Monday 19 January 2009

Buying Traffic, Is It A Good Idea?

The more traffic your site gets the higher your chances of making a sale. Or at least so we are expected to believe
And in a bid to increase website traffic it is really tempting to buy traffic

We have all seen the ads. £30 for 10000 visitors to your site or something along those lines. And some reading this post may have actually gone ahead and bought the 'traffic'

The long and short of it is these kind of traffic brokers usually do not deliver high quality targeted traffic to your sites. Let us take a closer look at some points

Traffic conversion. What proportion of this bought traffic actually ends up taking a desired action ie clicking on an affiliate link and making a purchase, or clicking on an adsense ad, or joining your opt in list. From reports from other webmasters that have bought traffic, conversions are just about nil. So what is the point of paying money for a ton of 'traffic' that does not make you any money?

Traffic source. where do these 10,00 visitors come from. Think about it. If you had a list of 10, 000 people that are interested in a certain product or niche, and they are real people, and they are ready to visit a site and take action. well would you be selling this traffic for 30 bucks. I think not. You would probably run out, set up your own website and send the traffic to it. And retire a rich happy man :) But more seriously, you have to think very carefully about the source of the traffic. there are paid to surf sites where people are paid to visit sites. And there is even software to automate surfing. i really do not think this kind of traffic is going to convert

So on the issue of buying traffic from the mass click brokers, I think the answer to the question asked in the title of this post is no. It is simply throwing away your money

But having said that there are other forms of bought traffic that do convert and are real visitors and we will be covering these in a later post

Till next time

No comments: