A handful of fans going nuts in front of their favorite band on stage can quickly grow into a throbbing crowd that soon swallows up apprehensive bystanders. Before you know it, everyone’s singing and bopping along.
For the audience, the concert is a one-night stand. A few that experienced the band for the first time might become new fans. For others, the concert becomes but a fading memory. For the band, it’s probably been a long, hard slog of many years pounding the pubs and clubs to get a few minutes of fame on the circuit.
Building up a loyal following of online fans, whatever your gig, is much like the backstage trials and tribulations of the proverbial band striving for fame and possibly a record deal. You, instead, have been growing your audience with the gamut of free SEO strategies – most of which mean pounding away at the QWERTY keyboard until your fingers bleed.
You have been somewhat rewarded for your time and effort in publishing engaging content with a gradual increase in your visitor stats and search engine rankings. Still, eventually, the entrepreneur in you realizes that your time is more valuable. It’s worth spending some cash to cut back on the hours invested in pumping the keyboard so you can see a quicker return on your investment.
Here we’ll look at cheap complementary ways to increase web traffic and give you some strategic tips to get your visitor numbers up to the next level, assuming you’ve already got some fundamental SEO strategies in place.
Increase your web traffic and give you some strategic tips to get your visitor numbers up to the next level.
Quick Word on WordPress SEO Plugins
If you already use WordPress, your search engine optimization (SEO) is well covered with the plethora of plugins available through the content management system. If not, browse through the other articles on this blog for SEO plugin recommendations.
What are Your Visitors Worth to You?
How much are 1,000 visitors worth to you? How much work do you have to put in to get that many visitors in a day?
I know from experience that it took me several years of almost daily posts on my news website to build up web traffic to a somewhat respectable few hundred visitors a day.
Publishing breaking news always brought a boost to viewer and subscriber numbers as the content went viral.
Spending many hours a day writing news stories – doing my due diligence with keywords and meta descriptions to appease the search engines – did eventually pay off, but at what price?
Time Really is Money
This white-hat method of self-promotion didn’t cost any money, but it did cost a lot of time, hundreds of hours, which are almost impossible to put a price on.
If you’re any kind of entrepreneur, you’ve probably already achieved a degree of success with raw effort alone, but at some point, the realization arrives that it is worth spending money to get things done that otherwise consume far too much valuable time.
Is Your Time Worth More than a Minimum Wage?
If we try to put a cost on hours spent doing organic SEO to build an audience, we could start with the average minimum wage as a benchmark. In the US, the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. In the UK, it’s £8.72 per hour.
Let’s say you spend an 8-hour day updating a website and then populating various other “free” marketing channels such as social media platforms. Based on the minimum wage, a single day of do-it-yourself SEO has cost you about $60 of your time.
And what can we expect to get in return for all those hours hunched over a keyboard? A sprinkling of new visitors and a smattering of ‘likes, perhaps? Certainly not enough new visitors to make any money with an affiliate marketing partner.
Whether you aim to profit from ad revenue or from direct sales, anything short of a few thousand unique visitors a day just doesn’t cut the mustard. Paid web traffic is a shortcut to boosting visitor numbers used by even the most charismatic online influencers.
Save Time & Money With a Web Traffic Package
You could get several thousand new visitors over a month from a paid web traffic plan for the same cost of a day’s toil on a breadline salary.
When you can buy traffic for a website for less than the hourly minimum wage, then you’re a winner. It just makes good business sense. Paying for web traffic is usually safe to do in conjunction with monetization programs such as AdSense, as long as you use a reputable vendor that guarantees to send you real human web traffic.
Benefits of Paid Web Traffic
Paid web traffic has a bit of a bad name. You might believe it to be unethical and point an accusatory finger at yourself for even thinking about paying for an increase in visitors. Really though, nobody gets well known on the web without buying web traffic. Even the big guns in the info industry buy web traffic to become influencers in the first place. So ethical quandaries aside, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Here are some other good reasons to buy web traffic to give your SEO a boost.
- The rapid increase in web traffic (within 24 – 48 hours)
- The cheapest alternative to expensive online marketing and advertising
- Increases your search engine ranking
- Reaches out directly to your target audience
- Brings more online conversions
- Increases potential profit margins from affiliate marketing
Web Traffic Strategies
The damage done to domain rankings by low-quality bot traffic is the main reason that paying for web traffic is sometimes frowned upon. Really cheap web traffic is usually artificially generated from bot farms or click farms. Their job is to visit your site and quickly leave – a behavior that search engine spiders easily recognize as distinctly non-human.
So sending hordes of bots to your domain hoping to boost visitor numbers and your SEO ranking will likely backfire and could end in your website being penalized and demoted by search engines.
Who Cares if Visitor Numbers are High?
Even though affiliate marketing organizations benefit from lots of web traffic generating lots of ad impressions, they also have a reputation to uphold and must justify charging their customers for pay-per-click or cost-per-impression advertising. Advertisers can’t justify charging customers for quick clicks from bots.
So as long as everyone is assured of getting clicks and views from real people in return for their money, everybody’s happy. Try cheating the system by buying outrageous volumes of really cheap web traffic, and you risk losing favor with affiliates and the search engines keeping an eye on your website statistics.
So play it safe when you buy web traffic by making sure you get a plan from a vendor that promises to give you real human visitors.
A low-cost solution to buy cheap targeted traffic costs about $55 per month, which feeds you several thousand visitors over 30 days at a time. Spreading your visitors over an entire month is a safe web traffic buying strategy rather than a one-time splurge. A steady stream of visitors indicates that your website is gaining popularity and if your content is good and you have a good click-through rate, your search engine ranking should also improve.
Ruthlessly Exploit Your Niche
Combining paid web traffic and SEO strategies is a marriage of commercial convenience. Apart from the tweaks, you can make to your SEO with plugins, the best way to boost your website’s ranking is simply to publish good content that adds value to your domain.
With the increasingly smart artificial intelligence used by search engines to serve relevant content for audiences and advertisers, you must stay focused on complementing your niche with appropriate content.
Your visitor experience counts as points towards your overall SEO score too. If your website engages visitors and is easy to navigate, your click-through rate increases, and visitors spend longer on your site. These visitor behaviors are part of your web traffic statistics analyzed by search engine spiders.
Target Your Audience
The most effective all-around SEO strategy is narrowing down your specific niche and your audience of potential customers.
Selling music? If it’s good old rock and roll, then you have a vast demographic to target, which may or may not work in your favor. It’s tough to get noticed in an ocean filled with similar-looking fish, but if the genre appeals to a narrower demographic, then your target is more specific.
If you are looking for clownfish, there’s no point hunting for them on the English Channel. You’re better off going to the Indian Ocean. The same is true when targeting web traffic. Choosing your niche as well as the location of your paid visitors is highly effective in boosting your search engine rankings.
As mentioned earlier, publishing good content is key to organic SEO growth. The same is true when you buy web traffic. You could order up to 400,000 visitors a day, but if they don’t hang around and click through or convert, you’ve wasted a good opportunity to capitalize on the influx of visitors.