Should You Buy Traffic?

Small businesses are faced with a mountain of Internet marketing tools. Most are expensive and do not generate revenue. Others are free, but the advertising cycle often exceeds two years. The Internet is an ever evolving community. Successful businesses need to hook web-surfers within 10 seconds or lose them permanently.

Buying traffic looks like a black hat scam destined to leave a website banned.  Most business owners are surprised to learn that buying traffic is often the cheapest and most successful method of Internet Marketing.

Buying Impressions

The ideal price for 10,000 impressions should be around $12 - $19. Before signing up, ask the company exactly what they are selling. Some sell link ads, others sell a full size pop-under of the small business’s landing page.

Success is going to be determined by the quality of the landing page, therefore its up to you. If an index page appears on the pop-under then the campaign is destined to fail. A small business can buy targeted or untargeted page views.

Mistakes to Avoid: Never lead visitors to a squeeze page or buy now page. The page should ‘give’ to the visitor.

What is an impression?

One thing you need to know is that some of the cheaper target selling sites have found a way to skim money from clients. They count ‘loads’ not ‘hits.’ A page with 10 images has 11 ‘loads,’ one for the page, one for each image. This means the client’s expectation of 10,000 visits to their site drops to 1,000.

Others count each pop-under (A window that appears behind the browser window) as a load. They count hundreds of pop-unders despite the fact the user’s browser blocked the pop-under.

Buying Sign Ups

There are two types of ‘guaranteed signups.’  Incentivized Signups drive visitors to the company website where they sign up. Non-Incentivized signups are input by a data entry person. These are expensive, but unlike Google’s AdWords, the small business only pays when someone signs up.  Both of these methods are equally effective.

Mistakes to Avoid: Asking a website visitor to sign up for a ‘hard sell’ is a common mistake. Asking them to sign up for a forum, an online course, or a social networking community works better. Hook the visitor first. Sell them when they are ready.

Keyword Traffic

This is popular for publishers, but is not cost effective for small business owners. The double green lines under words in articles and website text are highly intrusive. The web visitor may resent having their reading experience interrupted for a sales pitch.

The down side is that the small business must pay every time a user drags their mouse over the code, triggering the JavaScript. The small business owner pays even though the person moved their cursor toward another link.

Mistakes to Avoid:  Signing up with a company that is not Niche based, or one that bills per impression and not click through.

 

Expired Domain Name Traffic

Most small business owners overlook this marketing tool despite the benefits. I give this traffic generating tool two thumbs up. 

Domain names increase in value the longer they are active. Some expired domains have been active for more than 10 years.  Keywords anchored within a domain name usually receive a higher search engine value than keywords located in text.  This is why ‘expired domain’ pages rank high in searches.

How They Work. The client lands on a web page with a list of niche website links. They chose the most relevant one and click through.

This method of buying traffic has several benefits. There is no pop-under or pop-over interrupting the viewer’s surfing experience.  The visitor decides to visit the small business website. The small business is usually charged per clicks and not impressions.

Mistakes to Avoid: Using Keyword Phrases – not user relevant phrases.  If someone wants to start a new business they will type ‘How To Start A Business’ into the search engine. When a visitor lands on an expired domain page, they will want keywords that ‘give’ them something like, ‘Start A Business on a Shoestring.’

Another version of this marketing scheme is the Domain Redirect. They use expired domain redirects to bring traffic to the small business website.