Traffic.
The only way to make money online is through traffic. Without it, all you’re left with is a site where you are the only one looking at it, and after 10 minutes of refreshing your stats page, it’s no fun to keep seeing 1 unique. We all need traffic, but for most people this seems to be the trickiest and toughest thing to find. I’ve always found content tougher to gather up than traffic. Well, with all the search engines out there, and buzz about cajillions of people going on all types of sites you’d think it would be pretty easy to find free traffic, or even good paid traffic.
I’ve always been a fan of search engine traffic, both paid and free, it’s just awesome, and it feels great to get it too. Like an internet high (did I just coin a new term? - yay!).
Even though I’ve always done well with engine traffic, I’m constantly trying to figure out new streams of traffic generation, whether they be paid or free, and I’m pretty much willing to try out just about anything (except email spam and spyware crap). So I did a search on Google and Yahoo for different traffic sources, and it seems all of the ads, which I do click on often, were all of those “Pay $20 and get 10,000 visitors to your site” type deals. Now, I must admit, I remember trying one of those back in 2000 or so and I know for a fact that they are all popups/popunders and let’s be honest, no one really takes a look at a site that’s being popped up unless they can’t find the X button on the top of the page. So why are there so many of these companies still around, and is there really a source that does give a positive ROI?
I think it’s my job to find out. I have already purchased $200 campaigns with a few of these places, and I’ve tossed up some quick sites to test them out and see if I can get an ROI on ANY of these campaigns. Each campaign is geared towards a different site, and since each site is new, they have absolutely no other source of traffic except for these seperate campaigns. Each site has either YPN or AdSense on the pages, plus some content with a few affiliate products/services tied into it. I’ve also got 1 CPM banner network on the pages. Now with all of these excellent income generating sources on the same page, I want to see how “great” and “fantastic” these traffic sources are. I figure it will take about a month to collect all of the necessary data, but I will report all of my findings, in great detail here.
I’m not sure how I’m going to lay it all out, but I’ll try and figure out something easy so that everyone can see the stats in detail and whatnot. I’ll also report the type of category/niche the site falls into, so if the traffic does work, you can easily use it for a niche that you know works and report back with your results too.
I do need some help from everyone though. If you guys can come up with a list of traffic sources you’d like me to test out and use that would be really helpful, because the ones that advertise on the search engines all look as if they are using the same stupid wholesale traffic sources.
So let’s all get together and see what works, and what doesn’t, so that when people are looking for good traffic sources they can now find it, quickly, easily, and safely. I will also keep an archived published list of every single traffic source tested, the results, and grade given. Sure, it may put some of these guys out of business, but if their traffic isn’t converting except for them, then they shouldn’t be in business in the first place!
Email me your traffic sources — also, if you’ve tried any out and you think they have good traffic that actually brings in an ROI, I’d love to test it out as well. I want all traffic sources, good and bad. Whatever you can find as long as it’s NOT email spam or spyware related.
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