Why would buying traffic break the TOS of Adsense. If you want to get your site seen by others then you have to promote it if you do paid advertising or free advertising. But if you get untargeted traffic where you only receive 1 pageview or robot traffic from these auto exchange sites and things then you won't be doing yourself any favours if you have CPM advertisers on your site. Don't forget, these CPM advertisers are only advertising on your site to make money. If they don't make money then they will move onto the next site and you will loose them for good.
I have a tremendous amount of experience with this. Purchasing trafffic sounds like a great thing, and you will often hear that traffic equates to sales, which is a half truism. I can tell you from experience that non tareted traffic is worthless and I would suggest that if you are looking at this as a means to an end you had better pay close attention to the type of traffic you want and them be certain that your site is designed for this metric.
Ive purchased traffic before with the following results: Zero ROI. which all equates to a waste of time and money. Spend your money on targeted Adwords rather: Its targeted and you can see view reports!
It depends on how you buy your traffic. If you pay for something like 10,000 uniques for $30 then you are just wasting your money. If you buy an ad on a site that is displayed on the site for about 30 days and the site is popular then you can get some good traffic plus it is most likely to be targeted.
Buying traffic is a good option if you are paying for targeted traffic. First figure out who needs to see your websites and then figure out how to get your ads in front of them. If your ads are good and the products are worth buying you will eventually make money. I KNOW this works.
Unless you are with a well known company Buying traffic can often mean: 100 or so people earning points on some dodgy website by clicking on some button 1000 times a day that redirects them to your website for 10 secods or so. etc
This is true, avoid "guaranteed visitors" and similar bullshit. I'm talking PPC and CPM. There are a LOT of reputable networks (like AdWords, Overture, Lycos, etc...) that will deliver genuine targeted traffic at reasonable prices. It might take a little experimentation and a few lost dollars before you get the hang of it but it pays off in the long run. If you have a good landing page and commit to it you can even see positive returns in your first month.
I guess that is the chance that you are going to have to take. If you want to grow quickly on the Web then you have to prepare for this dodgy traffic, but it is still worth spending money on advertising. The more you spend the more money you can make if you do it right. If you are really serious about making money on the Web then you would look into purchasing traffic just so you can grow bigger and quicker. Also if you are serious about making your traffic convert then you would either purchase or make your own tracking scripts just so that you can see exactly what type of traffic is coming from each site that you advertise on. Do this then you can see which advertisers to keep promoting on and which ones to chuck away and never advertise on again.
My point is that you should stay away from get paid to surf sites. eg http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/5000-targeted...09492458QQcategoryZ121880QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem Wasted money + No conversions. I cant see how that would make you grow. There are 1000s of quality companies offering targeted traffic. One person visiting your website 10k times a day is a waste of bandwidth.
You are right about the surf sites and buying bulk targeted traffic. I don't think you quite got what I meant in the quoted part that I have mentioned again below. If you are starting out on the Web then you may not have much money to start of with so you advertising budget will be minimal. So it is best to get prepared for dodgy traffic. I didn't mean that it would be good to buy from rubbish sites, but even some sites that you think may send you good traffic may actually do the opposite and if you are advertising on about 10 or more sites then it would be hard for you to know about this dodgy traffic unless you get prepared for it by having tracking statistics and things in place so that you can easily see where you traffic is coming from. For my sites I have made a script which is rather good. It tells me exactualy where my visitors are coming from, how many pageviews they visit on my site, where they go on my site, how long they spend on a page, etc. All I have to do then is type in a sites name that I am advertising on in a search box and it will then give me stats about that site. These stats contain or shall I say will contain as I have not done this part of the script yet. Well anyway once I do it it will contain the amount of unique visitors that I have received from the site, the amount of pageviews I had generated on my site from their traffic, how many pageviews I received on average per visitor from their site, etc. All this information will be collected automatically and I can then monitor my traffic by doing a quick search for each site that I advertise on. If I see that there is any site that I am advertising on that is giving me an average of say 1 pageview or 1.5 pageviews then these are the ones that I will drop. If sites give me more pageviews then I will keep them as these are the most likely ones that are giving me the best traffic as they are actually actively searching through my sites content. They may not buy anything still, but least I know that the traffic is better as they are actually looking through my site and not just leaving on the first pageview like you get with some advertising on the web. For example, the surf sites, paid to read sites, 3rd tier ppc search engines, etc. If you are not prepared for any dodgy traffic that you may receive meaning that you don't know that it is occuring then you will end up loosing alot of money over it and could be the decider wether you will go bust or not. Keeping track of your traffic is very, very important if you are buying it.