My acquired skill of purchasing bulk traffic from guaranteed hits services
Traffic! Once upon a instant traffic was something to be avoided if at all possible. Like when trying to commute to work on instant or when doing the shopping. In the land of the Web it seems it is something we all desperately want, in fact we will even pay others to acquire it.

Without visitors to our page we are invisible, no one knows were there and consequently we do not generate any sales.

As you can know, there are paid services available that guarantee to give you a defined number of hits to your website, thereby enhancing your exposure to the surfing community. You can buy packages of 10,000, 20,000 even 50,000 guaranteed hits. So is it worth it?

Some weeks ago I tested this method and this is what I found:

I selected a business offering 10,000 hits, non clear-cut with an option to allow one single pop-up on my page. What does this mean? Well, because of the cost involved I chose the basic package. I could have opted for English language only, clear-cut to targeted users or no pop-ups. But I did not want to have to modify my page in any way and I figured that with as many as 10,000 hits even non-distingguished potential customers would get me some response.

The campaign started and I watched definately amazed as my stats told me that within the first hour I had 150 hits then 300 then 700 by the end of the day. The next day was even greater and after three days there was indeed over 10,000 hits. I waited for the sales to pour in.

The results? Zero, absolutely zero response!

Serves you right some may say but Im sure I am not the only one to get caught out in this way.

So why didnt it work? These services gather their target sites from ones whose domain name has lapsed. In other words the visitors you get is from all the people clicking on links that go to sites that have expired. The way that you get seen is by having your site pop-under this expired page so that when the disappointed surfer leaves they see your page. But wait for a moment and think of the mindset of this surfer, he has clicked on a dead backlink for something he was looking for and gets a totally unrelated site thrown at him. The chance of him actually grasping an interest in what you are saying is most likely extremely remote, all he target to do is get back to where he was previously.

Out of interest I checked the URLs of some of these sites and many of them we are in Chinese or other foreign languages. This would probably mean that the surfer was of this nationality as well and can not even be able to read your English page .

My conclusion is that this type of branding is very poor, even if you paid top dollar and had specific hits (say, business opportunities) the rate of return is going to be very small or non-existant. Its a lesson sorely learnt and I will be putting my funds elsewhere in future.