By Larry Stepanowicz
Building your Internet business can hard enough without falling
victim to traffic thieves. No, I'm not talking about software
that overrides your affiliate links with those of another, but
the kind of thieves that take your money with lies or deception
and don't deliver what they promise or what they lead you to
believe you will get: the so-called guaranteed traffic sites.
Lotto sites are an example of guaranteed traffic sites but they
are not the culprits. What separates them from the thieves is
that they are, at least from what I've seen, honest about what
they do, that is, deliver undifferentiated, low grade traffic by
arranging for your site to be a detour in their game -- an
obstacle in a player's path where almost no one ever stops to
look.
But they never promised you anything more.
Start pages work similarly but will, upon occasion, bring you an
interested visitor.
So where are the thieves?
Among those who purport to sell you targeted traffic in the form
of pup-unders, where your page loads under an opened page in a
visitor's browser.
The first such service I tried came well recommended by a
longtime Internet marketing "expert." This company promised to
send "targeted" traffic at a very reasonable cost. It's just too
bad that it wasn't what it was made to seem. NO ONE from among
thousands of what were supposed to be "targeted" visitors
bothered to download the free book that was eagerly being
downloaded from my site for months.
Looking into this further, I could see why. The "targeted"
traffic they were sending was mostly from China! Even if they
could read English, these people were not valid prospects for my
MLM or virtually any on-or-offline business in the free world.
What the joker selling this service was doing was more than
misleading. It was tantamount to fraud.
Some months later, another such company came to my attention.
This one played-up the deceptive nature of the Chinese traffic
ploy used by "competitors" and appeared to be an honest
alternative that offered 100% unique, targeted, US visitors.
It looked good so a bought a 10,000 visitor test only to find
that what they delivered was quite different from what I
purchased. About 65% of their "US" traffic came from OUTSIDE THE
US with most from Western Europe. With such dishonesty, I have
my doubts that what traffic they did deliver was targeted to
category, as if it even mattered, by then.
Companies such as these are a bane to anyone wanting to use the
Internet to build a business and their dishonest tactics need to
be exposed. I hope this has made you a bit more aware. As the
old sergeant used to say, "Be careful out there."