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Free traffic is a lot like a gridlocked city. It looks impressive in pictures, but it takes you nowhere.
by mkr-hn 13y ago
Free traffic is a lot like a gridlocked city. It looks impressive in pictures, but it takes you nowhere.
- PaulHoule 13y agoYes and no. Paid traffic is expensive. The issue is that you're competing with two things: (i) people who pay $X per click and get a solid $Y in revenue per click, where $X>$Y, and (ii) people/organizations who pay too much for ads. (To take an example of how you have to compete with deep-pocketed ad buyers who have the lights on and nobody home, if you search for https://www.google.com/#q=bing https://www.google.com/#q=bing you get an ad for bing; another phenomenon is that many businesses buy ads on local radio, cable, or the newspaper just because they get pleasure in hearing or seeing their name.) If you've got a type (i) business model, then paid traffic may be good for you. If you want to create a content business supported by advertising (i.e. put w3schools out of business) or create something social, you can't afford to pay for traffic unless you can afford to cut a check to Google for a few million dollars with a high risk of not getting any payback. Thus, if you want to create that kind of business you really do need some source of free traffic which is 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than the stuff mentioned on that site.
- mkr-hn 13y agoI'm distinguishing between qualified free traffic (search/viral) and spaghetti at the wall free traffic like StumbleUpon or one of those skeevy pageview buying services. I didn't actually read the post before commenting (!), and I see that it describes some good traffic sources.