"Guaranteed Traffic" Scams

A common problem that Internet marketers face is getting traffic to their sites. Although getting traffic is not a difficult task, it can be expensive and you will have to figure out how to make a profit after your advertising expenses. That leads marketers to look for alternative ways of getting traffic other than PPC, ezine advertising, and banner ads.

To solve this problem, there are many services that promise to send you thousands of hits to your site for rock-bottom prices. These companies run ads that promise something like "100,000 guaranteed hits for $30."

The cheap price makes these offers incredibly enticing for marketers as it would cost literally 100 or more times that amount to get that kind of traffic from other sources.

Even if it does sound too good to be true, these companies play to your logic side and state that even if you were to convert half a percent of these visitors into sales, you would still walk away with a huge amount of profit from your advertisement.

But these offers are downright scams. These companies deliver bogus traffic in many different ways. Some of these companies will simply use "bots" that constantly visits your website until it reaches the hits they promise. Many customers report that they analyzed their traffic logs they received all the traffic from one IP address.

Smarter guaranteed traffic companies use more sophisticated technology that generates a unique IP address for each visit to your page. You can find out whether by studying visitors' behaviors. Real visitors will often click, browse and stay on your site for some time while bots visit and leave your site instantly.

Another way these companies cheat you out of your money is by misleading you. To break it down technically, a hit is when a file from your site is downloaded. So if a visitor comes to your site and you have 10 different images, it counts as 10 hits. So some of these companies actually do deliver the guaranteed hits but you are really getting a fraction of the number they promise. Take note that some of these companies do market it as unique visitors but use bots as I mentioned earlier.

While there are a few legitimate companies that sell real traffic for highly discounted prices, they are almost always low quality visitors. Your site will be presented to highly untargeted visitors and may even be plugged into adware. You'll just be wasting your money trying to appeal to an audience that isn't even interested in what you're selling.

In closing, these guaranteed traffic offers sound very promising but are not worth your time. You should seek out legitimate advertising sources like contextual ads, PPC, blog ads, and email marketing networks. By doing some research and finding out how other advertisers did with the network, you can get a good idea of traffic options.

IM Report Card has reviewed many of these networks like Adbrite, Chitika, Clicksor, and more so you can find out how they work and if they're worth getting involved with.


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