We know it is painful to maintain a quality content website and have very tinny organic traffic / Visitors. Now one must think of ways to get free traffic or low-cost ways to get traffic; the first question that will arise in mind is whether it is legit to buy paid traffic or not.
Well, buying paid traffic is a grey area; it cannot be certainly legit or illegal. It is a very common perception that buying paid traffic is cheating in the ocean of cyberspace, where everyone is striving for survival to boost visitors, using some tactics with the aim of being considered fair play. It mostly depends upon intention and methods of getting paid traffic.
Why people think for paid traffic/ Is it legit to buy traffic?
Why would a publisher think of getting paid traffic for his website? There can be lots of factors, but the broad answer is revenue.
Money or revenue is a major factor in buying traffic for your website. Obviously, revenue generated from any website depends on the number of visitors to that website. Purchasing traffic in less amount and generating good in return is a fascinating thing for new publishers. The only factor that resists publishers from buying paid traffic is:
“Is it legit to buy traffic”?
But there are some other aspects as well. People do promote their sites for marketing or persuasive purpose as well. This article is going to address these factors individually in detail.
Ethical Ways of buying traffic:
We all have experienced unethical ways of paid traffic; in the below list, we categorized them. But what are ethical ways of buying paid traffic? The answer is simple, but every bit costs some penny. You first need to know that purchasing quality traffic is the best ethical way of paying for traffic.
Targeted website traffic:
Suppose you have written an article about the upcoming Olympics and want it to reach all fans eagerly waiting for the event. You can run a promotion using different platforms to engage a real audience with your content.
It might not be profitable for the first time, but the audience experience would make them visit again. In the long term, it is going to help you in building healthy traffic for your website.
When you are creating sponsored content:
If you are creating any sponsored content, and your website’s promotion ultimately aims to benefit the advertiser is entirely ethical. If someone has launched his phone and sent it to you to write about its features, so that audience can go through it, it is your responsibility to make it approachable to the audience.
Forbidden/restricted ways of buying Paid Traffic:
It takes time to build a high volume of web traffic. It is also dependent on the quality of your content. People work on the second factor but mostly can’t wait for the bulk of visitors on their site. That’s why they look up paid traffic.
There are also kinds of people who want to build an empire on someone’s ground. They use plagiarism content for paid traffic to earn some gold coins.
Buying web traffic becomes unethical when people do not target the right users and start generating traffic through fraud.
Here are 5 unethical ways of paid traffic:
Clickbaiting:
Using some sensational claims to make users click the website link:
- 90% of internet users do not know about this hack.
- Unbelievable life-changing ways of earning.
Clickbaiting increase your bounce-back rate; Google algorithms hate such website. So using such things even harms your site.
Generating fraudulent clicks:
Fraudulent clicks are fake bot clicks on PPC advertisements. Ultimately, the advertiser will pay for a fake click, which is not a click from any individual.
Another fraud that advertisers use this way is activating any bot clicks on competitors’ sites. This causes them to max out the advertiser’s click limit; fraudulent competitors’ ad is able to replace maxed-out ads.
Misleading Ads:
Like clickbaiting, deceiving ads are intended to mislead users about products and services. Such activities are avoided by well-reputed e-commerce sites, which causes a bad image and ultimately bad for business.
Normally, users land on a required page by only clicking a few times, but adding lots of pages between the required landing page creates confusing navigation. This is an obvious benefit for the website owner, but it causes trouble for the user.
News and gossips from different film industries or related to any political personnel always attract users. Users click such things and share a lot on social media platforms. Scraping viral content from popular journals and news channels is proscribe since it’s their property to earn upon.
Unethical Arbitrage:
The arbitrage of unethical traffic starts from cheap cost and turns out to be a high amount. Such practices aren’t running among real business ethics obligators. Again this is not illegal to arbitrage website traffic, but it still is a matter of ethics; the rest is your choice.
Platforms for legit promotion on your website:
- Social media
- YouTube
- Guest blogging
- Search Engine Marketing
However, the question is still for many publishers; “Is it legit to buy traffic”? Being a grey area thing, it has some pros and cons. To figure that out – you need to go through this article.