Drive traffic to your site

[EVERTON]

Hi Everyone,

I was speaking with someone at a conference the other day and was speaking with someone there about driving traffic to websites. Apparently he said you can buy into agencies that can help drive traffic to your website - what do you think of such agencies and can you recommend such agencies?

Cheers
Everton

[nielsencl]

I have tried this a couple of times with poor to bad results.

I would not call them "agencies" since this sounds somewhat respectible. Not that they are all scams, but most don't really care what happens on your site as long as they deliver the "traffic" they offer.

The traffic can come from many sources such as pop-ups/unders, deleted domains, and visitors that are blindfolded and dropped off on your front porch. One variation that I found on ebay and tried took a copy of your home page and poped that up for visitors to see. If they clicked on anything it brought them to your site. The problem was that after spending $20 for 100,000 "visitors" (that was the wording of the ebay item), I didn't show ANY increased traffic, or if I did it was so low as to be within normal traffic variations. If you try it, USE A LANDING PAGE. You will probably only see a lot of traffic to the one page that you are sending it to and they will look and leave. Note, see if they people that visit your page also load any graphics. If not, they are either not seeing the page at all, or are only connecting long enough to load the page and nothing else before they are gone, which is what you can expect from the worst of these kinds of scams.

Depending on how the traffic is sent, who the visitor is, what your site offers, and what the visitor expects will affect your results. If your site is in English and offers branding irons, the Chinese visitor from Bejing may look and click away. If you have adult content though, they may stay for a while.

Even if the traffic offered is labeled as "targeted", that may not be exactly true. The bottom line on purchasing traffic is that if you have something really, really great to offer people and most people will have some interest (Photos of kittens or free phone cards) you may get some positive results. Otherwise, the only thing purchased traffic is good for one thing:

Some dishonest people will buy traffic to their sites for a period of time and then offer to sell the web site. This makes it look like you are buying a great site at a great price. Then after you buy the site, the traffic stops. Ooops!

[JustinGoldberg]

They are basically a new twist on the alladvantage scam (get paid to surf)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosurf

It's popular in India.

[JPRuss]

Here's a suggestion that might work well to test "traffic generation"

Setup a blog (free one on blogger or something)
Setup stats (google analytics / statcounter)

Try a limited (usually free 30 day trial of a "traffic generating scheme")

Compare:

1) The number of visits to your blog before/after the scheme
2) The number of "useful"/non spam comments left on the blog before/after the scheme.

if 1) changes a lot but 2) changes a little then you'll likely get low quality traffic from the 'agency'. Since if people can't be bothered to write a comment they arel likely not going to convert either.

Obviously, this is somewhat biased since the actual content on the blog has some weight in weather or not people will write comments/convert. But if people are 'intent' on auto surfing for their own credits, the content on your site (good or not) will probably not make much difference.



The 'theory' is that if people can't be bothered to add coumment

[nielsencl]

Autosurf? Yes, I had not even considered those as sources of the traffic. It reminds me of Traffic Swarm if you have heard of them? All I can say is that I know of nothing that "swarms" that's good, unless you are a beekeeper...!

And that's kind of what I was referring to when I mentioned using a "landing page", since they are generally something you create and may be a copy of an existing page on your site. There are no links to it from your site and only links from it to the rest of your site. You use that URL in a promotion or marketing situation so you can see exactly what the results are. Since there are no links from anything else, it should not be found by spiders or people outside of the promotion you are running.

[JPRuss]

Originally Posted by JPRuss

The 'theory' is that if people can't be bothered to add coumment

Oops. looks like I stopped mid sentence.. The remainder should have said:

...they probably are not going to convert to a sale.

I also should have added that autosurf websites are normally full of advertising with little or no content.

However, some blog surfing sites, like BlogMad and BlogExplosion, I must admit..reading some of these can be quite addictive....sort of like blog soap operas.

[JustinGoldberg]

Originally Posted by JPRuss

Here's a suggestion that might work well to test "traffic generation"

Setup a blog (free one on blogger or something)
Setup stats (google analytics / statcounter)

or better yet, use hittail

www.hittail.com/

[Waldo]

Interesting...

I'm going to give that software a good look through.

[beu]

Originally Posted by EVERTON

Hi Everyone,

I was speaking with someone at a conference the other day and was speaking with someone there about driving traffic to websites. Apparently he said you can buy into agencies that can help drive traffic to your website - what do you think of such agencies and can you recommend such agencies?

Cheers
Everton

There are lots of ways to drive traffic to a website and lots of agencies who can help you! Keep in mind there are a number of ways to do this free. (ie Google APIs)

[MikeLevin]

Originally Posted by JustinGoldberg

or better yet, use hittail.

Thanks for the mention, Justin.

[khalidh]

Most of the sites that offer delivering thousands of visitors for low prices are scams. I initially thought that these sites had some sort of technology they use to deliver traffic. After spending a bit of time doing some researching, it seems that there is no technology nor traffic for that matter.

The best way to drive traffic to a site is via seo and good quality content. No big secret here. We offer traffic building solutions to our clients which rely on creating high quality content and getting it indexed by major SEs.

Khalid

[MikeLevin]

Originally Posted by khalidh

Most of the sites that offer delivering thousands of visitors for low prices are scams. I initially thought that these sites had some sort of technology they use to deliver traffic. After spending a bit of time doing some researching, it seems that there is no technology nor traffic for that matter.

The best way to drive traffic to a site is via seo and good quality content. No big secret here. We offer traffic building solutions to our clients which rely on creating high quality content and getting it indexed by major SEs.

Khalid

Khalid, what if I told you that merely filtering your incoming traffic data properly, you can expose new opportunity to generate traffic? What if there actually is technology that can use every search hit that ever occurred on your site in order to filter, so that the only things you're seeing are the first time that keyword EVER led to your site (from that source). Then what if it could tell that the searcher was determined in finding you, say perhaps 3 or 4 pages into the results? Wouldn't that make you think that...

1. You CAN be found on that term, but are not well optimized?
2. There are 2 or 3 pages of crap above you that did not satisfy the user?

Using that thought, what if your publishing platform was so well optimized, say Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad, or WordPress, that you don't even need to think about SEO. What if just putting that suggested keyword into the headline of your next blog post nearly assures you that you will be found on the first page of results for that term in a few weeks, whereas you were buried before?

And finally, what if I told you that the whole thing was free--ultimately dispelling any concept that there is any sort of scam element to it?

Would that be of interest to you?

[khalidh]

I would say that I need to learn more. Am I wrong in assuming that you are talking about hittail?

Originally Posted by MikeLevin

Using that thought, what if your publishing platform was so well optimized, say Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad, or WordPress, that you don't even need to think about SEO.

I think many platforms may need a little tweaking. Most clients have to do some seo work to start with. But after that is done good traffic comes from good quality content.


Khalid