The Truth About Cheap Traffic

Traffic is the life blood of any internet marketing business. Without it, it’s impossible to be successful online. But the problem is that it can sometimes be expensive get the right traffic amount of traffic to your website in a short amount of time.

If you are anything like most internet marketers, sometimes you want to get traffic to your website quickly. You don’t want to write articles, make posts on forums, or use other types of free traffic generation methods that take a while to start showing results.

On the other hand, you also don’t want to spend tons of money on expensive paid advertising methods even if they produce faster results. What you want is traffic that you can quickly get to your website without paying an arm and a leg.

In other words, you want cheap traffic. So in this article you will discover 3 powerful ways you can quickly start using to get cheap traffic to your website.

But that’s not all. You will also discover 3 methods of getting cheap traffic that you should stay far away from. These are methods that will rob you of all your money without producing any worthwhile results.

So let’s start by looking at the 3 effective methods of getting cheap traffic.

PPC or Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC advertising is one of the fastest ways to get traffic to your website. If you are able to select the right keywords, that is, keywords that others aren’t bidding on, it can be a great source of cheap traffic.

The main reason why most people spend a fortune on PPC is that they bid on keywords that everyone else is bidding on. And just like any auction, the more bidders you have, the higher the price goes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an eBay auction or an auction to sell a house.

So it is absolutely important to do your research and find keywords that have a low amount of bidders and then use those keywords in your PPC advertising.

When you join the Google Adwords program, you can use their keyword tool to see which keywords have a reasonable amount of search volume and yet have low competition.

In other words, you can find out which keywords a good number of people are using at the search engines but which not many advertisers are using in their PPC campaigns.

If you find those keywords you would have found yourself a really affordable way to get traffic to your website.

PPC advertising platforms include the Google Adwords program and Facebook to name a few. If you are just starting out, I would suggest that you start with Facebook as it is considerably cheaper than Google. That way you can make your mistakes cheaply.

Media Buying

Another great source of cheap traffic is media buying. Media buying simply refers to paying for ad space. So when you see those ads displayed on sites like Yahoo, that is media buying.

It differs from PPC in that you don’t pay only when someone clicks on your ad. In other words, you don’t pay for clicks.

Instead, you pay for impressions. This means that you pay for the number of times your ad is seen by people. It is generally much cheaper to pay for impressions than it is to pay for clicks.

That’s why many internet marketers use this method once they have a proven set of ads.

So they first test their ads using PPC in order to control costs and then switch to media buying platforms once they know for a fact that people will respond to their ads. That’s the way I do things as well. There is less uncalculated risk involved.

Two great media buying platforms are Adbrite and Buysell ads. You can get started for less than $ 15. Infact, once you establish your reputation on a media buying platform, you can even pay for ads after the campaign is over.

In other words, you can make sells first and then pay for advertising later!

Paid Video Distribution

You are probably aware that video marketing is a wonderful source of free traffic. It works well because most people are used to learning by watching and listening.

So when you market your online business through videos, you convey your message in a way that naturally works effectively for most people.

But what you may not yet know is that video marketing is also a very powerful form of cheap traffic. For as little as $97, you can use a video distribution site to blast your videos to several video websites.

A good example of a video distribution site is Traffic Geyser. Using this site can help you send your videos to more websites than you could ever manage to manually submit your videos to.

$97 may seem like a lot of money and it is. But when you consider the fact that you only pay once and yet have your videos posted to several sites on a permanent basis in some cases, it’s really a bargain.

So those are a few great sources of cheap traffic. Let’s now look at the bad and the ugly.

When searching for ways to get cheap traffic, you need to make sure you avoid the methods ywe discuss below. Though they may be cheap, they are not effective and will prove a sheer waste of time and money.

Purchasing Cheap Lists

It is critical to avoid purchasing cheap lists. Some companies online tend to offer very cheap leads. These companies give you the impression that all you have to do is buy leads for a very low price and then sit back and let them work for you. However, things NEVER work that way.

Much of the time these aren’t targeted leads. They are just a collection of details of a random group of people who have no interest in what you have to offer at all.

So it’s not worth spending your time and money to buy these lists and send them emails. Furthermore, it can get your online business into a lot of trouble because emailing such lists is considered spam.

Don’t let the extremely cheap price allure you. Prices like $5 for a million leads are a SURE sign of a bad quality list.  

Safelists

In a nutshell, this is a form of cheap traffic whereby you join a list where everyone can market to each other by sending emails.  Although it sounds viable, it rarely leads to any significant traffic or sales for your business.

The reason for this is quite simple. Everyone who joins a safelist joins it to send emails not to receive them. Infact most safelists even show you how to avoid receiving emails!

So marketing to people who only want to send emails, no matter how cheap, is a really terrible idea indeed.

Guaranteed Visitors/Hits

If any service or program guarantees you thousands of targeted hits, in all likelihood this is something you don’t want to get involved with. Infact, you should like run away as fast as you can. 

I once bought 10 000 guaranteed hits and sent them to a website that I know for a fact converts. None of them bought anything.

So I know from my own experience and several other horror stories from other people that you should avoid guaranteed visitors or hits like the plague.

The Bottom Line

When searching for ways of driving cheap traffic to your site, stick with the methods that are tried and true. These are methods like PPC, media buying and paid video distribution.

When exploring new methods, make sure you do your homework. Make sure you know exactly what you are getting into.

If a method does not make sense or seems too good to be true, avoid spending your money on it. Also, try not to rely on just one traffic source.

Instead use several sources of cheap traffic at the same time so that the small streams of traffic they bring to your site eventually add up to one huge river of consistent revenue.

You can find even more sources of cheap traffic here.

To Your Success

Bruce