Once upon a time in the annals of Internet history, you could sparkle like a celebrity by showing off your visitor stats after bolstering your search engine ranking with a backstreet injection of cheap web traffic. These days though, artificially inflating your web page views with old-school sleight of hand can instead be a disastrous fall from grace.
With search engines getting smarter every day, getting a high ranking on search engines is no longer a simple numbers game of sourcing any old web traffic and backlinks to boost your site’s apparent popularity.
Smarter Every Day
Google launches several new algorithms almost every day to improve the search engine’s ability to read and recognize web content.
A recent release by Google called BERT is a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that reads snippets from websites in more than 70 different languages. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
In layman’s terms, BERT’s purpose is to better understand the intent behind a user’s query so the search engine can give better, more customized search results for each query.
It can now discern the meaning of words such as “to” and other words previously ignored in favor of more significant words in a sentence, which Google says impacts 10 percent of all searches.
The birth of BERT means searches are more refined for the individual user. This is good news for non-mainstream websites hidden in obscure corners of the web that wouldn’t normally be seen by a loosely defined keyword search. More specific queries get more specific answers with lists of web pages that more precisely fit the search terms.
So there’s no point trying to trick Google by stuffing your pages with keywords strewn among shabby content because the algorithms are smart enough these days to discern the difference between real content and irrelevant puff made to appease search engines.
Monetizing Real Web Traffic
Enticing visitors with hooky headlines is one thing, but keeping your visitors on-page and engaged is how money is made, and that requires web pages with substance.
Regardless of how you attract visitors to your website, serving up something of substance for your readership is vital to building a good reputation.
When the objective of popularity is to generate income, increasing web traffic is a common-sense solution. It makes sense that you can profit from human visitors but not from bot traffic.
Web Traffic Monetization Formula
The formula for monetizing web traffic is essentially a three-step process that’s the same as any other business model where a product is acquired cheaply, value is added to the product, and then the product is sold on. It’s called web traffic arbitrage.
Web traffic arbitrage is very similar to buying and selling shares on the stock market. The middleman buys cheap shares and adds value to them by bundling them with other stocks, thereby creating a higher value packaged product.
Instead of profiting from a direct sale, you make money by investing time or money in web traffic, which converts in other monetized ways. Regardless of the type of conversion made, human web traffic gives you the best potential for adding value and making a profit.
Types of Monetary Conversions
The purchase of merchandise is the most direct form of monetization. Only a real human will ever buy something through your website. Bot traffic won’t.
Affiliate marketing means you get paid for your website visitors seeing or clicking affiliate ads on your web pages. That’s why providing visitors with useful content matters. It keeps visitors hanging around long enough to count as a conversion.
Analytical software and affiliate marketing algorithms like those used by Google AdSense to calculate payments measure visitor behavior or conversion, which could be one or more of the following:
- Time spend reading content (dwell time)
- Entry and exit pages
- Click-through rate to other pages
- Ad impressions (views)
- Ad clicks
- Clicks on internal and external links
Digging for Diamonds
Finding out that you can actually buy web traffic is a ‘ka-ching’ moment! If you’re reading this, then you’re probably already aware of the potential benefits to your website and your business if you buy some website visitors to get things going.
Sourcing quality, organic web traffic is like digging for diamonds. You have to invest time, effort, and money in the right places to reach those gems that convert into hard currency.
Like real diamonds, only real human website traffic clicking through your pages is of any real value. Fake diamonds are just for show and don’t have any real value.
According to Ad Age, one in every three dollars spent by advertisers for online advertising is going toward ad fraud, which costs the industry more than $18.5 billion each year. That’s why it’s in the affiliate advertiser’s interest to pair their ads up with good content on websites attracting quality web traffic.
Click through rates and other actions considered ‘conversions’ – a visitor performing a desired action such as clicking on a link or subscribing to a newsletter – are usually considered signs that efforts or investments in web traffic are paying off.
Only Real Web Traffic Converts
The more real human visitors a website gets, the more likely a percentage of them will invest their own time and money in your product or service.
Any other form of web traffic is useless and can ultimately be detrimental to your website’s health in search engine rankings.
Investing in bulk website traffic that isn’t guaranteed to be human web traffic is just throwing money away.
Investing in Organic & Paid Web Traffic
Organic web traffic is the best type of web traffic you can invest in. Yes, ‘invest’ is the appropriate word because even though organic website traffic is essentially real human web traffic that you don’t pay for, growing your base of organic website traffic is time-consuming and requires much effort.
Buy from a reputable website traffic seller. Some web traffic vendors are upfront about where they get their web traffic. Others are not. If you’re being offered millions of visitors at a really cheap rate, the chances are they are selling bot traffic.
Where is the Best Place to Buy Real Web Traffic?
Just for laughs, look at some of the ads offering to send website traffic to your website on the freelance platform Fiverr, many assuring you of delivering US web traffic, even though their grammar wouldn’t get them through an American grade school.
Would you trust these people to sell you real human website traffic with their poor English command?
“I will do the Google White Hat SEO and keyword targeted traffic.”
“I will promotion sales drive USA traffic marketing..”
“I will send a minimum 100 000 visits on your website per week”
And finally this Nigerian, who claims to deliver web traffic “100% USA, Canada & Europe No China’, tells us: “Words is not enough to express my ability, check out my gig and place an order. Thank you”.
You can rest assured that you won’t be getting quality web traffic from the cowboys above.
In summary, if you invest in web traffic with the aim of profiting from a monetized website, play it safe by using a web traffic plan which guarantees 100% human web traffic and allows you to target web traffic for your specific niche.
As long as you offer valuable content to your visitors, then your investment in real web traffic should pay dividends with a gradual increase in search engine rankings as well as a stream of income.