Web Traffic Methods to Avoid

If there's one question that every website
owner asks herself, it's this:

How can I get more traffic to my website?

The more visitors your site gets, the more
opportunities you have to make money through
sales and advertising.

But as more and more websites pop up everyday,
the competition for traffic is getting fierce.
Ideally, you should be getting traffic from
many different sources. And for the most part,
anything that brings you new visitors is good.

But there a few traffic-generating methods that
are just not worth the headaches. Let's talk
about two of them now.

The first traffic method you should avoid is
paid hits.

Now let's not confuse this with legitimate
advertising programs like Google AdWords. I'm
talking about services that advertise:

"10,000 unique visitors for only $9.95!"

Common sense should tell you that something is
fishy about these types of services. How can they
possibly deliver quality visitors for that price?

They can't.

They generally work in one of two ways. They
either use a script to "hit" your website over
and over again or they are part of a "paid to
surf" program. This type of program pays people
to visit websites, so all that happens is they
add your site to their queue and pay people to
visit it.

Unfortunately, your visitors will mostly keep
your site in the background while they do more
important things. Your sire will be visited, but
rarely read.

The second traffic method to avoid is called
"safe lists".

A safe list is a list of email addresses of
people that have supposedly agreed to receive
promotions via email.

A major problem with safe lists is that you have
no real way to verify that the owners of the email
addresses actually opted in. Their email addresses
could have been scraped from any number of blogs,
websites, forums, or discussion groups.

Sending emails to a safe list could result in
a rash complaints that could get your entire
website banned by your ISP.

It's just not worth the risk.