Should You Buy Traffic for Your Blog?

Launching a blog is a fun and exciting venture, especially when it’s your first attempt at monetizing your written thoughts. But, as you may have recently discovered, it can take some time to get your readership and daily traffic to grow. When growth is slower than expected, many bloggers are tempted to pay to get increased traffic to their blog; they do this through PPC campaigns with search engines or other paid advertisement programs.

If you are contemplating paying to get increased traffic to your blog, Daniela Baker from CreditDonkey recommends you take a moment before you pull out your credit card to consider whether the investment of paying for web traffic will pay off. Here are some pros and cons to this tactic and some other approaches you may also want to take to increase your web traffic.

The Pros

If you have already created some high-quality and relevant content that simply needs added exposure, then a paid advertising campaign may be worth the extra dollars on your upcoming credit card statement. When you take the time to choose an advertising option that will properly target your blog to the right audience, it could lead to building your long-term readership base.

Paying for traffic will also help increase your website quality which is used by search engines when determining your page rank. This means that your blog will get a more favorable ranking over time, making it easier for potential readers to find it through organic search. Your page rank increases because search engine crawlers tend to index sites that have a steady flow of traffic before those sites with intermittent traffic.

This optimization of search engine results is something that typically takes time. But by purchasing targeted web traffic, it will help speed up the process so you don’t have to rely on your newfound SEO skills or factors that are completely outside of your control.

Perhaps the best benefit of purchasing web traffic is that it will help with the success of your affiliate marketing. Research affiliate marketing opportunities that fit your blog’s niche and add those targeted ads to your blog. This will make the most out of the increased traffic coming to your blog and will help pay for the PPC campaigns and other blog expenses that you have charged to your credit card or drawn from your checking account.

The Cons

The primary con of purchasing traffic for your blog is the added expense. Just because you get extra traffic to your blog doesn’t necessarily mean that your blog will become profitable overnight. There are other factors that you may need to invest in as well, such as design and content. This means that you don’t want to blow your entire blog budget on purchasing traffic.

Many bloggers view PPC and other paid traffic campaigns as a last step to take after making inexpensive efforts on their own. They feel that the small time investment made on the other tactics pay off better than having to make an upfront financial investment.

The Other Tactics

Before you jump into a paid campaign, you may want to consider the following tactics to help increase your blog traffic on your own.

• Ping your posts to help alert search engines there is new content to index

• Share every post via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn so your current network is aware of your new posts; seeing you share the posts will also encourage them to share the posts with their social network.

• Be active in forums and other blogs that attract your target audience; with every post, include a link to your blog .

• Carefully consider your post topics to ensure you are creating relevant content; research what topics are trending and find ways to make them fit into your niche. For example, when the recession takes a nosedive, budgeting and smart credit card decisions are a top concern for everyone whether they are computer programmers or teachers.

• Guest write for others’ e-newsletters; at the end of the article, include a link to your blog so their readers can find more content that speaks to their needs

• Submit posts to Google News.

• Include an email subscription form to your blog so you can alert them to new posts; a free e-book or similar incentive will help boost the subscriber list.

Once you’ve exhausted this list of tactics, you will be able to review your blog metrics to see if your traffic has increased and determine whether the pros outweigh the cons of buying traffic for your blog.