Why buying traffic is a waste of money, don't take shortcuts
It's sometimes catch 22 when you first start writing - it's hard to find the motivation to write good content when no one will read it, yet no one will come to your site because there's no good content. However there are websites on the Internet that offer you a lazy alternative to lucrative marketing strategies; let me talk about the two types and why you should avoid both.
1. Buying Traffic
Unfortunately I'm not going to be discussing PPC here, rather the shady dealings of traffic brokers. A quick Google search shows quite how many vendors are willing to sell you "traffic", quoting prices like $69 for 100,000 "real" visitors. It's not difficult to make more than $69 from 100,000 visitors so you'd be forgiven for thinking that you're on to a renewable source of income - but where does that traffic come from?
Theoretically the majority of these "real" visitors are being redirected from expired domains that the vendor has purchased. These expired domains still get some traffic and the vendor passes the visitors on to you - seems legitimate enough, no? It may be untargetted but if they're real then maybe it'll work.
But what if they're not. I've read a few convincing reports that hint that these schemes are more likely to be scripts on a server somewhere; set to load up your site a bunch of times. That's not going to get you a decent ROI is it? In fact it resembles a denial of service attack more than anything else.
2. Sharing Traffic
The most obvious vendor in this instance was a company called Trafficswarm who appear to offer astonishing levels of success from seemingly little effort. The basic premise with these systems is to register and become part of a 400,000 strong community of traffic sharers. This sounds innocent enough but it's ultimately pointless.
You see, to get members to visit your site you need to visit theirs for a set period of time (10 seconds normally), thus earning you credit. This credit is then used to pay for visitors to your own site - get it? Everyone is stumbling from one member's site to another, burning each other's credits and earning their own.
The beautiful part of traffic sharing schemes is that you're wasting your time. The only advantage you'll be getting is numerical at best because your visitors will only sit on your site long enough to earn credit. So you might be getting 500 extra visitors a day but you'd be lucky if one of them read anything, clicked a link or made a comment.
Conclusion
So it doesn't really make sense to acquire traffic in this way because (in both cases) you're just buying statistics. You're not buying readers, customers or repeat visitors; what you're buying is a lie. You can then show the world your statistics and feel like a famous blogger - although you might want to turn off commenting, there aren't that many 150,000 visitor blogs that don't have any comments.
If you want legitimate traffic then write good content and promote it; short cuts like this will only empty your pocket.
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