Many webmasters will tell you that buying traffic will do nothing but harm your website in the long run. Others will insist that it’s perfectly fine, if you do it right, and point to their successful past as proof.

The reality is that buying traffic, like many marketing and web business techniques, varies from site to site and from person to person. It all depends on the quality of that traffic, the source of the traffic, and what was done to get that traffic. Even though this site sells traffic, I’m not going to blindly tell you to buy without explaining the situation. You should always investigate your options and your situation before you attempt any technique, whether it’s buying traffic, implementing keyword research, performing a link audit or anything else relating to your site and its well-being.

Buying Bad Traffic Does Nothing

Before discussing particular sources of traffic, you should learn a little about traffic quality. See, it’s not enough to just assume that any visitor coming to your site is a visitor that wants to be on your site and is interested in what you have to sell. There’s good traffic and there’s bad traffic.

If you’ve been in the marketing game for a while, chances are you’ve made up a few profiles of the typical people you want visiting your site. These audience archetypes are representative of the ideal visitors. You can reasonably expect to follow what they do when they visit; which pages they click through to, what they do in their time on the site, whether or not they’ll convert and so forth.

What happens when the person who visits your site has nothing in common with those archetypes? One of two things can be the case. Either they’re a previously unknown archetype and they can be the foundation for a new marketing campaign, or they’re completely disinterested and just bounce away after the click.

Your business earns money through conversions, or in some cases, affiliate links. Very, very rarely does a business earn a successful living through impressions alone. Any visitor that visits your site and doesn’t convert, and has no interest in converting, is a wasted visit.

Now, when you’re buying bad traffic, you’re buying at best disinterested visitors. More often, you’re buying visitors that aren’t even real; the same person operating bots and software spoofs to direct traffic your way, traffic that doesn’t have a human behind it.

When you buy bad traffic, all it does is inflate the number of raw hits coming to your site. It doesn’t increase your engagement, it doesn’t increase your comments, it doesn’t increase your shares, unless you’re also paying for those things. It definitely doesn’t increase your conversions. You would have to pay more for the conversion than the conversion is worth to you, and that’s not a sane way to do business.

Buying Bad Links Kills SEO

There’s one other way to buy bad traffic that can have a much more detrimental effect than inflating numbers in your analytics. That’s where you’re buying traffic in the form of links, and those links come from sites that aren’t trustworthy. When you have a high number of links coming from bad sources – spam sites, unrelated sites, low quality sites, penalized sites – those links can harm your SEO. Too many of them built in too short a time will earn you an immediate penalty.