Website traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. In fact, without traffic your website is as good as dead. Web traffic comes in many shapes and sizes and QUALITY is by far the most important thing that should be on your mind right now. While “free” SEO traffic is nice, it takes forever to get it and playing the SEO game is definitely not an easy one. If you buy web site traffic then you get it instantly – which is why is so popular and so powerful.

Buying web traffic can be the quickest and most profitable thing you will ever do for your online business, BUT if you don’t know what you are doing you will burn out and probably lose a lot of money. The most important words in paid traffic is Return On Investment (ROI). Since you pay for the traffic it has to return a profit. Paid traffic is just too expensive to just use for branding purposes.

If you ant to buy web site traffic you have so many options and sources of traffic to choose from. Which one is better and where should you start? Lets quickly look at some of the main sources of paid traffic:

- Pay Per Click:
This is by far the highest quality traffic because it comes from highly relevant searches. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing offer PPC programs that allows you to buy advertising space based on keywords. You pay “per click” and all 3 these major search engines have a TON of traffic available to virtually any audience anywhere in the world.

- Media Buys:
Media buys is all about buying banner space on websites. Although Google Adwords allows you to buy banners on its Adsense network, there are hundreds of Media Buyers out there. You usually buy banner space on a CPM (cost per million impressions) basis where you pay for the amount of times your banner gets viewed and NOT per click. Most high traffic websites have media buys available and the great thing about this is that you can pick and choose the websites (and the audience) you want to advertise on.

- CPV Traffic:
CPV stands for “cost per view” and its one of the hardest traffic sources to see good return. The payoffs can be ginourmous though as there is a lot of traffic available. CPV traffic is usually full page ads that gets served to users who have software installed on their computers. Many see it as “spyware” but there is a very definite distinction and the most reputable CPV traffic sources like TrafficVance are definitely not spyware.

- Mobile Advertising:
This is the latest trend in advertising and if you want to buy web site traffic from mobile users then this is the way to go. With mobile phones becoming more and more powerful its basically like little computers and users spend a lot of time surfing the web on their mobile phones. Google recently acquired AdMob – the biggest mobile phone advertising network which a good indication of how serious this traffic source will become in the future.
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If you want to buy web traffic then you have a ton of options. There really is no hard and fast rules for what “the best” traffic is because it all boils down to conversions and ROI. While many advertisers buy traffic for branding purposes, we want to buy traffic to make money. Think of it as a funnel. you throw traffic into the top, it moves through your webpages and money comes out at the end. Its really quite simple. If you make more than you spend, its good traffic.

Testing different traffic sources is really important to continuously expand your reach and to find new markets. Every traffic source can potentially help grow your business. Some will be good, some will be bad while other will blow it up or bomb out completely. Test, test and test some more. That is the key. Lets quickly look some of the main sources where you can buy web traffic.

Search Traffic:
Search traffic is probably the oldest form of traffic you can buy and the big daddy of search traffic is Google Adwords where you can buy sponsored ads based on search terms. Its commonly referred to as PPC (Pay Per Click) and is one of the most expensive traffic source because of how focused and how targeted it is. Search traffic is generally considered high quality because it is so targeted to specific search terms.

Contextual Traffic:
As the name implies, contextual traffic is usually sponsored words or phrases that appear “in context”. The majority of contextual traffic sources offer hover ads that appear when a user moves their cursor over the sponsored phrase. Its generally considered a low quality of traffic because clicks are generally quite low although with the right targeting you can get some decent conversions. Contextual traffic is cheap which makes up with low conversions and you can see great volume with this.

Web/Banner Traffic:
This is probably the most important and most popular way to buy web traffic. You can buy banner positions from virtually any website and with more advanced targeting available, its a great way to reach specific demographic markets. Standard IAB banner sizes are available on most high traffic sites and you can either buy direct or buy through an ad server. Google Adwords serves banner ads and so does thousands of other networks. Its usually priced bet CPM which is a price based on the amounts of views your banner gets.

Pop Traffic/CPV/PPV:
Pop traffic as its commonly known is based on a cost per view (CPV) basis and you can serve your ad as a pop-under or pop-over based on certain targeting criteria. This traffic is also known as Pay Per View (PPV) and the 2 biggest networks are TrafficVance and MediaTraffic that allow you to target website URL’s as well as keywords to trigger your pop. This is “cheap traffic” but the quality is not always up to scratch. It can potentially be a huge source of traffic and will allow you to reach a very specific audience.

Social Traffic:
Social networks are dominating the internet at the moment and if you want to buy website traffic from some of the most high traffic sites on the web, then Social Networks is the way to go. Facebook is now the most popular website on the planet and when you buy traffic through their self-serve network you can get very specific in your targeting – which means that your ads are very focused and the results are often a very good ROI.
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