Traffic is essential to any online business. If you have enough traffic, then any offer, no matter how terrible, will eventually make money. People actually do make money, albeit small amounts, from AdSense sites that are designed to be so bad that they will encourage people to click on an ad just to escape the horror.
On the other hand, without traffic, it doesn’t matter how good your product or offer is. You might have created a product that solves all your potential customer’s desperate needs and written copy that converts at fifty percent; you won’t sell a thing if you don’t get eyeballs on the page.
Paid Traffic – The upshot is that getting traffic is easy; you can pay for traffic and get as much as you want, whenever you want. The problem is the matter of paying for it. While pay-per-click and other forms of paid traffic can make you a lot of money, they can also drain your bank account faster than Bernie Madoff on a gambling spree.
Paid Traffic
There is a couple of things you need to have in place before you start buying traffic:
A budget – Obviously, you need to pay for paid traffic, but you also need to keep in mind that there is a learning curve involved, and that you are likely to have to spend money for a while before you make any. If you can’t afford that, you’re not ready.
A product that converts – You need something that people are actually going to buy. Basically, you need to know what your conversion rate is and what your other relevant numbers are. If you don’t, or if they suck, you should hold off on buying traffic.
Discipline – Success with paid traffic is all about testing and tweaking. You need to be able to make and track changes in an orderly meaningful way. If you just switch things randomly without hard data, you won’t succeed. This can be hard to stick to when you’re losing money, so you need discipline.
If you want to learn how to get cheap paid traffic, make sure you watch the video I made not so long ago:
– Cheap PPC (highly recommended video)
Any questions? Feel free to leave a comment! Do you pay for traffic or do you stick to organic traffic from the search engines? Remember that you can also get in touch with me via my Facebook page!
I'm an avid fan of your blog, and the content is always top notch - great reading. I'm always impressed with the variety of content and the way you get all the important steps outlined for processes, but still manage to keep it short and simple - few people do that quite as well.
Mike Purvis
Andy Fletcher
Todd Gross
Why not use a platform like Viral Networks? Contribute to the community and surely you will get traffic. What’s more, it will grow organically, the type the search engines love.
The trouble with a lot of paid for traffic is that it comes like a huge avalanche, there’s a week or two of high volumes, then it goes away. A sure fire way to make Google suspicious!
Nic,
I agree with you, the traffic that is ideal is Social Traffic, Traffic coming prequalified, from people who know you or about you and your service. You need a LOT less traffic to get better results. Good point mentioning ViralNetworks, Thanks 🙂
Can I have a gold banana from the social monkee for mentioning viral networks, pretty please? 🙂
Hello Colin can you tell me little bit about Viral Networks. The benefit using Viral Networks. thank you
Oh I wonder how many burned their budgets when first starting hunting for “Paid Traffic” I know that I certainly did – I think that the most poignant paragraph is a offer hat converts. Great keywords and a great landing page are no good at all if the offer is not relevant to your PPC ad eh !
I absolutely agree with this post. And like Affiliate Buddy, I wasted thousands on PPC when I first started online marketing and found out the hard way that nothing comes cheap when you are after quality leads from traffic. Also, I learned the important lesson of buying leads or PPC ads only really gets you a ton of tire kickers and seekers, so your ROI is very very low!
As your more recent post on Offline Marketing, this is what most people never get. After all, postcards are the most proven marketing method for 19-years now.
I agree, relevance is key when paying CPM. If its CPC and you are in the same ballpark, with a good looking, descriptive banner, people will only click if interested. Thanks for the comment, sorry for the slow reply, was traveling 🙂