The good and bad of buying traffic

November 15, 2007 by
Filed under: General 

Buying traffic has gotten a terrible name for itself from the webmaster community. The reason is usually obvious, most are not real visitors, are proxies, are from foreign countries, traffic exchanges, spyware installs, etc. The real answer is that not every website is corrupt and useless.

When I ran my proxy websites nearly a year ago, I monetized the extreme amounts of traffic with popunders (You click a link and a “popup” window opens behind your active window). I know these can be pretty annoying, but rightfully so, even when using my own website, I had to manually open the popunder window, reading the site, before closing the window. The reason a lot of big name companies still use popunder and popup advertising is because it still works. If you have an excellent product for sale, you can get many sales for paying dirt cheap prices for this traffic. The company I used to publish popunders on my proxy sites was Adversal, so I emailed the owners asking if I could do the opposite… buy popunders. They responded quickly saying that their advertiser website was TrafficTaxi.net. I bought 10,000 unique popunders from Australia and 10,000 unique visitors from Canada because both countries speak English, and the advertising rates were cheaper than US traffic. The total cost was around $60, and resulted in 9 sales for WordHugger at $60 each. I have since stopped buying this traffic for WordHugger, but you can easily see that if you have a good product for sale, you can make (in my case, 900%) money back on your expenses. I would not recommend doing this if your product is not unique, or if you are only monetizing your websites through Adsense or other CPC (cost per click) publishers.

If you are not selling a product, then I would highly recommend NOT to be buying traffic. If you have experimented with popups/popunders as well, feel free to let me know your outcome in the comments. I also want you to know that I do not recommend buying traffic from any of the top sites you find on Google searches or webmaster forums, because most are not popunders, but are actually the useless traffic as stated in the top paragraph. Good luck buying traffic!

Comments

One Comment on The good and bad of buying traffic

  1. Sudarshan on Thu, 15th Nov 2007 2:22 pm

    2. Thanks,May i know how good it can bring traffic to a website….How many uniques in how many days….Just give a rough idea?

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