One of the things that’s difficult to get on the internet is traffic. There are millions of websites and billions of pages which makes finding the pages on your site more difficult that finding a needle in a haystack. Depending on how you tackle things, it can take a year or more before you start to see anyone other than yourself and some friends in your server logs.

If you’re not providing a local business, it can be tempting to look at offers that claim to send thousands or even millions of visitors to your website.

After all, if you’re buying that many visitors, it stands to reason that some of them will sign up to your newsletter or buy something from you.

Or does it?

The answer is that cheap or instant traffic rarely (if ever) provides anything of substance.

The first question you need to ask yourself is where is this new traffic coming from?

Usually the answer is that it’s either not real people visiting your site or, if they are, they “view” it for a millisecond or two – usually just long enough for them to click the red X to close the new browser window that’s popped up.

The first of those two options are robots.

Robots can be programmed to pretend to be humans visiting a site. They can certainly arrive for long enough to register in your site analytics and therefore you see a spike in traffic.

The second option of real visitors is often delivered by something called a pop-under window. That is a new browser window that pops onto your screen, typically underneath the currently open window.

If you’ve been to sites like TripAdvisor you’ll have seen this in operation – they seem to spawn new browser windows with monotonous regularity. Other less savoury sites often do the same.

Again, these visits will trigger in your site analytics but most people have trained themselves to close these new browser windows before the page even has time to load.

Some traffic sellers will say that they are sending you traffic that has been generated by recently expired domains.

The logic is that these domains still have some links pointing to them and that those links generate clicks.

The reseller then directs some of those clicks to your website. The traffic may or may not be relevant to your site and users may or may not like what they see if they reach you.

This kind of traffic is normally cheap and, as with almost everything in life, the price should give you an indication of the quality of the traffic you’re likely to get.

Think about it for a minute – if the traffic was worth anything, the domain would have been bought by someone (or it wouldn’t have been allowed to lapse in the first place) and monetised by them in a more profitable way than sending thousands of clicks for a handful of dollars.

As a general rule, the only real way to buy traffic to your website is to pay for each individual click using something like AdWords or Facebook or possibly Twitter.

You’re probably paying as much for one visitor as the miracle traffic sites claim to charge for thousands of them.

But you stand a much higher chance of getting the traffic to do something more than boost your analytics figures.

If you’d like to find out how to get targeted traffic to your website, take a look at this course.