Paying for it

Traffic, I mean. Every once in a while I get an email from someone that goes something like this:

There's a program I was thinking of joining that promises to send 10,000 visitors to my site. Is this a scam?

A scam? Probably not. Worthwhile? Doubtful.

There are many traffic generation services out there, and I don't want to single any one out for fear of being sued, but these services are generally to be avoided. The benign services will merely send you untargeted traffic. The deceitful ones will send you automated traffic via a network of computers they can access. The aggressive ones will create doorway pages and use other spammy tactics that will only hurt you in the long run.

This is not to say that you can't pay for traffic. There's a tried-and-tested method to get traffic: advertising. If you can't enough traffic for free, advertising is one way to drive visitors to your site. Assuming, of course, that you have the right ad in the right spot — good advertising is not easy to execute, no matter how simple companies like Google make it to place the ads.

I actually recommend that AdSense publishers take a whirl at using AdWords to drive some traffic to their sites. Not so much as a money-making endeavour — arbitrage, which I'll discuss in a later post — but as a way to see the world through the advertiser's eyes and to get a better understanding of how the whole online advertising ecosystem works. Create a text ad or two, find some appropriate keywords, set yourself a low daily budget (say $5) and do some experimentation. You'll discover that traffic doesn't come cheap, especially targeted traffic.

And that, my friends, is why building links through quality content and becoming an authority in your niche pays off. Whether you do it virally or via the standard long-term approach, it's the cheapest way to get targeted traffic.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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