Why Do People Continue to Pay for Traffic?
I’m sure you have heard the saying “there is no such thing as a free lunch”. I think this mindset, has made people think that the only way they can promote a website, is if they spend a lot of money. I even had a prominent experienced webmaster tell me that, in order to make money, I must spend some. I didn’t believe it and it turns out I was right afterall. I’ve gained thousands of visitors to my sites, without ever having to pay a nickel on advertising.
However, there is literally hundreds of methods you can do that don’t cost anything. Sure they take some time and are at times a little complicated, but if you want to make a career as a webmaster, why not learn it? I see some people spending money to advertise their their lousy blogs, forums, affiliate links/landing pages. It simply amazes me why someone would do that.
Common sense would tell you, that you will lose money in the end advertising those sites. Lets say you spend 30 cents a click on Adwords, to promote your forum. What are those people going to do? A small portion of them might join your forum, maybe 2% at best(and that’s assuming your forum is already a moderately active forum). And only a small portion of those members will ever click on your ads, maybe 25% at best. What does this all mean? You will be throwing most of your hard earned money down the drain.
Unless you advertise your own commercial business website, you will never get a return on your investment. You may not even get your money’s worth advertising your own commercial business. People often like to do business with brand names they trust. Just because it’s the internet doesn’t mean there is no financial risk starting your own internet business. You may shell out a ton of money and find out after a year, you spent more on advertising then made.
I know some people don’t want to learn SEO, but just doing basic SEO optimization, can benefit your website for the rest of it’s life. It won’t cost a thing and it won’t be a fleeting thing, like paying for traffic. If you read my other articles, you will find there is many different types of ways to promote actively or indirectly for free, but my favorite will always be SEO.
June 15th, 2008
Great article I totally agree with it. Affiliate program marketers can’t afford to let a cut of their revenue go to paying money for traffic.
June 15th, 2008
In my many years of webmaster career, I am also shocked how people fall for such ‘pay for traffic’ scams, sure, there is Google, Yahoo and others that may offer some real traffic through their paying programs, but it is still not worth it, when as you well mentioned Paul, there is SEO and it is absolutely free. It’s all about making your website strategically, make it rich-content and start doing some PROPER link exchanges with SIMILAR activities, optimize your html/php pages properly, subscribe to free search engine directories, always make updates to your site, search engine bots LOVE that. Sure, you won’t get results in a few days, but if you keep it up, you’ll definitely have them in a few months, guaranteed.
I myself, own a whole network of sites and I am proud of my own SEO work, turned out great. Just document yourself well about SEO, read some serious forums and you’re already on the right track.
Cheers!
Anonymoys
June 15th, 2008
Thanks for your nice post.
Doing a link building, writing content consistently, and optimizing your site, it all slowly adds up over the months. Also a lot of people don’t realize that the free software that comes out, such as wordpress, smf, etc is very un-seo friendly. You have to really pick it apart the software to make it better for the search engines. But if you are eager to learn, it pays off big time.