Don't Purchase Traffic

There are a ton of companies online that offer guaranteed visitors for a fee, but what's the quality of these site-seers?

Many moons ago, I decided to try the idea of purchasing website traffic in the hopes that it would lead to more people viewing my site. This proved to be a waste of time and money. Although I knew that sign-ups, customers, etc. weren't guaranteed, and I wasn't really expecting any, I thought maybe the extra traffic would prove worthwhile for increasing the visibility of my site(s).

Let me tell you, there's no point in doing this. There are far easier, less expensive, and much better ways to increase your website traffic. Ways that actually work and really do bring in more genuine, interested traffic.

1) Article Marketing. Done right (although this is terribly time-consuming if done entirely by hand), writing unique articles and submitting them to a variety of free article directories is a fantastic way to snatch up extra, genuine traffic. The people who find your article, or even use it on their own site or blog, will actually be looking for what it is you're talking about. They are therefore genuinely interested in your product or service.

In the mean time, while no one has yet seen that article, the search engines will find it. This gives your site valuable back links. And if the content is 100% unique, it will rank much higher in search engine results. And that is the kind of traffic you really want - organic website traffic from real people who were actually searching for products, services, and information about whatever it is you're in the business of providing.

2) Traffic, Banner, Link, and Ad exchanges. Although this kind of traffic isn't quite as organic as the aforementioned article marketing, it does lead to plenty of back links and real people are actually looking at your site. Some of them may even be interested. They are real people after all, and many are probably on the look out for something you know how to do or provide.

This isn't exactly targeted traffic, but it's far more targeted than the type many companies are trying to sell you. And it's also free or extremely low-cost.

3) Social Media Marketing. In today's age, this can't be emphasized enough. Leveraging your free accounts at various social networks is a fantastic way to generate a heck of a lot of targeted, organic traffic. Not only are these real people, but these are people who aren't going to be clicking on your link or ad without being interested in it.

The problem with this one is that it can take time to get enough followers, fans, friends, etc. on these different accounts to get very many clicks per day. True, there are places that will sell this to you, and it even works for some people. But gaining followers for free on Twitter is pretty easy if you go along with the #TeamFollowBack or #500aday or many other such hashtags.

And if you don't have the time to build and maintain a decent following on the social networks, there are plenty of people who will tweet your links, advertise your site to FaceBook groups, etc. on Fiverr. And it's cheap. I don't consider this cheating. You're only hiring someone to tweet your site, you aren't buying followers. You're asking them to advertise your site to their FaceBook fans, you aren't buying likes. So your traffic should be just as targeted as if you were doing it all yourself, but this might save you some time to work on your site, blog, product, or service offerings.

These are some of the best ways I have found thus far for generating genuine traffic and increasing exposure for your business online. There's always PPC ads of course. They certainly do bring in traffic from genuinely interested people online, but PPC is usually very expensive. There's also a lot of competition for the best keywords, which is really going to cut into your bottom line. So I say - it's time to get creative!