Paid Traffic

January 27th, 2023

   

Paid traffic is the fastest way to drive traffic. Paid Traffic
It’s also the fastest way to lose money. You need to know exactly what you are doing or you will lose a lot of money, and very quickly.

You need to understand:

  • testing landing pages,
  • quality score,
  • conversions,
  • creatives,
  • ad copy,
  • and more.

By the time you figure all that out, it could be too late.

If you want to give it a go, you can purchase traffic by bidding on your keywords with various search engines or traffic providers. One of the most well-know but also most expensive programs is called Google AdWords. You are well advised to stay clear of AdWords until or unless you are an expert on how paid search advertising works and you have a fat budget wallet to work with.

Some more economical alternatives are:

These sites offer a variety of types of advertising each with a unique set of pros and cons. In many cases you can choose display ads, contextual ads, and mobile ads. Some offer pop-up or pop-under ads. Each has their own method of targeting your potential customer. You should visit each site and review their tutorials on how to setup and utilize their services to the fullest.

I’ve had good results with 7Search and Stumbleupon. Although many swear by Plenty of Fish, I have never been pleased with their performance. The quality of the traffic just isn’t there. Maybe I’m in the wrong niches.

You will find that most of the same sites you can use as a publisher to make money also offer to sell you traffic. It is the other side of the house so to speak. The traffic provider first finds someone known as an ‘advertiser’ to pay for a ‘click’, (CPC). Then, through another program they pay ‘publishers’ for that click. In the case of Google, the publisher program is known as AdSense.

The traffic provider makes money on the difference between the two rates. In general, this type of business model, (buying at one rate and selling at another.) is called ‘arbitrage’. We will see more examples of arbitrage in later modules.

One thing I must say here before we leave this topic. If you are paying for traffic it is vital that you send your visitors to content that will convert into an opt-in or a sale. It makes NO SENSE to me to get paid one cent for sending your visitor away when you paid ten cents to get her to your site in the first place! Think carefully about your traffic and monetization plans to be sure you don’t do stupid things like that.

Now, let’s look into Backlinking for traffic generation.