I think I already know the answer to this but what's everyone's take on those free traffic programs?

You would expect an avalanche of posts why not to use free traffic programs, huh?

The truth is somewhere between, and to really answer it you need to be more specific.

Not all programs are useless, but majority of them is.

Why?

Because these programs are a way of making money for their owners. And even though you can generate some traffic, you will not get the traffic you want - targeted audience, who want to find more information about your site and a potential product. You will get visitors who will come to your website for just a few seconds and then leave.

And this provides some false statistics - you will see high numbers of visitors, but no clicks, no purchases, nothing. And this is not very effective. When I tried most of these programs I was sooner or later sad and frustrated and spent loooots of time for nothing.

Then I changed my strategy, started building real traffic sources form search engines, authority sites, media etc. and you know what? I spent the same amount of time, but the results ($) were dramatically different.

Thats why I suggest you to go for the real thing.

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I totally agree with webmaster.

Traffic is the blood line for any site but targeted traffic is important to stay alive. You have to remember, once you have traffic you want to profit form that traffic. The more targeted traffic you have to your site, the better your site will convert ($) (at least that's what i think).

In the past I have tried this programs which promise traffic and trust me you don't want to go that route. Most of them are scams. They run a script which visits your site from different servers and you think these are actual people who are visiting your site. But that's not the case. If you have a web stats tracking visits on your site, you will notice that these are fake visits because the bounce rate will 100%.

Rather use the money to get inbound links to your site. Submit your site to good paid directories. And most importantly build a layer of valuable content around your site to attract targeted traffic from search engines.

One you have targeted traffic to your site, then you have to worry about keeping that traffic happy and make them come back to your site. That all depends on your design, content and value of your site.

In the field of web marketing and promotion, i have seen from my own experience that there is a lot of experimenting you have to do before you gain any success and success comes in small steps. Because it is all trial and error. You have to test different strategies to see what works for you. Most importantly be patience. I know its hard to maintain patience (i'm not good at it). One thing that has helped me is getting help from people who been through his process already. And this forum is a great place.

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Excellent advice webmaster and webdev,

As webmaster said, the only people that really benefit from these programs is the people that own them. I have to admit I joined TrafficSwarm years ago and recruited tons and tons of webmasters (because my site is geared toward webmasters) and even though I got all these clicks and sign ups under me, I never converted anything because people are simply just clicking through to your site to earn more credits for more useless clicks...and the cycle continues.

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Yeah I saw a thread on another forum about guy raving about TrafficSwarm because it gave me 10,000 hits in a certain time frame but when he was asked how many sales he generated, he told us a big fat zero. Yet he was still convinced it was good. I tried to convince him it was worthless traffic.

I'd rather get 400 highly targeted visitors than 10,000 random, non targeted visits. And unfortunately these free traffic programs aren't going to get you the targeted traffic.

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Severely Addicted to AdWords :)

Free Traffic (or dead cheap traffic) comes from three sources:

1) Traffic exchange:
You have to surf other people's sites and they surf yours.
It is waste of time + bandwidth. If you don't buy anything from the sites you surf, why will people on the other end buy from your site? Autosurf programs have timers that change the page after every 20 seconds. I can say, these may be useful if you are displaying CPM (cost per impression) ads. However, the days when they paid $5 CPM are long gone. The hardly pay $0.10 per 1000 impressions now. It is only waste of time.

2) Automated bots.
Ever heard of a command called "ping" in DOS or Linux? This is what they do. If you ping a site, the counter (eg: statcounter, awstats, etc) registers a hit. And it may look like actual visitors.
It is waste of time to deal with someone selling this type of traffic. You will only lose precious bandwidth and end up with no human visitors, leave alone conversions. Your web host may even suspend your account because these bots puts two much strain on their servers.

3) Traffic from parked pages/ Redirects.

I will give example for this type of traffic. If you visit http://www.keyboard.com/, you will find links to related sites. Now, if I want to buy a new keyboard and visit this site, I may click on these links and buy something.

If the source of traffic is links on parked pages, we can expect good conversions. This type of traffic is not cheap. It is almost equal to running PPC campaigns.

However, nothing beats search engine traffic. It is free and you get copious amounts of it. And as far as conversions go, it is the best.

That's true Lisa, but actually, trafficswarm is how I found this forum. I was doing my daily clicks & this page just caught my attention & so I continued reading & decided I liked what I saw. Problem with trafficswarm is most of the sites are crappy. I guess it helps if you've got an eye catching site.

Well I'll be darn... trafficswarm finally paid off. LOL I knew I didn't close the account for some reason.

__________________
Don't put the cart before the horse.
Plan your website, then create it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2 Create a Website | 2 Create a Website Blog
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Recent Blog Posts...

Are You Cashing In On ClickBank?
10 Reasons You Should Be YouTub-ing
Is Google AdSense Dead?