I knew a guy once who paid $6,000 to a website. In return they guaranteed they would send him 30,000 unique visitors a day. Sounds like a great deal, right? On the surface perhaps it does but in reality it’s far from a good deal.

This guy was so proud of this “great” traffic deal he had just worked out I felt almost sorry for him. But since he was paying me for my advice I had to tell him the truth. Sadly not everyone takes the advice they pay me for and in this case it was one very costly lesson.

Good traffic converts at 1:500 or better. If the traffic isn’t converting at that then something is seriously wrong with your website or that traffic. If this guys traffic was good he would be getting 60 joins a day out of that.

At a rate of $15 profit per join * 60, means he would be making $900 a day or $27,000 for the month. That’s a $21,000 return on his original investment of $6,000.

But we all know things didn’t work out that way or I wouldn’t be writing about it.

When I tried to explain quality traffic conversions to my client he didn’t want to hear it. He had gold fever. His argument was that even if it wasn’t the best traffic and didn’t convert at the norm, and only converted at double that he would still make 30 joins a day or $13,500 for the month which is still a $7500 return on his investment.

In the end he got 4 joins out of that. Not 4 joins per day, 4 joins total.  That means the traffic ended up converting at a rate of 1:225,000.  The guys site normally converts at about 1:350.

But why? How did I know this deal would go bad?

The answer is very simple. My grandmother always said to me growing up that I want every one of you to memorize right here and now ….

If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is!

If this guy had this much traffic, where is it coming from?  In this case it turned out it was from a tube site.  Tube site traffic is notoriously low quality.  People go to tube sites for free porn and they are not known to be interested in paying for porn.  They don’t care that if you buy a website membership you get higher quality.  They are interested in fast and free and at a tube site, that is what they get.

Next you have to ask yourself, how is this tube site sending you all these visitors?  Are the ads deceptive or misleading?  If so then of course that would account for the horrible conversion ratios.  If a person doesn’t know they are clicking an ad then that person is worthless to you.

And the last reason I knew it wouldn’t work out is the price.  If a person really had all that traffic, why would they sell it off so cheap?  Traffic is extremely valuable.  So why would you just give it away?   Common sense tells us that you wouldn’t.  If a person had traffic that wasn’t total and complete poo poo they would make the most money they could from it and that means they wouldn’t be selling it at rock bottom prices.

So next time you go buying traffic, especially from those traffic networks, consider what you just learned here carefully.  If you do it will save you a lot of time and money.