How To Profit From Really Inexpensive Website Traffic

by Willie Crawford

Search Engine Optimization Articles

Published on this site: November 6th, 2010 - See more articles from this month

All online marketers eventually realize that a steady flow of targeted traffic is the very life's blood of their online business.

At that point some decide to focus on generating free traffic via methods such as article marketing and search engine optimization. That's how I generated most of my website traffic for many years.

Other marketers look at the time and effort involved, and decide that using traffic from paid sources is more cost-effective. Given that I now manage dozens of my own, and clients projects, and a dozen virtual employees, I've evolved to where buying traffic often makes more sense.

While most people think of pay-per-click traffic such as Google AdWords, I actually focus on MUCH cheaper paid traffic which offers a much higher return-on-investment. That's what I'd like to teach you to do today.

Before we get into a few simple and easy methods, let's establish a few rules that you should always follow. They are:

1. Make sure that the traffic you buy is targeted: These should be individuals actively looking for what you have to sell. They should be in a buying mode.
   
   
2. You should know your source: Do your due diligence and actually check them out. Google their name or their company name and see what is being said about them. Contact people who gave them testimonials and see how satisfied they are with that buying decision today. Look their site up on "The Way Back Machine" at http://Archive.org and see how their business has evolved over the years and get a feel for how long they have actually been in business.
   
   
3. Know specifically how this traffic is generated: You want to know both the methodology and the general demographics of the traffic.

Several years ago, one of my subscribers who violated all three of the above rules, lost $4000 in about a month. He was promoting a network marketing "opportunity," and was advised to buy leads. So he went to an online company and plopped down $4000 of his retirement fund for some guaranteed traffic.

He did indeed get the guaranteed visitors (several thousand) of them but not a single one of them converted (joined his team). Some did fill in his opt-in form for more information but they were just curious.

It turns out that the way the company he purchased the leads from, delivered that was traffic via pop-unders. A person would visit a site pertaining to something they were marginally interested in, and while they were reading a page, another pay would load underneath. When the surfer closed the top page, he saw my subscriber's page.

The problem was that most of these surfers had absolutely no interest in what my subscriber was offering. The curiosity seekers who filled out the form basically sent my subscriber on a wild goose chase as he followed up with all of those who left a phone number. NONE of them proved to be really interested.

Now that you know not to fall for that or similar scams, let me tell you FIVE ways that I generate a flood of highly-target website traffic, often for less than a penny per click.

1. I buy keyword-rich domain names to capture type-in traffic. These can be brand new domains or they can be aged domains that may even be still indexed in the major search engines. Even if they are not still indexed, some search engines seem to favor aged domains which are readily available.
   
   Many surfer, looking to buy a product, mistakenly type their search term into the browser bar rather than the search box. If you happen to own that term (as a domain name) the traffic will often be redirected to your site. Even if the surfer enters the search term in the search box, your site will often be shown in the results provided your site is properly optimized and indexed.
   
   If you use this method and average a mere 10 visitors per day, that's 3650 targeted visitors per year. Assuming these visitors are searching on a term that you'd have to pay $1 for at the pay-per-click search engines, and that the domain name and a full year of hosting cost you $25, you've just saved ($3650 - $25 =
   $3625). I do get my domain names and hosting that cheaply :-)
   
   Imagine having a dozen domains each targeting a different keywords, and I'm sure you'll understand why I personally love this traffic generation method so much.
   
   
2. Offering a free gift to get the visitor to your site and then requiring them to join your mailing list before they can access the gift. After they opt-in, you give them the gift but also tell them about some other product that you want to call their attention to.
   
   I find this method very effective when posted on social networking sites, or even run as ezine solo ads.
   
   Done properly you not only generate traffic, but by building a list, you also build-in a way to call them back to your site periodically.
   
   
3. Buying links from other sites. In many niches, there are webmasters who haven't figured out how to monetize their sites yet. You can approach them offering to pay for a prominently displayed link pointing back to your site, and many will sell you these links very inexpensively.
   
   You do need to shop around, and since there is a rumor that the major search engines MAY frown upon this practice, I do it in a way that it's not so obvious.
   
   
4. Funnel traffic via "mini-nets." In a mini-net, you have one main site that you really want to funnel traffic to. That's often referred to as your "money site." You build other sites on domains that you purchase, web 2.0 sites, and what are often referred to as "parasite sites." These are sites offered by companies that will give you free hosting on their network.
   
   You have links from most of the domains that you purchased, the web 2.0 sites, and the parasite sites, all pointing to your money site. Some people build a network of sites pointing to their peripheral sites. The idea there is that if you can get the peripheral sites to rank higher in the search engines they will command more respect and boost the ranking of your money site too.
   
   There are many complex linking patterns that you can use - as many as there are people who consider themselves experts on the topic. I personally keep things as simple as possible, and often rely upon the experience and expertise of webmasters that I often outsource the mind-numbing, tedious tasks to.
   
   
5. Build backlinks and RSS feeds by bookmarking. Many of my WordPress blogs are configured so that every post is bookmarked. I also use software to bookmark every page on some of my content sites and mini-sites. This both pushes them up in the search engines, and places links that highly-qualified visitors can follow back to my sites from all over cyber-space.

There are many other techniques that I use to generate an absolute flood of traffic to my websites and those of my clients. I'll share more in future articles.

Willie Crawford has been running online businesses since 1996. To continue learning from him, simply visit his main website and subscribe to his free newsletter at http://WillieCrawford.com.