If there’s one question that every website owner asks herself, it’s this:
How can I get more traffic to my website?
The more visitors your site gets, the more opportunities you have to make money through sales and advertising.
But as more and more websites pop up every day, the competition for traffic is getting fierce. Ideally, you should be getting traffic from many different sources. And for the most part, anything that brings you, new visitors, is good.
But there a few traffic-generating methods that are just not worth the trouble. Let’s talk about two of them now.
The first traffic method you should avoid is paid hits, normally called Guaranteed Traffic Hits.
Now let’s not confuse this with legitimate advertising programs like Google AdWords. I’m talking about services that advertise:
“10,000 unique visitors for only $9.95!”
Common sense should tell you that something is fishy about these types of services. How can they possibly deliver quality visitors for that price?
They can’t.
They generally work in one of two ways. They either use a script to “hit” your website over and over again or they are part of a “paid to surf” program.
This type of program pays people to visit websites, so all that happens is they add your site to their queue and pay people to visit it.
Unfortunately, your visitors will mostly keep your site in the background while they do more important things. Your sire will be visited, but rarely read.
The second traffic method to avoid is called “safe lists“.
A safelist is a list of email addresses of people that have supposedly agreed to receive promotions via email.
A major problem with safelists is that you have no real way to verify that the owners of the email addresses actually opted in.
Their email addresses could have been scraped from any number of blogs, websites, forums, or discussion groups.
Sending emails to a safe list could result in rash complaints that could get your entire website banned by your ISP.
It’s just not worth the risk.
