If you're having trouble attracting visitors to your site, you may wonder if you should buy web traffic. Naturally, there are two schools of thought here; the first reckons that there are so many free ways of attracting traffic that there's no need to pay for it and the opposite which advocates saving time and effort and just spending money on getting visitors.

There are plenty of internet business success stories which is encouraging to know, but unfortunately, there are probably a million times as many failures. Why do so many businesses fail when there are plenty of customers out there; people using the internet who are looking for a solution to one problem or another.

The answer is traffic. If you owned a shop, you would need customers to come in and browse your merchandise. In the world of the internet, "traffic" is the same as your drop in potential customers and the more people who come and take a look, the greater the potential for sales. Not everyone will take you up on your sales offer at their first visit, but if your site is attractive and easy to navigate, then they may well bookmark your site and come back.

Where does this mysterious "traffic" come from? Enough traffic, that is, so that even a small percentage of buyers will turn you a profit. Established internet businesses can attract thousands of visitors a day but only around ten to fifteen percent will buy anything. However, because of the numbers involved, they can still maintain their business.

Free Web Traffic

If the content on your site is interesting and relevant enough and you have picked a rich target market, then your pages may rank highly in the search engines. As most website traffic is generated in this way, because it's free and easy to use, with a high ranking page, you will attract plenty of traffic but it won't be a staggering high quantity.

Buy Web Traffic

If you buy web traffic from the likes of Google and Yahoo and if you bid enough for your advert to be on the front pages, then you are guaranteed to be seen by whomever is searching for the search term that you have paid for. This greatly increases your chance of someone clicking on the link and coming to your site.

The secret here is to choose a search term which will attract buyers rather than browsers; for example you could use "baldness" as your search term but that would attract anyone who wanted information on baldness. However, if you're selling a product which reduces the appearance of baldness, you could bid on the search term "how to cure baldness" or "how to stop balding" and this will ensure that your visitors are looking for something to help their baldness. In the same way, if you find that there are people searching for a particular product name, for instance "XYZ Brazilian coffee", they may well just want some information on that coffee but if you target "buy XYZ Brazilian coffee" your visitors are looking to actually buy that product.

I don't want to go into detail here about PPC (pay per click) advertising, suffice to say that you bid for clicks and when your advertisement is clicked on (not shown), that is what you pay. Some search engines charge for actually showing your advertisement but this doesn't guarantee visitors.

Careful keyword research is the key to a continuous flow of visitors ready to buy your products.