Website traffic generation is the single most important factor to making money online. If no one is able to find your site, then regardless of everything else, you won’t make any money.
Because traffic generation is so important, countless schemes and ways have been designed to get traffic. One of them is “guaranteed traffic” and at first glance, it sounds great. For a low price, usually under $5.00, you will get a certain amount of visitors to your site who will stay for at least a minute or so. The appeal of this, of course, is the cost, and the fact that you are “guaranteed” to have visitors to your site.
On the Warrior forum, an internet marketing forum that I frequent, a member was asking for predictions on what would happen with the thousand guaranteed visitors he purchased for $1.99. Would he get a thousand visitors? Would he make any sales? Most people predicted that he would get no sales at all, and a few predicted that he might not even get a thousand visitors.
So called “guaranteed traffic” is pretty much worthless. There are three primary reasons why this is so:
1: Guaranteed traffic is not targeted well, if at all. Unless the vendor from whom you are buying the traffic can tell you that they will specifically funnel visitors who are eager to buy your widget, then the traffic can come from anywhere. While making money online is a numbers game, and it can be argued that traffic is traffic, if you’re going to pay for it, targeted traffic will earn you a much higher return on investment than untargeted traffic will.
2: The traffic comes from traffic exchanges or even worse, get-paid-to sites. Traffic exchanges are set up so that marketers must view each other’s websites for a certain period of time in order to earn credits which can then be used to get their own sites seen. Get-paid-to sites pay people pennies to visit websites and stay for a certain period of time. In both cases, the visitors have an external incentive that has nothing to do with your site or your offers. This kind of traffic rarely converts into a sale and is therefore a waste of money.
3: Worse still, the traffic may have come from bots that are run from a “bot net” of infected computers around the world. The computers are infected by spyware programs that are often implanted when an innocent web-surfer clicks through to a site that opens up many “pop-up” advertisements. You’ve probably had this happen to you. Each pop-up contains a code that gathers the user’s IP address and alters it slightly so that it appears unique. This IP is then sent to your site and is recorded as a visitor, yet no human eyes have seen your site.
For these reasons, guaranteed traffic is a waste of money and time. There are better ways to get targeted visitors to your site such as article marketing, social networking, and pay per click advertising. While these methods may cost you more in terms of time or money, the return on your investment will be well worth it in the end.
