Buying Traffic
“Buying Traffic” is a fairly new term to me. In fact it wasn’t until I came across the Awio Web services (thanks Jackofallblogs !) that got me thinking. How do they do it? How does one buy traffic?
After much research *cough* I stumbled across this.
When a website owner loses interest in their site and decides not to renew their domain name, it becomes available to the public again. We buy these domains which still receive traffic from search engines, links and marketing done by the previous owner, and direct this traffic to you.
Ah ha. These guys are those pricks that hijack domain names and fill them with useless information. Kind of like when you misspell google. Bastards.
Anyhow back to buying traffic, to me it seems like it can’t fail. Lets look at the pros and cons of targetedvisitors.info.
Pros
- Extremely cheap to purchase traffic, starting from $1.99 for 1000 visitors.
- The ability to choose untargeted or targeted customers. Just want American traffic? Sure thing, there are packages available for you to choose.
- Easy payment method, via credit card or paypal.
- My application took 15 minutes to be approved.. that’s fast. (Site says maximum 1-2 business days)
- Want another 1000 visitors? Simply recharge your account from the easy to use control panel.
- Feel like spreading your incoming visitors over a certain period? Via the account manager you can set a daily cap. Default is 50 visitors per day.
Cons
- You can’t be 100% sure that they will send exactly 1000 customers. Sure web stats will help track a rough idea of hits but it can never be 100% accurate.
- Does your site have illegal content, popups, background music or sound? If so you won’t be able to sign up. (just the rules I’m afraid .. illegal content .. who would have thought !)
- Visitors sent by the system may not be the visitors you’re after. If your website is focused on a small niche, this traffic generating scheme is probably not for you.
I’ve signed up and purchased my first 1000 visitors. If the 1000 visitors I receive generate more than $1.99 in advertising revenue, then I see it as being worthwhile.
Only time will tell.
Update: Check out my update on buying traffic.
How are you going to track how many visitors did they send you and how much of them made you some revenue?
How about creating a separate landing page for this traffic with :
1) A link to sign-up for an ezine or to subscribe to your RSS feed.
2) A page that tells them the benefits of drinking the FF provided kool-aid.
3) A page that has content and links to see if they’ll click.
4) Whatever action you deem worthy of that flavor of traffic.
5) A survey
6) A redirect to my blog.
We could test this traffic in several ways, on your $$$ Scrivs, and enjoy the learning experience you provide for us.
Let’s get all wiggly and really spend Scrivs’ $$$ !
I wonder if there is a way to use Google Analytics to track traffic from these guys not only to see if they make you $1.99, but to see how long they stay on your site and how many page views they generate. It would be worth knowing if they overwhelming leave immediately or if they browse around for a bit.
Welcome to the web guys ;) Buying traffic has been a core part of the adult market for years and now, a decade in, is handled with scientific precision. I should blog on this myself – I never dreamed accomplished mainstream sites and blogs might not be aware of the pros and cons on traffic buys.
There are a thousand ways to be conned here – as Google knows a person is not a click and even a click’s hard to measure.
Miha, there’s no accurate way to test so I can’t be sure. I’m simply going to monitor my revenue & website hits and see if there’s an increase !
Sam Sugar, I’d love for you to share your comments and views on the whole buying traffic concept. I find it interesting yet somehow dodgy :)
Let me know how this works out. I have used their service in the past with mixed reviews. And i was a reseller.
Mike,
Better look at who is writing the entries before you go screaming about spending all my play money…I have enough women doing that right now as it is.
Jamsi, I’m looking forward to seeing your results.
I wonder if this users, who will hit your site, click on ads?
Me too Miha.
What I might do is buy another 1000 visitors and like Mike said, have a special landing page with perhaps 3 links.
One saying “Buy an iPod”, “Earn money online” and “Free Christmas ideas”. Would be interesting to see what people click.
Scrivs – I saw your net worth on the Blog Network WatchList…Wow ! You is da man ! I just figured you had given Jamsi a big ole pile of your $$$ to play with !
We’d way, way down the list from you. Way down.
And how about some pictures of those spenders you spoke of ?
Jamsi ain’t gonna learn how to be a big time internet marketer without spending some of that green you been gatherin’ !
You gotta give these people an expense account to play…er, work with.
Jamsi…now you’re learning. Testing and tracking is the key to enlightenment and success, as a marketer, blogger, salesman, etc.
I’ve bought traffic in the past and found it to be almost useless. From what I recall the majority of it was bots and those human users that did come through (despite being targetted) didn’t like what my site had to offer. Which is not necessarily unusual but did buck the trend of other natural traffic.
That site (and many others) are resellers, the company which that site has a reseller plan with is the one that actually buys the expired domains. Mainly domains which still receive traffic, there are several different categories of domains to choose from.
There is a script from the reseller which directs traffic to your site depending on the category. It displays your website in a full page browser window.
When people fail to renew their domains after they expire, they buy the domains, they direct it to their servers and send out the traffic to the campaigns users purchase.
Scrivs,
Any feedback to report regarding the 1,000 visitors that you bought? I’m interested if there is anything to this service. Thanks.
Minic, that was actually Jamsi who wrote this post so you would have to ask him. Hopefully he plans a followup post to see how things turned out as I am just as curious as you are.
Scrivs… I’m sorry… didn’t see that Jamsi was the one who posted. Anyway, I did bought some traffic from them ($1.95 for 1,000 visitors) and pegged my desired daily visitors to 100. Two days lapsed without any visitor from them. This morning, when I checked my sitemeter, I noticed 60 visitors with referrals from this… http://216.55.186.22/trafficserver.htm?http://www.apieceofshirt.com
If there’s anyone who can help me “interpret” what that means, please post it here.
Thanks!
Minic: To successfully measure how much traffic they are sending to each site that buys it from them, they probably have to send it first through a proxy server and that is what you are seeing. You hope that it isn’t them sending fake clicks over though.
Come on Jamsi, we are waiting for the results with anticipation. Got my $1.99 saved up and ready to spend on your recommendation.
The results haven’t been too good I’m afraid, I’m not sure if I mentioned this but they only send 50 customers a day as to even the traffic out. I have NOT noticed any increase in adsense revenue or any huge leap in traffic. I see a whole heap of visitors in my stats that come from a proxy server, but other than that – I was disapointed.
As I mentioned in my post, different people might have better luck, it all depends on what your site is about and whether a untargetted audience would be interested in your blog.
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Anymore current feedback on the 1000 visitors for $1.99?
I purchased 10,000 hites for like $40.00 from that 216.55.186.22 Ip. I use Google analytics to track it and so far only around 1000 actual hits. I did it only to increase site traffic, to impress Alexa rankings. Not a single call yet however. I guess it was a waste of money but I will keep you all posted.
ooops typo. I meant “hits”, not “hites”