A few years ago, we were struggling to drive traffic to one ofour websites. We were immediately overwhelmed with the amount ofknowledge and skill it took to successfully drive traffic to oursite. We had assumed that if we created a site that was worthseeing, it would be seen. We could not have been more wrong.
We ran into a number of companies who offered to take over thisdaunting task for us. We decided to try out a number of them tosee how our competition stacks up.
They offered many packages of visitors. I remember my firstpurchase. I bought 5,000 targeted hits from them for $10. Myproduct cost $15 at the time, so I figured at least 1 person outof 10,000 would purchase. The days went by, and my counter wentcrazy.
The Results
After our contract expired, all my hits had been delivered asexpected. I did not have one sale!!
I Should Have Learned My Lesson!
Thinking this had to be a fluke.. I switched to another company,and bought the same package.
Again, I GOT NO SALES!!
I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was confident my ad'swere written well. The site was well designed and planned, andmy product was in demand...
I Started To Investigate
Frustrated, I started to investigate exactly where thesevisitors were coming from. I discovered, that I had fallenvictim to one of the most common scams on the internet. Icouldn't believe my eyes when I first discovered the secretsthese company's use to drive traffic to the clients sites.
I checked the script I had installed that was used to checkdetailed stats on all of our traffic. All 10,000 of our hitscame in 2 days, and all 10,000 of them were logged in for lessthan 3 seconds. Not a single one of them navigated past our mainpage. My stats script will also tell me where my traffic wasreferred from, and what keywords they used. All of these hitshad the same referral, and didn't use keywords. This last factisn't important, because any company, good or bad, will redirecttheir traffic sources through their domain. This is just to keepcompetitors from stealing their sources (good or bad).
I believe that these company's are going to pay for their greedand dishonesty sometime in the near future.
In the next few pages, we are going to reveal exactly how thesegreedy companies scam you. This will help you avoid such scams,and put your money to good use, instead of wasting it.
You Will Be Shocked at what these company's do to send youtraffic!
This is the most immoral, unethical, and dishonest businesspractice I have ever come across online. These companies knowexactly what they're doing. After all, if their traffic methodswork, wouldn't they use it themselves? Why is a company offeringmillions of hits to their visitors, when they are only getting10-15 hits a day? They don't use their own methods, because theyknow their hits are useless.
I fell victim to this scam, as have thousands of others. Thesecompanies give you a sales pitch something like this...
Suppose that you sell a product for $25 and that in a worst casescenario only 1% of your visitors purchase your product.
An average site gets less than 100 hits per day (3,000/month).Thus, approximately 30 people will purchase the product everymonth (1% of 3,000). That means you are taking in only $750 permonth (30 x $25)
With our service: Suppose the site owner (you) purchases 100,000visitors with our service. Using our assumption that only 1% ofvisitors will purchase the product, a total of 1,000 purchaseswill be made. That's a value of$25,000! And that is if only 1%of visitors purchase the product! Think about the return on yourinvestment!
If you're like me, you got pretty excited when you read that.After all, there's no conceivable way you can't at least earnyour investment back, right? WRONG!!
You give in, order their service, and at first, you get excited,because traffic is pouring in! Soon you realize that your moneyis earning you nothing. In fact it's costing you your bandwidth,and not delivering any results!
Of course no company, no matter how credible they are, canguarantee you sales. That depends highly on your ad copy, price,and the demand of the item. I can guarantee though, that some ofthese company's have thousands of clients, and not one of theirclients has ever made a sale.
I bought my traffic... Now where are all my orders?
Now remember, worst case scenario is that 1% of your visitorswill buy your product. Right? WRONG! If that's the case, thenwhere are your orders? These company's place these ads right inyour face when you visit their website. This way, your soldbefore you even see the price, and you'll buy into their highprices.
Naturally you are going to believe that you'll pay off your"investment" right away, and make a ton of extra money. Afterall, you spent hours writing that "perfect ad," so you're goingto draw in a lot more than 1%.
I'll let you in on a secret. No matter how good your ad is, itdoesn't do any good if it's never read.
You sit there and watch traffic come flying in at hyperspeed.Then they fly out. You don't make any sales. What do you do now?If you're like me, you're going to email them, complaining howyou didn't make any sales from their services. They're going totell you some variation of the following...
"I'm sorry you didn't make any sales. If you read our terms, youwould see that we can only guarantee that we send the traffic toyou. The sales are your responsibility. We cannot guaranteesales, because we are not involved in the writing of theadvertisement."
This leaves them clean from delivering any refunds. Trust me,they won't refund your money!
Starting to get suspicious? The truth is your traffic wasdelivered in a misleading way.
You were sent FAKE VISITORS, or GHOST VISITORS, as they arewidely called online.
Have you been tracking your traffic?
Many people don't realize that there are free scripts that youcan install on your site to track detailed statistics about yourtraffic. I'm not talking about counters. Counters areinaccurate, plus they don't tell you anything about yourvisitors.
If you actually monitor your traffic, you can learn lots ofthings about your visitors. Including the countries they'refrom, their IP addresses, the time they came to your site, thetime they
left your site, the site's they were referred from(google, yahoo, etc..), and the keywords they used to search foryour site.
My statistics were shocking!
The traffic I ordered had no IP address, no search engine, noneof my visitors navigated past the front page! I paid for these"Guarantee'd Real Visitors," and I have the right to know wherethey come from. Guess what, I figured it out!
A few of the hits that they had sent, slipped up, and didn'tdisguise their origin as well as they should have...
I kept seeing the same IP address over and over and over againabout 900 times in one day. I thought somebody out there reallymust love my web site or it's the scam hit company I hired. WellI clicked the link that night which was labeled with an IPaddress, not the actual web site .com name itself just thenumbers of the IP address....I clicked that and wouldn't youknow it? I received just a site telling me it doesn't exist.
With my campaign still running the next day along with all the"unknown" places I seen a peculiar url and had to click that tosee where over 500 of the same people were coming from and Iended up in Pop Up hell! You know that hell don't you? Where youare swarmed with so many pop ups that you literally have to pullthe plug on your computer to get out of it? The sad part aboutthat link is that all the Pop Ups were from PORNO sites!
It's no wonder these companies don't tell where they delivertheir traffic from! After all, what ethical business wants toadvertise on those disgusting adult sites?
So you want to know exactly how this all works?
After following the slipped up referral link, I was directed toa website where anyone can post their own free adult site. (Ifyour going to try and follow these links yourself, I wouldsuggest switching your browser to text only mode, as I did.Otherwise you'll get flooded with pop-ups, and disgusting pornopictures.)
Now we have determined that my traffic was coming from thissite, but I didn't see my site at all...
I switched back to my traffic log, and hit refresh. I WASSTUNNED! At the top of my log, I had 12 hits to my site, allwith my IP address!!! By viewing this site just once, I recieved12 hits!!
I switched over to www.Alexa.com. Alexa is a site rankingservice, that can tell you how popular a site is. This adultsite that I was listed on was recieving 786,376 hits per day, onaverage during that week. Multiply that by 12, and that's whereall my traffic came from!
So now we know what site is generating the traffic, but how arethey disguising the IP address. Why wasn't my site ever shown onscreen to me? The answer lies in the HTML source code...
Here are the secret codes!!
One of the tricks that these companies use is a the way theyhide where your traffic is coming from. The way they do this isthrough a redirect code. A redirect code is simply a cade thatwebmasters use on their websites to take one website and send itanother way.
The biggest trick is how they can mysteriously load your sitemultiple times, without you seeing it. They do this by embeddingyour site into theirs, and making it tiny. So tiny in fact, thatit looks like a period. So instead of using periods at the endof their sentances, they just embed their clients sites sites tolook like a period.
Try it for yourself
Open up your HTML editor, or notepad, and create a sample pageusing this code.