Is Buying Your traffic A Good Idea?

I won't bore you with the usual claptrap about how much everyone needs traffic and how your business would go nowhere without it. That is obvious. However, that's not all that is obvious. In spite of all the millions of people using the internet today the hardest part of running a business online is getting the traffic that it needs. There are, as anyone who has been working on the web for any length of time will tell you, many many different ways to get traffic to your site. Some are good, some bad. But, as with the proverbial horse getting your visitors to buy your product is your next problem. Really these two problems are linked. The reason many of your visitors do not buy has nothing to do with the quality of your website or the product you want them to buy. It has to do with the type of traffic you are getting. Let us look at some of the more popular forms of traffic generation. Traffic Exchanges
Traffic exchanges are a less than ideal way of getting traffic. The traffic is usually free but at what cost. Generally these systems require you to browse to someone else's site and they browse yours. You don't usually get a 1:1 ratio. This means that if there is a ratio of 2:3 you get two visitors for every three sites you search. They often give you less. You must use their site to navigate to the sites on an automated system that keeps you on the site you are visiting for a minimum time of around fifteen or twenty seconds. This is to ensure fairness etc., but it could take quite a while to accumulate any decent traffic for your site. I don't know about you but my time is better spent marketing my site. And you can be sure that the other people involved in this deal are just as keen to see your site as you are to see theirs. So if you are planning to sell to any of them…Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are good. They do attract a certain amount of traffic, but not on the scale that you would need to make a go of a business. I would recommend that you build links with other sites simply to improve your ranking in the search results. Many search engines and Google in particular seem to value inward links. i.e. links to your website from other websites. These links are seen as a vote for your site. The more votes you have the better chance you have of being elected to the top position on the search results. Reciprocal links are a link swap between your website and another. It is a deal that benefits both. However, the effectiveness of the reciprocal link is thought to be fading in recent times. What you need now to improve your ranking effectively is an abundance of one-way links from other sites and the higher they rank the better. Articles Directories
One way to get these one-way links is to write an article and publish it in an article directory. This article will contain a link back to your site. The article you write will be on the topic of your site. Therefore the traffic you get from the link will be targeted and you will also improve your ranking enormously. Not to mention improving your reputation and standing in your field by writing quality articles on your chosen subject. This and natural traffic, are the best type of traffic to get. Also, the articles will help you get more natural traffic. Natural Traffic
The single best traffic you can get. This is traffic from the search engines. It is plentiful, target and free. But it can also be the hardest to get. You have to optimise your site in such a way that both your visitors and the search engines are happy. This involve on page and off page optimisation. Assuming that you succeed you then have to try to keep up with the changes the "masters of the search" make to the programming in the search engines. These changes mean that you could be on page one today and condemned to obscurity tomorrow. They make these changes to keep their clients (the general public) happy by constantly improving the results their searches produce. So, in a way you cannot blame them, but it is tough to take when it is your site that they all but wipe out with a keystroke. My Recommendation
What I would recommend you do is this. First design and build your site in a way that you think will suit your product and your visitors. Then optimise it for the search engines. But, don't ruin it, just make sure that your code is clean and that you are using the correct keywords, Meta tags and header tags etc. Then write loads of articles and publish them to hundreds of article directories. Then while they are out there doing their job you can start swapping links with other websites that are in the same business. The links from similar or complementary websites are worth more than links from unrelated websites. Ok, but what do you do until the traffic starts to come? And it is very unlikely to come overnight. Well, you buy traffic. Buy traffic? Yes buy traffic. Competition in this area of internet marketing has meant that the cost of the thousand unique visitors has come within easy reach of al but the most frugal and parsimonious of webmasters. So if you have a product for sale on your website, buy your traffic until your website becomes established. If you bought a package of ten thousand unique hits per week you would not be very much out of pocket and if you had a one percent conversion rate you would very likely have more than covered the cost of the traffic. (depending on the price of your product) Where Does The Traffic Come From?
A valid question. Traffic which is sold to webmasters like this usually comes from pop up at high traffic sites which are related to the webmaster's topic. e.g. if you order travel traffic the pop up will be on a travel site. Another way traffic is collected is by the purchase of expired domain names which had a high profile on the internet before they expired. These sites are still attracting traffic and this traffic is simply redirected to the paying webmaster's website. Again these websites would be on a related topic making the traffic targeted. There are other ways, but I am not going to give away all the trade secrets here. Nevertheless you can see that it is quality traffic and worth the small charge that is required to get it. In spite of all the millions of people using the internet today the hardest part of running a business online is getting all the traffic that it needs. But, as with the proverbial horse you can bring your visitors site but