Buying Traffic?
-
Hi Everyone,
Has anybody ever bought traffic using a site like visitorboost.com?
What are your thoughts? What other services are there?
We are trying to supplement our "like/follower" campaigns, while we wait on our organic methods to build followers. Think of a HVAC company just starting out in social....they dont have time to build and nurture a list, (although we will for the future) they need sales now...so they trun to radio, print ads, etc.
If we could buy thousands of followers in a demographic that made sense and it was affordable, is it worth a try to get the word out?
Thanks in advance guys!
-
An example that I saw that worked recently was for a pasta company, and they literally sent out free pasta for every person that signed up. You ended up having to like and follow their company to sign up as well, so they killed 3 birds with one stone.
I found out about it from a "frugal blog" site.
It was seriously popular, and it built a following that was specific to the brand and product. Excellent idea, but probably not the cheapest thing ever done.
-
ty Dignan99. We concur on the campaign ideas you mention...we are looking at this as supplemental.
-
Let me clarify. We are all set with growing organic visitors for likes....but like direct mail sent to a large demographic, it is hard to discount that buying 5,000 or more from any type of reputable service is a bad thing, unless the list is bogus or comes of misleading and causes brand damage.
I mean if i could buy a 50k list of SMO CEOs and execs and 80% of them left, i would still have a good target to nurture. So, i guess we are wondering if anyone else had tried the mass market approach to build their "opt in" likes/list/followers
-
Buying traffic sounds like a bad short term solution for a longer term issue.
While I believe there may be some positive results from getting a bunch of fake traffic to a site, blog, facebook, or twitter campaign, what do you think your client would prefer?
1. Purchased traffic that fakes out Google temporarily, with the possibility of punishment and other repercussions?
2. A legitimate campaign that reaches out to their current customer base, and allows for an organic following of their site, blog, twitter, facebook?
I know as a small business owner, I would realize that the second answer might take a lot longer, but would be superior to number one if the correct strategy is put into place.
As many of the recent SEOmoz blog posts point out, building a friendship and loyalty between a business/site and their customers is absolutely key. It should be approached as a fledgling friendship, and the rewards will be real when one if finally developed.
As far as a specific Facebook "like" campaign goes, start with the basics. Have all of the owners and employees follow the business in question, and "like" and/share all the likeable shares and posts.
Before this happens it would be advisable to have these same people ask them to follow the business as well.
Hope my suggestions help.
-
I think that buying traffic is not going to bring good results.
Maybe you should subcontract this job out to someone else?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
5 top things an eCommerce Site Can Do To Improve Rankings and Traffic
Hello, We are a niche eCommerce company with a limited budget but time on our hands to make changes and start projects. For our main keyword we rank 10th. It is a small to medium sized niche. Without knowing the details, I'm looking at the top 5 things I can do for Rankings and Traffic considering on-site, off-site, keeping in mind google updates. Also, what's the best or your favorite Ecommerce ranking/traffic articles? Thanks! Bob
Social Media | | BobGW1 -
Traffic from YouTube
Hi I've suggested a client add annotated links to the end of their YT vids to help get traffic from YT My clients video guy has suggested setting up a hidden redirect page so we can tell how many people come to the website from youtube I take it this is not necessary since traffic from YT will be easily identified by Google analytics anyway ? Cheers Dan
Social Media | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Increasing Unbranded Organic Traffic
What do people think is the best way to increase unbranded organic traffic specifically? We have worked on on-page optimisation / keywords / some social media, but there has been no noticeable increase over the last 6 months. Do you think increasing unbranded traffic is an objective worth pursuing?
Social Media | | RG_SEO0 -
Dealing with Pinterest Traffic | Best Practices?
I've not been able to determine what a best practice might be in this situation. Maybe you can help. One of my sites (built on Wordpress) had a blog post go viral on Pinterest. We went from about 1-200 visits a day to more than 17,000 visits daily. All the traffic was basically coming through this one blog post. The site was not built to accommodate that much traffic. We quickly received a call from the hosting company that they had to take our site down because of the load that was being placed on the server (shared hosting.) This is a small, niche site. The products & services being advertised are extremely niche. There is no intent to ever have huge amounts of traffic because we know the customer base is so small. In order to keep the site up, and to reduce the amount of traffic coming from Pinterest, the hosting company modified the .htaccess file to block all traffic coming from pinterest.com. We know that 99% of all the traffic coming from Pinterest not only were not potential customers, but are in the wrong demographic. So, there's no worry for us in losing that traffic. I also know we're not the first site this has happened to. So, what's the best practice here?
Social Media | | Imperi0 -
Do i direct traffic to all social platforms or not?
Hi ...I have a brand that is very strong socially..specifically facebook and twitter and this is where we have directed all strategy and traffic. We recently wanted to establish a presence on google+ and have done so. My feeling at this point is to maintain a presence on google+ but only direct social traffic to facebook and twitter from the brands website....so we can keep the focus here aswell as the stronger community. I have noticed other brands doing something similar.....is this a good strategy or should we be directing traffic to all the platforms from the site?...bottomline should we be linking to all our social platforms from the brands website or keep it linked to the stronger platforms and just maintain a presence on the others? thank you
Social Media | | nomad-2023230 -
Driving traffic to a forum
I am building a forum and its a general forum, what are the best practices to gain users/members. I dont expect to rank for every category in the SERP's. Doe's anyone here have any experience in gaining traffic/members to a forum?
Social Media | | SEODinosaur0 -
How to get most out of viral blog traffic?
Our website has a WordPress blog, hosted at website.com/blog. I've discovered that with some hard work and a bit of luck, I can create a blog posts that will go viral - they will get about 50k readers in 1-3 days (which is a LOT for our website), and 300-1000 tweets, 100-250 Facebook shares, and anywhere from 10 to 130~ G+1s. (Unfortunately, these are for the posts, not for our website.) The posts will also get some comments. And most importantly, a few links - sometimes from very reputable domains. However, I feel that I could be doing much more here. The links go directly to the blog post, and I'm not sure how much is that helping our website overall in regards to SEO. What actions can I encourage the readers to do, and how should I prioritize them? Some of the actions are: Sharing/liking, writing a comment, checking out our products, subscribing to our Facebook/Twitter/G+ profile, subscribing to our RSS. One another possible action/opportunity that I see and which could potentially pay off is to offer some kind of PDF report to be emailed, which would initiate an autoresponder sequence. Do you think that having a clear call to action in a blog post could reduce the sharing of it ? Is it possible to encourage whoever is writing about our blog posts to use a direct link to our website, instead of linking directly to the post? If yes, how? E.g. if I included a direct link to our website in the post itself, e.g. in the most important part of the post that gets quoted, it could work - unfortunately that's usually virtually impossible. Am I sitting on a gold mine here, and should do this as much as possible? Should I consider putting this content not just onto the blog, but on our website.com/something ? I'm actually not sure how that would help though, it would simply have a shorter URL. I've discovered that it doesn't matter where I post this content, if the presentation looks decent. So it doesn't have to be posted on website.com/blog. I can even post it on other domains - should I? And the most important question: How do I get the most out of this opportunity in SEO regards? Thanks for any ideas or insights!
Social Media | | Jiri.Novotny0 -
Best way to capture traffic from tweet pictures
I tweet a lot from several twitter accounts, and have a lot of traffic from my tweet pictures. However, I'd like to capture that traffic on my blog. I've tried a few plug in's that allowed me to use my blog has a host for the images I tweet out, but I've yet to find one that works very well. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas / suggestions on how I could send the traffic from all of the pictures I tweet out to my blog? Also, I don't want this to clog up the home page. At one time I used a plug in that allowed me to do something like this, and I created a separate category (http://noahsdad.com/twitter) and excluded that category from my home page. There were a few issues though, the formatting didn't work well for people viewing the pictures on twitter. And the plug in conflicted with other plug ins I was running. I haven't tried it in a while, so maybe it works better now. I hoping someone out there was some suggestions. thanks!
Social Media | | NoahsDad0