Traffic Ballon

Have you ever purchased a package of hits from a company that sells guaranteed traffic (aka wholesale traffic), only to find that you haven’t made a single sale by the time the package runs out? You’re not alone! The truth is that most of these companies don’t actually send visitors to your website; they show your site in a small pop-up window. Obviously, pop-ups are much less effective than if a person was actually sent to your website. Plus, pop-ups will only show a small corner of your website, so visitors don’t actually know what your website’s about and there’s very little chance that they will take the time to find out. Also, many of these companies have been known to use tools that inflate the number of actual hits being sent to your website, meaning you don’t receive anywhere near the amount of traffic that you paid for.

There are millions of websites across the internet and everyone wants a top search engine ranking. Do you see the problem? Getting a decent ranking for a popular keyword has become nearly impossible if you don’t shell out big bucks. First you wait 6 weeks for your site to even show up in the search engines (unless you pay $300 for a quick listing in Yahoo), then you hope for the best. If you’re not listed in the top 20 for a keyword, you won’t be getting many visitors from the search engines.

SPAM has become such a broad term these days and will get you into a lot of trouble, even if you have not violated any laws. Most forms of e-mail marketing, including direct e-mail and bulk e-mail, are now considered SPAM by nearly everyone. You can follow all legal guidelines when sending out your mailing and still risk being labeled a “spammer”. In reality, it doesn’t much matter whether you think you’re a spammer – it only matters what the recipient of your e-mail thinks. One safe way to market through e-mail is by building your own opt-in list, but even then people will often forget that they subscribed to your list and report you for SPAM anyway! If you are reported for SPAM, you can lose your ISP, website, e-mail account, and much more!

Traffic exchanges (also known as startpage/click exchanges) are popular because they offer a free way to earn traffic. The idea is simple – you view other people’s websites in exchange for traffic. However, most traffic exchanges make you view a website for 30 seconds to earn a credit, then require 2 credits for each hit they send to your website. That’s 60 seconds of clicking for just 1 hit! You could click for an hour straight and still only get 60 hits. You’ll be very lucky to make a sale off of 60 hits, even after all that work!

Belive it or not, there actually was a time when Free-For-All links (FFAs) worked. As most of you have realized by now, that is no longer true. There are so many FFA pages and automatic submitters these days that there’s very little chance anyone will ever see your link – no matter how many times you post each day. Since everyone uses automatic submitters to post their link on the FFA pages, they don’t ever view the page that has your link on it. Their link goes on top, knocking your link down another spot. With so many auto-submitters being used, your link quickly slides off the FFA page, without ever being seen by human eyes.