Around a week and a half ago, I posted a question and answer session… anyways, the quality of the questions was a lot better than previous and due to most of them needing long-ish answers, I decided to answer them individually. I actually put out that post asking for what you guys wanted because a) I had come home late and thus didn’t have time to write content that day and b) I was honestly running out of topics, considering that in this niche most things are covered. Anyways, over the next month or so I’ll be answering random questions from that list, so stay tuned or leave some more questions if you want to see anything discussed

Today I’m going to cover purchasing traffic to your blog… whether it’s needed, and whether it’s cost effective.

The question was asked by Creating Revenue Online, and it was:

What do you think about paying to drive traffic to your blog. Maybe through Adbrite or something. Have you ever and if so, was the quality of the driven traffic worth it?

Personally, well… the only time I’ve ever bought traffic to this blog is when I was testing full page ads on Adbrite. Since that (a couple months or so ago) I have not, and I do not recommend any of you buying traffic.

The only time you should buy traffic is when you can directly make money off those visitors.

Someone hits my homepage, even if s/he is targeted… it’s likely I’m not going to make money off them (more often than not). As a direct example, I have around 1,000 people that read every single post, and thousands more that check out this blog monthly… however I make only a few dozen sales of everything combined on this blog (hosting and other affiliates, as well as advertising sales).

If you are selling a product, and are semi experienced in pay per click, by all means, pay for traffic. Make sure your keywords are very, very specific (dog training ebook instead of dog training, for example) and your landing page gives visitors only two options – buying your product or the red X button to exit.

Of course, if you do have a budget, you can still use it to build metrics for your website.

If you’re thinking about buying traffic, I’m assuming that you have at least $100 on hand (as that’s what’s needed minimum to start with the likes of Adwords… any less and you’re wasting your time).

Why not run a contest? Give away $50 in pure cash for two months, and you should be able to build at least 100 subscribers (and more if you promote it heavily). I talked about contest arbitrage and how you can use contests to make yourself some money, so that’s an idea. Rather than buying a one time hit to your website, you should make it so that people have to subscribe to your feed… at the very least, even if they use a junk email, this means they’ll be forced to read some of your posts.

Another idea… is to sign up Aweber using some of your money and outsource a short (1,000 – 2,000 words) report on a topic related to your blog. Combined, the two things shouldn’t cost you more than $50.

Offer the report to anyone that signs up for your Aweber email list and setup a blog broadcast to go out every few days… you’re providing people with decent content and in return building yourself targeted subscribers. Win / win. By offering a simple report that took me less than an hour or so to write, I’ve managed to build more than 300 subscribers to this blog… that’s as a direct result of the FREE report.

Both the above ways will have far better long term results than your average pay per click traffic to your blog, no matter how good your blog looks and how targeted that traffic is. The thing is, most bloggers that purchase traffic do not realise that ads tend to show up on others blogs in the niche… social blogs, like this one. Thanks to reading a few high quality blogs (which I’ll talk about in a later post), I learned quite some time ago that social blog readers are pretty damned difficult to make money off. So difficult that your time would be better spent elsewhere.

So in conclusion…

If you are selling a product, working a CPA offer or building a list, by all means pay for traffic.

If not, don’t (like if you are promoting a blog). If you are inexperienced with PPC, take it slowly – you can lose a lot money real fast with even the smallest mistakes