Should You Pay For Traffic To Your Blog?

"Gordon Bryan" "make money blogging" "The Great Gordino"Some people find it so hard to generate free traffic, that when they see offers to buy traffic, it seems like an easy option. In this article, I’ll explain why the easy option doesn’t necessarily make it the right option..!

Free traffic comes in many forms, and paid traffic comes in many forms. In fact it could be argued that a lot of the free methods have a cost attached to them, in the form of the time spent.

There’s nothing wrong with paid traffic, but as obvious as it may sound, it can get very expensive very quickly, so there is one thing you absolutely have to know before you start spending, and it’s this…

You need to know your visitor value.

You’ll need to have your blog set up with a specific plan for visitors, and you need to have had enough visitors to know how many of them go along your plan. For example, for every 100 visitors to your blog, how much money do you make?

If you sell directly from the site, that may be easier to work out, whereas if you build a mailing list, it’s a slightly longer process. If you are going for the list building option, you will know what each list subscriber is worth to you, and you’ll know how many visitors sign up from each 100 that come to your site.

Sound complicated? Well, that’s why most people don’t do it, and end up losing money on paid traffic! If, for example, you know that each visitor to your site is worth $1, then you would be happy paying 50 cents per visitor.

If you don’t know the value of each visitor, but in fact it’s only 25 cents, then to pay 50 cents for each one is business suicide.

You may say that 25 cents is not much, but if you set up a paid traffic source incorrectly, without spending limits, you can literally be charged $1000 or more in a day – don’t be fooled by low costs per visitor, you have to see the whole picture.

Even if you do know that it’s worth paying 50 cents per visitor, you need to test and keep testing, because not all traffic is the same quality – some paid traffic can be super targeted and responsive, but some paid traffic can be worse than bad free traffic.

Hopefully you can see why I advise people to be very wary of paying for traffic. For beginners it’s a definite no go in my view, stick with the free traffic options, and even more experienced bloggers should not pay until they are very, very sure of what they are doing!

Don’t forget to let me know what you think!
‘Til Next Time,
Health & Happiness,
Gordon
P.S. You might like to read The Blogging Secret The Gurus Don’t Want You To Know!

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14 Comments

  • Thanks Gordino. I am fairly new to blogging and have questioned whether or not or would make sense to pay for traffic. I think I will wait until I better understand my audience and know exactly who I need to be targeting. Until then I will put in the time and try to add value to my content! Thanks for the advice! 🙂

    • Hi Jeff,
      Your approach is spot on! Add value, which you are doing, then work out your aims/targets, and work out if you want to monetise the traffic that comes, and how, all before you pay a red cent for any!
      Cheers,
      Gordon

    • Monetising the blog? Why Not! Then whenyou are further down the road whenyouo know what a visitor is worth, you can investigate paying for traffic.
      CHeers,
      Gordon

    • Hi Susan,
      yes, your point about quality over quantity is true about traffic in almost all cases, particularly if you are paying for it!
      Cheers,
      Gordon

    • I would give 2 responses to that advice you were given…

      1. Google is only relevant for the traffic you get from Google! There are so many other ways to get traffic which mean you don’t have to play the google game.
      2. It’s also possible to monetise a site with only a few posts, either by the CPA model, having visitors click on as soon as possible to something else, or via an opt in box to your list. In that case the email opt in is the sole focus of the blog’s aim, you will monetise from the list.

      Both of the above points also work with the more posts the better, but you don’t always need lots of them!
      Cheers,
      Gordon

  • Rock On Gordino, great info and your right, alot of webmaster do not think of cost made per customer. Now sending traffic to blog could be waisteful, ok just hang with me here…. As most of our blogs are not really optimized for the traffic. They tend to be about alot of different aspects of whatever your niche is about. What you should be doing with paid traffic is sending them to a landing page. Matching up the offer with the traffic and boom you got success. Then during the opin-in and/or buying part of your funnel that you would send your paid traffic thru…. you would introduce your website, facebook group, or skype room. Two things happen when doing this….your sending buying vistors to your blog where they can buy more things from you (they have already proved that) and this is when you start to look like the authority figure for your niche. Thats what am doing… I hope it might help you when you want to start using paid traffic. Thanks for the info Gordino and take care….. I will see you around.

  • Good advice and lots of food for thought. My general attitude is to pay for stuff that’s beyond me technically, but if it’s just a question of spending time and effort, and within my capabilities, at the moment it’s up to me. Not that paying for traffic is really relevant but it’s good to know more. Thanks.

    • Thanks Harriet,
      when you talk about ‘spending time and effort’ that’s an important point as that is still a cost – not a cost out of your bank account of course!
      Cheers,
      Gordon