my reviews and finds

By Sean Mize
Traffic building is an area that even the masters don’t always understand. They are constantly trying to come up with a new ‘angle’ to use to get traffic, or so they can sell their new ‘method’ to someone else—particularly the ‘newbies’ online.
So what are the top 10 myths about traffic building?
10) Guaranteed traffic works. The only thing that guaranteed traffic is guaranteed to do is make the person selling it money.
9) The more traffic you get, the more money you make. The truth is, only buyers make you money, raw visitors do not make you money. If you cannot make money with 100 visitors a day, it is unlikely that you will make money with 1,000 or 10,000 a day – you will just have to pay for more bandwidth from your web host.
8) PPC traffic is good traffic. It depends on what you think of as good traffic. If you need traffic to test with, great, use PPC. But if you really want to make money off the clicks, you will have to do a lot of testing to make it profitable. If you have been online for less than one year and are unwilling to spend more than $500 per month on PPC, PPC is probably not for you. PPC costs money to test and if you are just getting started, that is the wrong place to put your money.
7) It is worth your time to use tricks to monetize traffic exchange or safelist traffic. Sure, you can monetize it, but why? All the time spent would be better spent writing articles or cruising online forums.
6) The more article directories you submit to, the more traffic you will get. That may be true in the long run, but before you do it, research it good – don’t just take some gurus’ word for it. Do what works in the short term and build on that. If you cannot see measurable results today, it is unlikely you will see measurable results in 3 months. There are some exceptions – so don’t take this as concrete – but be sure and think about it before you spend a lot of time on it.
5) Get to number one in the search engines and you will get tons of traffic. I have several web pages that made it to number one and I got some traffic. I get far more article marketing. The problem with search engine optimization is that I can easily teach you to get to number one in a long-tailed niche market that has very little traffic, but getting to number one in a short tailed market with lots of traffic is much harder. Sure, you can do it, but when the PPC monsters change your ranking from #1 to #3000 overnight with one small scripting change, you are starting over. I do not believe you should chase the mythical natural search engine market. Do things right, and if you get close, push to get to the front page – but other than that, I think your time is a waste.
4) JV giveaways are good for you. Hmmm – I fell for that one. Sent a lot of traffic (good quality traffic, I might add) to some JV giveaways. Then they stopped spending as much with me, or at least that’s how I saw it. Think about this – if you are one of 5 people emailing your list daily, you have a chance of getting some sales, right? But if you send your subscribers to a giveaway that captures your subscribers’ email everytime they download a free gift, and they download 30, for example, now they are on 30 lists instead of 5. What is that going to do to your response rate?
3) Ezine advertising is the best. Hmmm – this one is hit or miss. You must be willing to test, and test a lot. If you cannot afford to buy at least 10 different sources or ezine advertising so you can compare (some ezines might not even mail your offer at all), you might as well not do it. Better to do emailing swaps with list builders on your list.
2) You should buy lists – someone else has already done the work. This is one of the greatest lies – the important thing about a list is the relationship with you. If you buy a list, is there any relationship? No, or course not.
And for #1, the number one myth:
1) Article marketing is only good for backlinks. That is crazy. I get as many as 30-40 new subscribers per day when I am actively writing and submitting articles like this one. That translates to around 100 very high quality visitors from writing articles just like this one. Article marketing is probably the highest form of traffic you can generate on the web.