Traffic - I need good advice on buying traffic
 

I think I keep trying things I've never done before just so I can keep my Elder Noob status validated.

So what haven't I ever done before?

Well, for one thing, I've never purchased any traffic. Yes, I've used SE pay per click, but never straight out just purchased some traffic. And lately I've been wondering if there aren't some good uses for purchased traffic that I've just skipped over by not knowing enough about it.

So I'm looking to learn more about buying traffic, and I hope that there are some people here who are smarter than me about this and willing to share what they know.

In order to learn more, I'd like to send some purchased traffic to one or more of our sites. Depending on what I learn here it may just be one site, but I have some options on the kinds of site(s) to which I could send the traffic.

From what I can tell, there seem to be various sources of purchased traffic. Like the services that sell text links on various sites on a per click basis. And the traffic brokers which seem to have a variety of kinds of traffic available. Plus whatever other sources for purchased traffic you can tell me about.

I think we've all heard it said many times that if the traffic was worth anything they wouldn't be selling it. I can see how that might apply, but I'd also guess there's more to it than that. So if anyone wants to weigh in on that, or just wants to tell me why you think I should/shouldn't buy some traffic, please do.

I'll take all the good general advice and tips I can get, and any personal recommendations on good/bad traffic sources would be appreciated.

Simon


P.S. If you have some great traffic secrets and sources you don't want to share with the whole world, you can always contact me privately too. :)

P.P.S. I didn't mean to kill this thread before it got started by saying people could contact me privately. I really do hope that some folks will post some advice/tips/info publicly too.

I've never bought traffic... interested to see any replies.

Hmmm...looks we've stumbled on one of the tightly-held secrets, Karen. Seems like no one wants to reveal anything in public. :D

I thought for sure that some traffic sellers would have stopped in by now, at least. Can you imagine how this question would have gotten spammed on some other boards?

Gotta take the good with the bad I guess. :)

I have limited experience with purchased traffic, but I'm more than willing to talk about it. ;) I've made two very small purchases in the past from Traffic-out and the productivity was good - even on the shitty little site I was sending it to. I did make a single sale directly from it, which almost paid for one of the traffic purchases. If you had a pretty refined page with no leaks, one could make a profit. I couldn't, but someone who knows what the fuck they're doing probably could.

I think, if you had a nice link/content site that was regurlarly updated, quality purchased traffic would be a good way to gain some exposure and bookmarkers. I'd never buy blind, 404, or other types of shit traffic. Clicked traffic is good stuff though and worth exploring.

Several months ago I decided to dabble a bit with purchased traffic to some of my galleries. I tried a couple of sources (AskJolene Topspots and Spotbrokers), with minimal success. Best result I had was a $30 PPS sponsor with a $2.95 trial. Sponsors without trials, both PPS and revshare, did not do well at all. I about broke even.

I probably won't bother with purchased traffic again. I'd be more inclined to purchase a text or banner link on a site(s) with traffic that's a good match for the niche's I promote.

Limited experience here also, but I've had some success with http://www.adultgalleria.com/

I had some good luck with traffic holder, they are new and doing pretty good. Stu and me tested a lot of the various types they offer to various sources and found it's real good for building up bookmarkers to a tgp/ll etc and the cheapest traffic works best only 1.30 per K so it's not a big investment, you can get like $5 at a time i think even less once you fund your account. The no cookie 1.30 in the middle of list is what we both did best with, but we tried all of them by niche most expensive and then cheapest(all of the traffic is clicked, but forced skim from thumb tgps). Good luck. |thumb

I bought some traffic awhile back but have not bought in some time. I bought a large amount being I had the money back then and have contacted the seller and made a deal where the traffic was not so shitty and not sent in large amounts all at once. It still trickles in today and I like it that way as because of the deal the traffic is better. IE I get sign ups. But let me also say I am not buying traffic like some people. I'm buying it for my own paysite. But I stopped for one main reason. I think it was Greeny who woke me up with a statement along the lines, if someone is selling it, then how good can it really be? There are uses for it, but I can't see anything other sending it to other places that will send you back better.

What? Make up your mind. :D

When someone says "clicked", they mean that the surfer intentionally clicked on a non-blind text link to your site (and the text should indicate something about your site). Forced skim is shit traffic, which ranks not far above pop-under and 404 traffic in my book.

:D ok you got me but technically it's clicked not 404 or pop-under...it's not like traffic-out tho i have used them too, but they can't send fast enough and neither is going to convert and the price at traffic holder is 1.30 compared to 3.50 or so for traffic out, but traffic out is great to for certian things, but for pushing traffic #'s to pick up bokmarkers and climb toplists etc traffic holder works better i think :) ( so buy damn it lol..it's hot i can't think :D )

You know, one might think that you are just trying that traffic holder place due to the fact that you posted your affiliate link to them. ;) Traffic-out, who I have no invested interest in, sends traffic slower, because it's TRUE CLICKED TRAFFIC. All of the traffic sellers who sell QUALITY clicked traffic can't send you 1,000s of hits per day.

How you can say that lower quality traffic is going to get more bookmarkers is beyond me. |huh How does being blindly redirected to another site inspire trust and make a surfer want to bookmark? It doesn't. Circle-jerking doens't create bookmarkers.

I suppose, if you just want to watch your stats fly high while the purchased traffic is flowing -then yeah, buy cheap shit traffic. But if one is purchasing traffic with hopes of an eventual gain, quality is going to win over quantity.

I blame that fucking Simon guy for this whole conversation. |catfight|

Cool...some good feedback!

UW - Thanks for jumping in. :) That sounds like what I'm wanting to try. No blind clicks, or 404, or skimmed or anything like that. I'm interested in surfers who click a link which send them exactly where they think they're going. Mostly I'm looking to build bookmarkers, faster, but I wouldn't mind if some of them turned into spenders too. I'll take a look at what Traffic-out offers.

Toby - I don't think I have the whole gallery paradigm nailed well enough to try sending traffic directly to one of my galleries. :) I'd rather feed traffic into a MLL/MGP site if we can. I sent a note to AskJolene to see if they take anything besides galleries and paysites. I'll check out Spotbrokers to see how their setup works too. Breaking even would be fine if we can pick up some bookmarkers even at the breakeven point.

Bluemoney - Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at AdultGalleria and see how their PPC system might do for us.

Babymaker - Interesting that you found the least expensive traffic did well for building bookmarkers. I took a quick look at TrafficHolder and I'll drop them a note to see if they have traffic that isn't quite so blind. But it might be interesting to test how that kind of traffic likes it when they don't find any more blind links once they get here. Maybe that does turn into bookmarkers because they don't want to forget the site that didn't send them somewhere else.

Juggernaut - That's exactly the statement I've heard many times. But I've taken to wondering about whether it's just too broad a statement to apply across the board. For instance, you mentioned that the traffic you were sending to you paysite was generating signups. If you're not getting enough signups to breakeven on the cost of the traffic, then I'd stop too. But I'd be sure I was tracking the lifetime value of the member. Hell, if I could get near breakeven on initial signups that would be excellent, since the rebills would be gravy.

I'd still like to hear more people weigh in on the "if someone is selling it, then how good can it really be?" theory. I'm still a little surprised that no traffic sellers have replied with any rebuttals to that premise.

UW Part II - I've always accepted the baseline that forced traffic isn't worth much of anything. I'm still not interested in popunder and 404 traffic, but I'm thinking that it might be worth testing how traffic from cj-type sources sticks around when they find a non-cj site with plenty of content pages to entertain them.

Okay, so far I have these sources that someone here has tried:

Traffic-Out
TrafficHolder
AskJolene
Spotbrokers
Jugg's secret source

Has anyone use chokertraffic.com? I thought I'd seen some people post that they'd used them with some success. Are they the same as chickentraffic.com?

Any other good sources for traffic?

Any sources that are definitely ones to avoid?

More feedback sought, for anyone who'd still like to chime in here. :)

For the past few days I've been sending a few thousand extra visitors to two of my sites using Traffic Holder:
Fake LL/Hub - http://www.pynio.com/
Webcam Site - http://www.pyniosexchat.com/

I've used various types of the listed available traffic: UK, US, Canadian, general high quality, and webcams.
At this early stage the webcam traffic seems to be the most productive, and I'm quite happy with the service.
That's all I have though. Sorry to not be in a position to offer more info.
:)

Gary - Thanks, that's good information too. Question: when you say "productive" do you mean that as in signups generated or number of outbound clicks per inbound click? Productive is good either way, just want to be clear.

Hey...I notice you're promoting the awe cams on your webcam site. Did they ever start a pay per signup program? I'm asking because their 15-day revshare program doesn't seem like a good deal. Never liked their attitude about how we don't deserve to get paid any longer than that (as said on other boards).

I allways thought of selling high category links to tgps that are starting up

like maybe 30 days for 500.00

so they have some start up traffic to trade with

Productive as in signups generated. It's been a pretty nice first few days of August in terms of revenue.

AWE have indeed started a PPS program, currently I think they pay $40/signup. Of all the live chat sites I've tried AWE has been the "easiest" to convert for me, but I've only been doing this for five months or so. Still very much a new guy.
:)

You know, I could have written that post :)
I also made 2 small purchases at traffic-out and the traffic was pretty productive, didn't make a sale from it but at least the surfers where clicking through my pages. I also have no clue on how to convert purchased traffic best :)
But Traffic-out only delivers to TGP and LL type of sites...

I bought my traffic from http://adult-site-traffic.com sorry for not posting it. I have always had a good relationship with the owner. Nothing super friendly but he has always been fair to me and willing to work with me when I need him. He sends traffic to my cam site and it's a free sign up. I get about 1:120 roughly signing up for free and bothering the girls on yahoo. Out of the sign ups I have not kept track as of late being I have a shit load of stuff going on in my life and really dont have much time anymore hence the after 10pm postings. But I make enough to pay for the hosting and buy some ice cream for me and the wife. I get my ccbill emails every other day or so for a $20 ro $50 spot purchase on the ladies. I do this cause I like to. Sure I would love to make it full time but I don't have the resources to commit to full time. I have too many bills to take such a large risk of leaving my job for something that in my mind is very very touch and go with making it work long term. The big boys who really are making a living at this full time worked their asses of durring a differant time with the internet. Times when you could toss up some nudes on a site and pull in 10, 20 30 k for a month or summer. I honestly think those days are gone unless you have the $$ to back it up an keep it running. I think most of the people here wish they could go really fulltime but know in the back of their minds it would not last 10 or 20 years. I'm someone who thinks realisticly and looks way to far ahead to risk so much on the internet. Sure it can pay off but odds are it won't and I really don't think I'm so special that I can make it pay off. I'm just an average joe with a hot cam wife who both love porn. But more then anything as a man 2nd to fucking my wife I love $$ and traditional jobs are what do that for me. Anyway blah blah blah from jugg..

This is a pretty cool topic so thanks Simon for bringing it up.

Ill add my 2 cents from what little experience I have had.

Traffic Out is really nice for bookmarkers and from what I have bought I usually make enough sales to pay for the traffic.

I use clicked choker traffic to feed certain sites and these surfers do seem to click around but not so much with using the credit card to buy. Sometimes Ill see a sale but mostly I still use this to trade off somewhere else for better traffic.

I like the clicked choker traffic also becasue alot of times theres a pretty wide variety of pre filtered niches to choose from so you get filtered traffic for your niche.

The traffic comes in nice and slow so $100 will last me over a month. Im just cheap like that.

As far as I know choker traffic and chicken traffic are different versions of the same thing.

Well anyways thanks for the good read everyone.

More good replies...thanks! :)

Tommy - Nice idea. I'd hate to see your nice traffic get wasted in somebody's CJ network. On the other hand, if you decide to try it, I'd definitely want to talk with you about that. I can see how it would be good for sites with real content and no skim and it certainly could still help feed real trades.

Gary - I'm glad to hear they have (and you're on) their PPS program. Check some other boards or search "awempire pay rebills 15 days only" on Google if you want to check out the earlier problems. Congrats on the good start on August.

Fonz - Sounds like another good vote for traffic-out to me. That's the other kind of productive I meant. I'm thinking that with some sites, if you can get surfers to visit enough of your (good) pages after they arrive, you have a good chance of gaining more bookmarkers.

Juggernaut - Thanks for the additional traffic source to check out. :) I wonder if there'd be some correlation between the free signups you're getting and the free bookmarkers I'd be looking for. Seems like there would be. Plus they might sign up for other free things here if I offered some.

I know what you mean about the Internet being iffy, Jugg. If we hadn't gotten started so long ago, I'd be looking pretty hard at whether I thought there was still good money to be made for someone trying to get their foot in the door here now. It definitely does take money, hard work, lots of time, and some luck (see also: good relations with others). In the meantime, nothing wrong with some free ice cream. :)

Mike - Another vote counted, thanks! |thumb That's what I'm looking for. And thanks for the choker/chicken feedback. They do seem to have lots of niches covered, which could be good for some things I'm thinking of doing.

I expect that most traffic will leave without bookmarking, and those who bookmark won't buy right away. I've always been kind of a community builder, so my interest is in getting people to keep coming back. Making some sales from purchased traffic would be a bonus I'd love of course. But if they keep coming back I'll find them something they want badly enough to pay for.

To update the list, we now have these sources that have been mentioned so far:

AdultGalleria
Adult-Site-Traffic
AskJolene's Topspots
Traffic-Out
TrafficHolder
Spotbrokers

If anyone has other good sources for traffic, please feel free to mention them. Or if you have a horror story about some source to avoid, definitely come talk about it.

Still plenty of room in this thread for more feedback, so come talk traffic if you feel like it. :)

I've always found that the best traffic is free- it takes some elbow grease, but you can find pure, interested surfers who convert much better on your own. You know your product better than any traffic broker.


The odd time that we purchase traffic, we get the best value by sending it to targeted toplists which in turn send back better quality (more targeted) traffic.

It was pretty interesting both Stu and i were trying all the various types they had for a few days and sending it to different places some to galleries some to tour pages and then to our own sites, we tried the most expensive and cheapest and least and most trageted for all the different landing spots we were using only thing that was worth it was the no cookie 1.30 per K going to our TGPs and it picked up a good bit of bookmarkers, i think it is because the surfer was being thrown around through the CJ hell of skim tgps and then landed on our quality no skim sites that they stayed. True i have a refcode in there :D hehe but it's only a 5% payout lol and it goes right back to traffic you can skip it if you buy from them. Traffic Out is good too i have bought from them a few times but for 1.30 a K the other just is too good to pass up. One thing to keep in mind too for anyone here don't send any of the traffic to tour pages lol....it fucks up the shave bots big time and puts you in a new shave braket as the script now thinks your a whale and will push your ratios in the wrong direction, so not only will you not make a sale off the forced traffic, your good traffic you send of off freesites etc will now not convert the same and you will lose sales....so avoid this idea ....err...wait i mean sponsors don't shave lol |santa|

I'ved used the following:

Traffic-out - the traffic was good and productive. It was a little slow in the delivery, but well worth it.

Choker - Now, I've run some careful experiments with choker traffic. I've tried it on some galleries. Galleries that would normally convert at 1:300 with standard tgp traffic, would convert at 1:5000 with choker traffic. I still turned a profit but not enough to keep me interested in trying it :)

FPCTraffic - Ravo is pretty reliable traffic and pretty good cheap feeder traffic. You can buy a variety of traffic from clicked North American only, etc, etc, etc.

If you're looking for traffic to build a hub, tgp, or linklist, I'd probably recommend going directly to some established tgps and think about buying links with them.

Gee, I didn't even think about that...but yeah now that you say it, lol.

Shhhh, lol....that could never be true lol....|loony|

I have several of my own (private) sites that I keep on a slow feed of choker traffic (the good stuff). It helps build up the numbers over time and I find that my PR ends up going up faster that way.

FYI - The link in your sig has an extra http://

Nice...even more feedback :)

Hiya Emma - I flat out agree 100% with your premise. I've spent the last ten years or so building free traffic out of elbow grease. In this case I'm not looking to point it at our own paysites. It's for a new project so I'm considering alternative traffic sources. When you send purchased traffic to a toplist, do you send it directly to the toplist url or to your own page(s) first? I'm asking since it seems that some traffic sources are choosy about where they'll send the traffic.

Babymaker - That's pretty much what I'm thinking would happen. You stop jerking them around and they decide to hang out for awhile. I agree on not sending purchased traffic direct to sponsor's tour pages. At least not unless you can use a text link which says "Pay $35 And Up EVERY Month for Porn Site Memberships!" to generate the traffic. Otherwise you're correct that it would most likely throw off your ratios. Even worse would be to send skimmed clicks from thumb tgps direct to no-trial join pages with no images on them. Can you say "back button?" (Plus, no sense getting yourself shaved before you can afford it (fuckers)).

Mr. Blue - Thanks for more good comments! :) I appreciate the tip about trying to buy text links on established tgps. I thought some traffic sources/brokers get the traffic they resell that way, but going direct might be good too, if they don't already sell their links through a broker.

Your feedback on traffic-out sounds good, since slow is fine if the quality is there. You mentioned FPCTraffic. I signed up there awhile ago when someone mentioned them but looking around inside, all I could see were ways to sell my traffic to them. It was only when I went there today that I looked through the faq page and found a link to where they sell traffic. Sounds like it's worth checking out now I've found my way. :)

Meanwhile, what doesn't sound so good are the test results from Choker. If you have galleries you've tuned to convert at 1:300 for tgps, then I could see them doing maybe 1:1,200 until you figured out how to retune for whatever kind(s) of traffic you were getting. But 1:5,000 seems excessive.

You said that with choker traffic you "still turned a profit but not enough to keep me interested in trying it." So one question for anyone who cares to answer. How small does the profit have to be before you aren't interested in continuing with something you're testing?

I'm asking because my background before moving to the adult online business included some time spent running a direct response marketing business that I started when I lived in NYC. (David Ogilvy was my hero.) My rules were old school simple. Test, retest, and test again. Basically ABT - Always Be Testing. I had campaigns where the idea was to literally "make a buck" on a test. Any test which made a buck would be retested with bigger numbers to see if the test results held. The target was to refine an offer so you could make it to 1,000 times the number who were offered the first test and make $1,000 instead of one buck. Ideally you'd want to be able to rollout against 1,000,000 times the tested retests and make a million.

So how small a profit do you have to make to consider a test a failure on something like the choker traffic test?

MonsterPartners - Thanks for jumping in. :) The points you brought up are definitely on my list of why I'm considering trying some purchased traffic. Sounds like your experiences with choker traffic are good enough that you're continuing with what you're doing there.

Hiya Dr B - Thanks for dropping by! :D

And thanks again to everyone. Still plenty of room for more good ideas, comments, and warnings, so if you have some, come post 'em.

Simon

It all depends on where do you send the traffic. Nice topic, Simon :)

The best traffic comes from traffic-out, Hunter's I second that. If you promote teens, you should buy clicked toplist traffic from Rowan at doggieteens and you'll be happy with the results. His sites have great prod. He wrote a free trade script so you can install it, disable the site sdded and see how much they can send, url is http://www.slothtrader.com and like I said it's free and even I could install it :)
I gave a test to traffic-holder too and they are ok in my book.
I have bought traffic to my tgp so I could feed the brand new site and my trades. when you learn the ropes of skimming you don't need more feeder. First click to galleries, very low skim so you don't annoy the surfer and when the site is growing you can always switch to no skim taking all risks.

No experience with elbow grease sorry :D

In my experiance, I have done well with sending traffic to a landing page of sorts, ie: a portal. Which gives the surfs something to bookmark as well as feed a selection of toplists.

From a micro niche perspective (ie: not teens) toplists always seem to return highly targeted and non cj'd traffic. Which yeilds both high productivity & convets nicley.

I'm currently working on a massive portal project atm and plan to use trafficholder and a few of the others to feed it and I'll see how that goes. :)

-N

Hiya digifan :) Good point about where the traffic is being sent. I've been noting what each poster has been saying about the different sources for purchased traffic, and I can see that some traffic is good for certain things while other traffic is better for others. I appreciate the lead to doggieteens. We don't do a lot with teens, but there are always category pages that can use more attention. Thanks for the info on the trade script too. That's another thing I've never done, use a trade script. Maybe one day I'll try something like that to learn more about it, but for now I'm only looking to send traffic to no-skim sites where I hope the surfers will hang around awhile. I guess that means I'm already taking those risks. ;)

Hi nekrom - Thanks for the input. :) I see I'm going to have to learn a bit more about toplists sometime soon. While we've used them, I've never done it with purchased traffic. I can see how the return traffic would be nicely filtered, but I need to find out more about how we can send the traffic to the toplists. I'm wondering if some toplists let you send traffic right to them, or whether using an interim/landing page isn't only a good idea, but actually a requirement.

I appreciate all the feedback so far. I'm probably going to start some tests this week, so feel free to jump in if you have some thoughts, opinions or caveats.

Simon

For those interested, I sent a note to AskJolene last week when Toby mentioned them. I asked if they allowed traffic to be sent to MGP, Link List or Blog sites. Today I received their answer, which I'm posting here for anyone following this thread. Here's what they said:

Quote:

With our advertisment platform you send traffic to galleries and you can send traffic directly to paysites or datingsites. We don't offer any spots that can link to a MGP, Link List, and/or Blog.

So, since I don't want to send traffic to a paysite or a gallery, I'm taking them off my list for testing on this project.

More on the policies of the other sources as I find out what they do and don't allow.

In releation to sending traffic to toplists, the vast majority that I have dealt with don't really give a brass razoo, how you send to them.

The basic most used requirment is that the site/traffic you are sending is the specific niche, ie: they get the shits up when you send teen to a gay fisting toplist. :)

And as for the linking most again don't care so long as they can see the recip link back to them, (which you use natuarly to send the traffic to them) Be it off your main page or catagory pages.

I've sent it to them by skim, trade, blind click and all have been fine for me. The only thing I can think of, is that blind click sent, would be a pox prod% / return, rather then a link that says "click here for more 'niche' sites"

-N

Nekrom - Thanks for more info on toplists. Looking around, it seemed that most of them are like what we've used in the past, meaning that they want the traffic to the toplist to come from someone who clicks their button or text link on our page. I'm still not clear on whether someone can send purchased traffic directly to a toplist link. Sending it directly and getting better-filtered traffic back would be nice, particularly from toplists that send more back than they get.

Simon- you are right, most traffic brokers are fussy about the page they send traffic to. Just set up a page that meets their expectations, and throw in a traffic splitter file to redirect it to toplist codes.
PM me if you'd like a copy of one I've used in the past.

I have dealt with bought traffic as the main part of my business now for over 2 years. It ranges from cpc, cpa, cpm (impression), general banner/link buying, dealing with the traffic brokers etc etc. Most traffic has been purchased to make an immediate profit off after being filtered down. I don't buy traffic to feed projects .. eg tgps.

Having bought the odd click or million recently, I can give you a few bits of advice without breaking the bank :)

- No one in their right state of mind will suggest a traffic source that makes them a lot of money. Some may give it in general terms but don't expect to get any specific information from webmasters unless you feed them a lot of drinks :)

- Broker traffic is simply the worst stuff i have dealt with. I have tried most of them and at best can break even if I pull out ever traffic handling skill I have access to. In my experience brokers have already gotten the best traffic skimmed off before it reaches you.

- Some brokers don't deserve the term 'traffic broker' though .. and actually can send good traffic. These are usually cases where you can see which site the traffic is coming from and you aren't just looking at a black box wondering what is happening inside :)

- After thousands of traffic purchases I have either broken even or made a loss on 80-90% of traffic sources. The 10% that you profit on usually last for at least 6 months. You need deep pockets if you are going to do this in a big way as you find the good sources and bad.

- Don't buy traffic from tgps that skim clicks.

- Don't buy traffic from traffic sources that need to spam or need to go looking for buyers. Everyone is desperate for more good traffic, so its always odd that some places constantly need to try to get clients. You don't see good traffic sources going looking for buyers, its quite the opposite.

- Run your numbers. Work out your expected ctr, your expected impressions, your expected clicks and ratio. Then allow room for error. If the numbers dont come out at a potential profit then don't gamble.

- When asking for impressions or expected clicks from traffic sources they will almost always give you a value inflated 20-50%. Factor that in.

I hope that helps.

I meant to reply here the other day but I got busy and thought I posted this already. :)

Hi again Emma - Thanks for confirming what I was seeing at some traffic broker sites. They say they want to know the page where they're sending the traffic, and they want that page to meet certain criteria. I'm guessing that the better the traffic, the tighter they may want to control things...but that's only a guess at this point.

Hiya LB - Thanks for joining in on this thread. :) You mentioned some very good points in your post. We've bought banners and links at times, and have used cpm and cpc programs. We've been offered traffic from brokers many, many times. One of the reasons I started this thread is that I believe there is a difference, in general, between the folks who actively try to sell traffic to you and those you need to search out to find at all.

There definitely are more sources for traffic, sources that haven't been mentioned specifically in this thread, and I appreciate all the information that's been passed to me privately since I opened this thread. There are some folks out there I might think of trying to ply with drinks, hookers, or whatever else it took to learn what they knew about these things. But my guess is they'd save the best information for those they called 'friend' anyway. |shake|

That said, I'm interested in the mechanics of making a profit on purchased traffic after you're done filtering it. I understand that make be something you won't want to post to the world, but if you're willing to say anything privately, please let me know. I'm really not adverse to the liquor and broads approach if that works for you. ;) |cheers| |boobies|

I think the same way as you do about general brokered traffic, which is why we've always said no when brokers have approached us (or worse, spammed us) with "great" black box traffic. The kind of purchased traffic that really interests me at this point is the type you mentioned, where you can actually know the exact site sending the traffic (and the link generating the click).

I'm not sure if we'll do this in a big way, but even if we do, we'll most likely grow into it slowly. I'd like to know more about using purchased traffic, and I don't mind buying some to learn more than I can learn just talking about it. If what I learn can be used to manage a system that creates 'free' bookmarkers for new projects, while running at or near breakeven, I'd be happy with that.

Excellent advise on running the numbers on what you expect. Another reason for this thread is to get feedback on what reasonable expectations we might want to use for projections before we test anything. From what I've read here (and been told) so far, running at or near breakeven would be doing pretty damn good.

Thanks again for the input you posted, LB, most appreciated.

One thing about this thread is noticeable by its absence. I understand why those who don't have enough "good" traffic now for their existing clients wouldn't have any need to post here. But anyone else find it strange that no traffic brokers/sellers have stopped by to talk with us about any of this?

Oh well, their loss if they don't want to.

I think this has been a great thread so far, and I want to say thanks again to everyone who's taken time to offer their opinions. I'm still looking to learn more, so I'd be glad to hear more from anyone willing to keep it going.

:)

Your loss |pokefun| Not all of us are into broads :D

:D
Now, now... I only made it liquor and broads when I was addressing LB directly. Before that I'd said "liquor, hookers or whatever else," so not to worry, I have you covered.

Besides, you're on my 'special rewards' list already anyway. ;)