be abused by users artificially inflating their impressions. Your visitors are highly targeted and traffic is natural, so why not give the Publicity Wheel a spin?