Don’t Click This

I’ve just read this post from the ‘Evolutionary Imarketing Success’ Blog, and although it brings up some good points about both paid and unpaid or natural site traffic, I think the general message they are trying to get across that paid traffic is always superior is misleading. In my opinion, it depends on the type of site you’re running and that kind of sweeping generalisation cannot be made across the board.

If you are running a site that basically consists of just a landing page with some text and a link to the merchant then yes, paid traffic is probably the way to go as you’re unlikely to get ranked highly in the SE’s and finding sites to link to yours will be tough. However, if you have a content rich site which can get tons of inbound links due to it’s unique content, the SE’s will probably rank it well and it’ll get decent traffic for free. Ok, so this are two very general and simplistic examples and obviously both paid and natural traffic can go hand in hand for a lot of sites, but you get the jist. Essentially it depends on the type of site, but to say that paid traffic (although it may produce quicker results), will always be the most effective is wrong.

I’m setting up my latest site in the hope that I won’t have to pay anything for traffic, but I’ll have to wait and see if that’s going to be viable or not and how well I rank naturally in the SE’s. To be honest if I have to I don’t have a problem with paying for traffic so long as the end result is profitable, but I know it isn’t the be all and end all. But then again, what do I know? I’ve only been in this game for a few months…