Is it Worth Paying For Traffic?

There are so many different ways of generating traffic that some people get overwhelmed by the choices, and get tempted by paying for traffic, but is this increased traffic worth the price..?

It may not sound very helpful to say 'sometimes', but in truth there are a lot of variables.

It depends on factors I'll mention, and anyone that gives you a straight 'yes' or 'no' is showing a lack of understanding of the intricacies involved.

OK, so some paid traffic sources you can write off straight away are adverts which offer 10,000 visitors to your site for X amount of dollars.

They are a total waste of time and money, because the people coming to your site will be paid to do so, say 5 cents a click.

They have no interest in your offer, will not pay any attention, so forget these offers.

Similarly if anyone says they will get you top rankings in '100 search engines', steer well clear.
There is one search engine currently ruling the roost, Google, and maybe 4 others that can bring you worthwhile traffic.

But 100? I don't think so, and a simple email asking them which 100 search engines they are talking about will probably get no response, a clear sign to hold on to your money.

Not all paid traffic is worthless though.

You may go for the pay per click, or PPC, method.

Some marketers swear by this method, and use this alone to drive traffic to their site.

With pay per click you can target the visitors with laser focus, meaning it is money that is tightly spent. This is done by setting up the adverts so that they only appear to people who have typed in your specific keyword.

Even then you only get charged once someone clicks, so you are putting 2 levels of qualification in place before you spend a penny - firstly that they have typed your keyphrase in, and secondly that your ad has appealed to them.

So if a marketer knows that a targeted visitor from his selected market is worth 1 dollar to him on average, as long as he spends less than 1 dollar on average per visitor, he is making money.
Once that model is up and running, you can then theoretically just ramp it up.

However, and this is the key with any paid traffic, you do need to know this figure of how much each visitor is worth to you. That means proper and lengthy testing and tracking. If you only have a vague idea of cost versus profit, you are likely to be on the wrong end of the equation!

Another paid option is to advertise in ezines.

If the newsletter goes to a big list of targeted prospects, you may well find that the cost of the advert is more than outweighed by the sales.

Again, proper tracking and analysis is essential.

So you can see that the paid traffic choices can go from the scams and waste of money to laser efficient sales generators - due research is needed before you can decide if the increased traffic is actually worth the money.