Let me share with you the greatest lesson I’ve learned in business over the years: Web traffic is worth as much as you paid for it.
Online marketers who are new to the industry are often lured into traffic-
generation schemes that require little or even no money up front.
Every online entrepreneur has seen the ads and probably even received emails…
…from people trying to sell them 10,000 new Twitter followers for $10 or 500 sales leads at a dollar a piece. The offers sound tempting, but believe me, these schemes are a waste of time.
As Rich Schefren says, “All traffic has value … [but] you can’t get value for free.”
What Is Free Traffic? Robots vs. Real Marketing
I need to be specific about this because, technically speaking, there are two types of free traffic. The first is usually referred to as “organic traffic,” and it is a great thing.
Organic traffic happens when someone uses a search engine like Google and clicks your website after seeing it listed in the results.
The second kind of free traffic is procured through an agreement with a traffic provider. The provider will usually employ a traffic robot to increase website hits, and eventually ask you to continue the service for a low fee.
Traffic robots are really computer programs that visit your website instead 
of actual people. The numbers on your visitor counter will go up…
…but these statistics will be completely meaningless since a program cannot make a purchase.
This is not real traffic! Therefore, it has absolutely no value. The time you took to negotiate the free or low-cost website hits is a complete waste, as well as the time it took you to realize those hits never converted.
In 2013, non-human web traffic, including traffic robots, accounted for an astounding 61.5 percent of total online traffic. This just shows how much more effort web marketers need to put into attracting real traffic from humans who can actually convert.
As for cheap and free social media followers, these are usually nothing more than inactive accounts that won’t engage with your page or even look at it.
If You Want Quality Traffic, You’ve Got to Pay for It
So aside from organic traffic, which you cultivate from creating good SEO content, good-quality traffic must be bought and paid for. As an internet marketer, your focus should not be on finding cheap traffic sources, but on building an efficient selling machine.
The key to traffic generation is targeting your niche and creating quality products in such a way as you can afford to spend the most money acquiring leads.
Think about it this way: If you sell computers, and hundreds of other online companies are selling the same computers…
…how will consumers decide where to buy? It completely depends on your advertising dollars.
If you outbid your competitors for leads, your company will be the most successful—even though you have the same product.
Of course, your chances of gaining a high conversion rate are better if you offer a better product than your competitors. At MOBE, I know that as long as my company continues to offer the most profitable affiliate program in our marketing niche, we will never starve for traffic sources.
Like Most Ventures, You Get out What You Put In
When you are starting out in business, it’s tough to make your budget work. When you see easy ways to cut corners, like guaranteed low-cost traffic or social media followers I understand that the idea is tempting.
Just remember that your initial investments will create a strong business with strong systems that will last. You can’t build an empire on a cheap foundation!
Article curated from MOBE