The process of increasing web traffic takes time and there are many different methods of building that site traffic. It’s human nature to want things right now so it’s easy to understand why so many people fall into the trap of ‘buying traffic‘.
One of the sites that I run is an Ad Tracking site and the biggest complaints are from people that just purchased ‘hits’ to their sites. “Why does your tracking site show I only received 456 clicks when I purchased ten thousand?” they exclaim in the email. I want to shake them by the shoulders and ask why in the world they would waste good money to buy hits. But I try to stay professional and gently explain what happened without coming right out and telling them they’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve done that in the past, telling them they wasted their money, and they forward the email to the shady site they bought the traffic from. Now their problem just became mine and I’m not here to field attacks from angry (and greedy) traffic brokers.
Why Buying Traffic Is A Waste Of Time
Like I was saying, there are many different methods of building site traffic and that’s what this site is all about but buying it isn’t one of them. I’m referring to traffic brokers and purchased page hits. I’m not addressing pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-action (PPA) type of advertising. In fact, buying traffic is not advertising, it’s an attempt to bypass adverting and get straight to the rewards. Unfortunately that type of shortcut never works.
Traffic Scams
A handful of the sites offering you paid traffic are simply scams using bot-click schemes from scripts. This is equivalent to hitting your refresh button thousands of times. That may get your counter moving but you don’t have any traffic at all. It’s just a worthless waste of time and money.
Worthless Traffic Brokers
The biggest source of paid traffic comes from so called ‘traffic brokers’. Many have fancy names, flashy websites and fantastic ad copy. They offer common sense reasons to buy traffic. They use big attention getting words like guaranteed, authentic, targeted, and unique. They’ll start with telling you truths you already know like, “The more TRAFFIC you have to your website the more people YOU will be able to sell your products to“. They’ll offer ‘targeted’ and ‘unique’ traffic from a particular category or country. They may show all kinds of useless testimonials and every other proven tactic to separate you from your money.
Where Does The Traffic Come From
Paid traffic usually comes from traffic exchanges and “get paid to surf” websites. Auto/manual surf programs provide visitors that are not interested in your products or service. They vast majority won’t even notice your site much less read a single word on your page. They just wait the 15-20 seconds and click to get credit. To be fair, perhaps you have the perfect ad or graphic that grabs the attention of a handful of surfers and they may decide to look around your site but that’s going to be the exception not the rule.
Think about it! You have someone wasting hours on end clicking a button every twenty seconds to get their site to show for twenty seconds on another surfer’s browser. They are trading valuable time for what amounts to be pennies worth of advertising. Does that sound like the ideal customer?
Other services will get your traffic from expired domains or pop-unders. It’s just more useless traffic that will annoy everyone and get you nowhere, unless if gets you penalized or banned from the search engines.
Purchasing bulk leads, traffic and clicks is a waste of money - period! Whether from paid to surf sites, pop up ads or other shady dealings of traffic brokers, you can do much better by educating yourself a little and work toward developing a quality site with lots of natural traffic.
Start Here
Do you want real site traffic? Consider subscribing to the Extreme Ezine for more tips and articles. We won’t send you traffic but we will explore various ways of building traffic and discuss it. We offer or recommend resources only after we verify that it’s real and effective.
Your Comments
We welcome your comments to this post or any other. Feel free to leave your comments and you’ll get a search engine friendly link back to your site 
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Brian Hawkins on 20-07-2008 
Back in April I wrote an article for another site that I no longer operate. I also converted it to an ebook (.PDF format). I hate to let all that effort go to waste so I’m republishing it here. I’m also offering the ebook free of charge - Includes Give-A-Way Rights. Right click and save as to download your copy.
