Creative Technology

I recently started my own e-commerce site in a very competitive field.  I am very excited at the possibilities but I am also nervous because it is a dynamic, always changing market.  I, of course, want to be successful in my venture but being somewhat of a newbie, I have been spending all of my free time researching advertising methods.  There are so many different methods of trying to drive traffic to your website including Adwords, SEO, forum posting, using classifieds, and the list goes on.  This article will focus on using a third party site to build traffic.

    After some stutter steps with Adwords and posting several of my items on classifieds, I decided to hunt down a third party website to get my site some fast traffic.  I spent some time looking for and found what I thought was a legitimate site(will now be referred to as “The Badman”).  I even checked reviews of The Badman but being a newbie and very excited, I could only see the good in the reviews.  I was so focused on trying to find something to get traffic to my site that I impulsively decided these are the people I should go with.  These sites make it so appealing and create such a level of excitement about their offer it is easy for the inexperienced to fall into their trap.  

    I signed up for the monthly membership, and like a good little newb automatically spent $$ on the traffic creator program.  I was ready to go, I had purchased a guaranteed 1000 hits. Let the traffic roll in and lets make some sales! I thought wow that was easy, this will pay for itself in two days;  yes I know, for you experienced webmasters and marketers, my ignorance is astounding.  Anyways, the first couple of days, my traffic increased substantially and a lot of it was coming from The Badman.  So, the plan was working right?  Well I thought so until I noticed a trend in the traffic on my site that was being referred from The Badman.

   What was that trend you might ask?  Every time I logged onto my webmaster page(which I do obsessively) I noticed that there was always a new IP address referred to my site by The Badman.  However, I also noticed that the only page these visitors were visiting was the index page, my site homepage and that was it.  Every single one of the visitors referred to by The Badman sat on the index page for about 30 seconds and then logged off, nary a visit to any other pages on my website.  So this trend made me very suspicious.  I did some research and found out about all of the scams. Sites like The Badman have people sit on your homepage to make their offers of creating traffic look good. In fact, during my scam search, I had an offer to click on links for $.01 per site that I clicked on and stayed for 30 seconds.  The Badman sites use these methods to make it look like they have increased your traffic just like they promised and just like you paid for.  The real kicker is, they are doing what they promised because they don’t offer quality traffic, they just offer traffic.  So, by law these companies are not doing anything wrong.  However, you and I know that while it isn’t an actionable offense it is certainly unethical.

   Now the blame for this cannot be solely placed on The Badman.  I have to take a good portion of the blame myself.  I was too easily caught in this trap and if I wasn’t so one-track minded, I may have had a chance to figure it out for myself without spending a portion of my limited advertising budget.  When starting up your own website, you focus on the goals of getting quality traffic to your site and making it successful.  However, it is important that you don’t jump at all of the promises from sites like The Badman to help you create that traffic.  This article isn’t written to say that all of the sites promising to create traffic are unethical, but because it is so easy to operate on the internet, there are many sites that are.  It is up to the user to do their due diligence in choosing who to spend your money with.  Good luck in your endeavours and I hope this article has helped.