Is paid traffic really worth the money ?

I don't think most of paid traffic worth the money, however there always could be exceptions.

 

Let me help you and perhaps the OP.

Paid Traffic: It depends on a ton of factors but the main ones are: WHAT keywords will you be using. WHAT product are you selling and WHO is you audience.

People smell the coffee and stop posting random stuff that is not worth CAK

 

Reading all your answers made me totally back out on buying taffic.

Besides I get more and more convinced that they are lying when they say it's not bots. I realize this is the answer to my initial question (why don't they use it for themselves).
I doubt anyone able to send 100,000 real visitors on anywebsite will spend time and efforts on selling his service for relatively few bucks.

 

This is something i have thought about myself previously.
I actually conducted a few experiments using people from fiver.com (facebook, twitter 'real' visitors)

Example 1 - 68k 'real facebook' followers ~ roughly 2000 visited the site over 2 days (i presume it was via this), they never returned again (not that i noticed)
Example 2 - 50k 'real twitter' followers ~ roughly 1000 visitors over 3 days (once again i presume it was this), they never returned again (not that i noticed)

Obviously fiver members are no professional advertising people, they simply tweet or post to gain $$

 

Most paid traffic are from bots and will destroy your ranking in google. If you add google analytics to your site and buy paid traffic you will notice that there is a very high bounce rate. Normally the bounce rate will be something like 98%.

 

I ran several tests of traff purchases with poor results! A few big ad networks are affiliated to us and make A LOT of money but they send several TONS of traffic !
here are my 2 cts !

 

Agreed

Just like there are publishers with excellent sites/products who do not like getting "hands on" with their marketing, there are marketers who love what they do and are not interested in promoting any of their products. they'd rather leave the testing to the publishers.

Now, if you can do both (advertise and publish), you'll save money and learn a ton from the process

TEST! Do your research and look into the prospective source of traffic. If it looks promising, see if they can do a small test to see how it'll work out for you. If you've had success with your headlines/ad copy in google, adsense, etc. they should work with the new traffic source if it's targeted correctly (and legit).

 

Hey Gang,
Once you get the traffic you may want a dynamic and affordable way to promote your services, look into professional animation videos. This is one of the hottest marketing strategies on the web right now. High converting and affordable compared to others out there, some companies are charging 3 times as much for this service.

www.video-pitch.com

Check it out, for yourselves

 

You totally did not subscribe just to come here and spit advertisement for your own website. Besides, selling $199 a service that you get can get on Fiverr... did you find any pigeon yet ?

 

Well, depends what are you paying for... I personally buy lots of Solo Ads and I love it. If you manage to make a few sales the paid traffic becomes free

 

Exactly. Obviously it would be foolish to buy traffic without a proven funnel. Though many people do it. Well, unless you have the money to speed up testing.

 

The term "buy traffic" most of the time means to buying huge amount of traffic from a network. These networks own a ton of "cheap websites" (torrent and adult websites) and let these visitors go through a network with popups and pop-unders to make it into "good traffic" (taking them from a torrent site and letting them go through a PR 6 website, then redirect this traffic to your website) Most of the time the people that sell you traffic own a huge network of interconected websites (we are talking about 2.000 - 10.000 websites). As far as "Buying traffic" the legal way goes, there are a lots of things you have to keep in mind when buying ads on a website. I suggest you check out buysellads (dot) com. It will allow you to see websites, the monthly impressions they have and the price it costs to buy an ad for every 1.000 impressions.

 

Most of the people selling traffic either have a traffic exchange website or, unfortunately, are sending bots to the sites. There is a big difference between the two. I would not buy traffic, unless I was certain that the visitors were real people, from different IPs, and that they stay on the site/page for many seconds (let's say over 30). Hopefully, they are a targetted audience and they find the site valuable.

 

Its always good to target on free organic traffic
Some free traffic sources i have tested and had results with.

1) Google+ Communities
www.google.com/+/learnmore/communities/

This is a REALLY awesome way of engaging people in communities. You'll need a Gmail account for this.

Once you've registered the Gmail account you can browse communities for topics.

So for example if you're in the weightloss niche you could join:
plus.google.com/s/weightloss/communities?hl=en

The key here is NOT to spam the communities with your links but to engage the community with useful conversations which entice them to click on your link.

2) Content Discovery Networks
Example: Zergnet.com

In a nutshell content discovery networks are link exchange services which are automated.

What you do is place a widget on your sites which looks at the content on your site and populates it with links to related articles on other people's sites.

Have had mixed results with this one testing on some of my comic sites but had promising results with my game content.

On a test post doing a game review i received more than double the traffic i sent where visitors stayed for a decent amount of time on the site which i tracked via Google Analytics.

The last thing you want is sending traffic and getting back rubbish traffic

So if you have more sticky VALUABLE content geared towards entertainment, games and movies this one might be worth checking out.

3) Twitter and Google+ Profiles

One of the best ways to drive targeted traffic back to your sites is to find people who need help in your niche by engaging them directly on Twitter and on their Google+ profiles; also making them aware of your content/products/services.

BuzzBundle is a tool i use to find these people on a daily basis.

What i do is track keywords and engage conversations as soon as they appear online and mix it up by posting back content to either my social content e.g. Youtube videos or blog posts.

 

Paid traffic is bad for adsense, don't try it even if the sellers says it is - adsense safe.

Most of these paid traffic is sent by toolbars, auto-surf programs etc. so even if these are not bots, they are still not interested on your sites, they will just bounce back.

If you really want to use paid traffic, try PPC - google adwords for example. Or you can try social media - facebook ads, stumbleupon paid ads etc. much better than those $5 traffic... - please note that even these are not adsense safe - only organic search traffic can be considered as adsense safe.

 

When done right paid traffic can be really great! On the other hand if it's fake then perhaps it's only good for increasing the perception of traffic your own site is getting?

 

Well it's true, but what if you promoting affiliate product? You sending buyers directly to them.

 

You can advertise your affiliate program too- if you target potential affiliates.

 

I would not advise purchasing traffic from advertisers who ''guarantee'' X amount of hits because usually its fake automated hits that will not produce results. However, on the other hand, there are some great ways to generate traffic with paid advertising such as adwords PPC, Facebook PPC, Solo ads etc etc. It's just a case of trying and testing to find out what works best for you and of course, makes profit.

 

Your concerns are very much accurate however it must be kept in mind that there is a variety of visitors on the internet with different requirements. The only thing they do is drive the potential traffic to you.