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Department: The Worst Advertising
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Method
 The Worst Methods |
1. Pay a company to handle your affairs - Be it bulk mail, guaranteed hits, or URL submissions, no online site will sit back and make you successful for a few hundred bucks. They'd sooner just rip off any idea they felt was clever and tell you to hit the bricks.
2. Pay for traffic - This service promises to send you traffic, but at best you get nothing. Think about it - if it worked well, wouldn't the firms offering it just keep all the traffic themselves? Traffic is online gold and every site is killing for more.
Imagine for a moment you're strolling along at the mall. You approach the entrance to Macy's. At the door, a lady greets you hello and instructs you to head toward Bloomingdales. Silly? This is why pay for traffic is an impossible business model for anyone to offer. It makes no sense that a firm would turn away traffic without attempting to sell anything at their own store first.
What you really get is worthless traffic generated from free porno galleries, exit consoles, pop up windows, or all those intrusive tricks so many sites pull on visitors. Did you ever wonder how those frustrating and annoying pop ups or misleading links make money? They are almost always part of traffic pump groups that simply weigh success on the number of clicks they can generate whichever way possible. Their only goal is to get you to click on links. Then members of these groups resell traffic to each other or naive businesses. Do not buy this crap!
3. Banner Ads - Banners can score but are mainly for large budgets that can absorb weeks of continually poor responses before breaking even. In other words, they're most effective to brand a product for lasting public recognition over time - not for high conversion rates.
4. Link Exchanges - To rank higher on Search Engines and increase your site popularity it's vital that you have your URL linked on other sites that are relevant and more popular than your own. Browse around and contact other webmasters to propose a mutually agreed upon link exchange. Obviously you wouldn't bother with a site selling the exact stuff you do. There are programs that facilitate all this but don't bother buying into any of them. Exchange programs often have deceptive tricks like 20:1 ratios. In other words, for every 20 times you display their link - yours is shown once. Many of these programs often times employ artificial means to inflate traffic counts by purposely creating circle jerk pop up windows or top lists that never seem to end or close. These sites you may have wondered do make money with annoying tricks. The money is paid for in traffic generated from "forced" clicks by unknowing surfers. Then these artificial counts are exchanged with participating sites for even greater traffic. But Link Exchanges can be excellent if your the one on top - Get it? This is an advanced arena and more info can be found from our CD-ROM. See also Top site or Banner farms.
5. Paid URL Submission - Paying anyone to use submission software on your behalf is foolish. Not only will you learn nothing about what is needed to build a high search engine ranking, but you'll always need to pay again and again each time you submit another URL or wish to update your position. Even paying for inclusion within a search engine directly (like Yahoo Express) is not recommended. Yahoo charges a non-refundable $299.00 to review your submission. If they do not like your site - you lose. The chance they reject your site is fairly decent if submitted with errors or in an inappropriate category. Not to mention Yahoo is sourced by Overture and Google. If you use Overture you pay to rank well on Yahoo. Overture is excellent for all online sites to use. Also, if you rank well on Google, you will rank just as well with Yahoo. So don't pay Yahoo $299.00 to consider your site. Instead, try WebPosition Gold 2. It's the best way to list highly on the popular search engines.
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