Posted on Saturday 30th of December 2006 at 13:48 in Make Money Online

Advertising your website - part three - buying traffic

Welcome to the third in the this series of advertising your website focusing on the market of purchasing traffic. A brief blast on Google shows dozens of companies offering astounding levels of traffic for a pittance. Such as examples are "10,000 real visits for $7.95" and "100,000 Real US visitors for $69.95". Amazing offers or fraud? I looked into this a lot closer.

Where the traffic comes from
The logic behind this volume of traffic is through the art of purchasing expired domains that are still receiving a lot of traffic which then gets redirected to you. Sometimes companies claim to be able to offer 'targeted' traffic - by which they mean that if you run a car website they will redirect traffic from car websites, although I'm unsure how you would ever prove that the traffic was targeted.

Too good to be true!
Well isn't it just - for the price of lunch some companies claim to be able to provide 10,000 "real" visitors to your site. I use the quotes around "real" because I'm nearly entirely convinced that the majority of these campaigns are scams. There's a great piece on OpenTracker.net describing their experiences with such schemes. As it turns out the chances are that you'll get misleading statistics and no conversions (because your website will just be hammered by the same "users" time and time again). Even those who claim to send "real users" don't appear to - but I'm not feeling exciting enough to try it out for myself.

IF it worked, it could be used
If it actually worked then you could abuse this, paying sporadic $15's for tens of thousands of visitors could help you improve/manipulate your Alexa ranking (even if they're not real visitors, if the traffic looks real it may trick how your site is presented). This could ultimately lead to you being able to charge more for ReviewMe reviews or Text-Link-Ads.

Conclusions
I'm not going to experiment in this because I don't wish for Seopher.com to be murdered by pixel-frames (where your site is loaded in a 1x1pixel frame) or being a pop-up on a more popular site. It's not a good idea and until someone provides some convincing information from a full experiment because it's too "dodgy" and a waste of money.

The Series of Articles
See below the published articles on the topic:
Introduction
Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic
Conclusion

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