Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello -  I recently found a web site that claims it can drive traffic to your website for a fee.  The site is i-web-marketing.com (Intelligent web marketing, inc),  for $89 you can have 30k hits to your site.   Does anyone know about this site or sites like it?  Is this for real or some kind of spam scam?  Is is worth the price to drive traffic to my site?   Thank you.

I am reluctant to believe the hype. How can any company “guarantee” to know how to bring thousands of people to your website’s front door? Doesn’t “quality leads” play a role in your sales efforts. It’s easy to bring people to a site with a small amount of trickery. The biz can make the money quickly, then pull out of business. There really isn’t a “get rich…” excuse me, “get traffic quick” scheme that works well in the long term. Maybe someone here will be willing to prove me wrong.

The company may be providing a great service, but I would hate to be the guy paying roughly $100 to get 30K viewers who now have a bad taste in their mouth because they learn I do not provide the answer to their needs, or have been spammed by the third party, only to see my company name in the email. I’d walk with great caution, and trust the gutt feeling.


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

I`d concur with Vincent - as with most services of this kind, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Their site talks about 30K unique visitors to your site, at a price of $89 - that`s a fraction of a penny per visitor, which doesn`t seem to make much sense as a revenue model.

The only way it does make sense is if they`re sending you junk visits.  Clearly there`s no guarantee of performance, and my guess is that when you analyze the traffic generated (assuming they do send 30K uniques your way), you`re going to see the vast majority as single page visits.  There are numerous technical ways to run a scam with these types of features, so I`d tread lightly if I were you.


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chuck fuller

I`ll back you guys up here.  $89 for 30K visitors is just like the snake oil salesmen selling you a 30K email blast to a list for $89...

Spend the $89 on Google Adwords or Yahoo`s Pay Per Click Programs.  You`ll be much much happier!

 

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Bryan C. Fleming

http://www.BryanCFleming.com

Yes, Chuck. Fraud from the company you are working with is VERY difficult to prove, track, or profit from... Unless you are the business involved with the fraud. Please, please, please, do not fall into the "there`s a sucker born every minute" category. We (including me) don`t want to be a sucker, but the realism is that we ALL are at some point or another. Don`t let your guard down because of a few target hitting promises of success.

Peace Y`all


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

If it were me looking to drive traffic to one of my sites I would find a similar / complementary website that has a high page rank and pay them to put me on their page.  I have seen PR 6 as low as like $30 a month.  Driving traffic is pretty easy.  Driving targeted traffic is a LOT harder.

The good news is that every webmaster has a simple metric to track junk visits.  Watch your click to purchase conversion.  Niche sites should have a conversion rate of no less than 20 percent and more broad online stores should be seeing 10 percent of visitors buying an item.  Anything less may be a sign that the current advertising strategy is not working.

One very important item to keep in mind is that your conversion rate is not even across the board.  Are visitors from Google or a certain affiliate giving you a higher conversion rate than elsewhere?  Is it on a certain day or are they from a certain area?  (IPs will tell you what area of the country or world a visitor is coming from, unless they`re using a proxy)  Shifting the distribution of capital and attention in your existing marketing partners may be much better than buying more ads in a site you don`t know about or hiring a "SEO firm" that may just use bot scripts to boost your hits/ranking that will draw the ire of Google or Yahoo.

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"Forget inspirational quotes to keep you going. If by doing what you do, you get an hour every day to relax, be with the ones you love in comfort without doing wrong, then it is all worth it." -Anon.

Thanks everyone.  I appreciate the information.  I suspected as much.  I know that one way to earn revenue on your site is to sell advertising on it.  And having a site with alot of traffic on it could give the impression to others that they should advertise on your site.  What`s to stop the fraud and deceptive practice of just driving a bunch of `hits` onto your site to give an illusion of something else? Is the metric that David speaks of something to combate this practice? 

The metric is a simple way to check for advertising click fraud, yes.  Just divide the total amount of orders in a given period (adjusting for repeat customers and gift orders) by the total amount of unique hits you get.  Note that the conversion rate will go down as you get more visitors.  Amazon gets millions of visitors a day, but perhaps 3 to 5 percent of them will buy something.

For high-value transactions such as real estate, you may have to do periodic surveys as well as asking any prospective borrowers, buyer and sellers who call you how they find your site.  (And especially if it was via a search engine or word of mouth)     Offering lower rates online compared to those who come into your office may be one way of driving real traffic.  


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"Forget inspirational quotes to keep you going. If by doing what you do, you get an hour every day to relax, be with the ones you love in comfort without doing wrong, then it is all worth it." -Anon.

Thank you David.  Good information!