Our story
A few years ago, we were struggling to drive traffic to one of our websites. We were immediately overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge and skill it took to successfully drive traffic to our site. We had assumed that if we created a site that was worth seeing, it would be seen. We could not have been more wrong.

We ran into a number of companies who offered to take over this daunting task for us. We decided to try out a number of them.

They offered many packages of visitors. I remember my first purchase. I bought 5,000 targeted hits from them for $10. My product cost $15 at the time, so I figured at least 1 person out of 10,000 would purchase. The days went by, and my counter went crazy.

The results
After our contract expired, all my hits had been delivered as expected. I did not have one sale!

I should have learned my lesson!
Thinking this had to be a fluke, I switched to another company, and bought the same package.

Again, I GOT NO SALES!
I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was confident my ads were written well. The site was well designed and planned, and my product was in demand...

I started to investigate
Frustrated, I started to investigate exactly where these visitors were coming from. I discovered that I had fallen victim to one of the most common scams on the internet. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first discovered the secrets these company's use to drive traffic to the clients’ sites.

I checked the script I had installed that was used to check detailed stats on all of our traffic. All 10,000 of our hits came in 2 days, and all 10,000 of them were logged in for less than 3 seconds. Not a single one of them navigated past our main page. My stats script will also tell me where my traffic was referred from, and what keywords they used. All of these hits had the same referral, and didn't use keywords. This last fact isn't important, because any company, good or bad, will redirect their traffic sources through their domain. This is just to keep competitors from stealing their sources (good or bad).

I believe that these companies are going to pay for their greed and dishonesty sometime in the near future. In the next few pages, we are going to reveal exactly how these greedy companies scam you. This will help you avoid such scams, and put your money to good use, instead of wasting it.

You will be shocked at what these companies do to send you traffic!
This is the most immoral, unethical, and dishonest business practice I have ever come across online. These companies know exactly what they're doing. After all, if their traffic methods work, wouldn't they use it themselves? Why is a company offering millions of hits to their visitors, when they are only getting 10-15 hits a day? They don't use their own methods, because they know their hits are useless.

I fell victim to this scam, as have thousands of others. These companies give you a sales pitch something like this...

"Suppose that you sell a product for $25 and that in a worst case scenario only 1% of your visitors purchase your product.

An average site gets less than 100 hits per day (3,000/month). Thus, approximately 30 people will purchase the product every month (1% of 3,000). That means you are taking in only $750 per month (30 x $25)

Now, suppose the site owner (you) purchases 100,000 visitors with our service. Using our assumption that only 1% of visitors will purchase the product, a total of 1,000 purchases will be made. That's a value of$25,000! And that is if only 1% of visitors purchase the product! Think about the return on your investment!"

If you're like me, you got pretty excited when you read that. After all, there's no conceivable way you can't at least earn your investment back, right? WRONG!

You give in, order their service, and at first, you get excited, because traffic is pouring in! Soon you realize that your money is earning you nothing. In fact it's costing you your bandwidth, and not delivering any results!

Of course no company, no matter how credible they are, can guarantee you sales. That depends highly on your ad copy, price, and the demand of the item. I can guarantee though that some of these companies have thousands of clients, and not one of their clients has ever made a sale.

I bought my traffic... Now where are all my orders?
Now remember, worst case scenario is that 1% of your visitors will buy your product. Right? WRONG! If that's the case, then where are your orders? These companies place these ads right in your face when you visit their website. This way, you’re sold before you even see the price, and you'll buy into their high prices.

Naturally you are going to believe that you'll pay off your "investment" right away, and make a ton of extra money. After all, you spent hours writing that "perfect ad," so you're going to draw in a lot more than 1%.

I'll let you in on a secret. No matter how good your ad is, it doesn't do any good if it's never read.

You sit there and watch traffic come flying in at hyperspeed. Then they fly out. You don't make any sales. What do you do now? If you're like me, you're going to email them, complaining how you didn't make any sales from their services. They're going to tell you some variation of the following...

"I'm sorry you didn't make any sales. If you read our terms, you would see that we can only guarantee that we send the traffic to you. The sales are your responsibility. We cannot guarantee sales, because we are not involved in the writing of the advertisement."

This leaves them clean from delivering any refunds. Trust me, they won't refund your money!

Starting to get suspicious? The truth is your traffic was delivered in a misleading way.

You were sent FAKE VISITORS, or GHOST VISITORS, as they are widely called online.

Have you been tracking your traffic? Many people don't realize that there are free scripts that you can install on your site to track detailed statistics about your traffic. I'm not talking about counters. Counters are inaccurate, plus they don't tell you anything about your visitors.

If you actually monitor your traffic, you can learn lots of things about your visitors. Including the countries they're from, their IP addresses, the time they came to your site, the time they left your site, the sites they were referred from (Google, Yahoo, etc..), and the keywords they used to search for your site.

My statistics were shocking!
The traffic I ordered had no IP address, no search engine, none of my visitors navigated past the front page! I paid for these "Guaranteed Real Visitors," and I have the right to know where they come from. Guess what, I figured it out!

A few of the hits that they had sent, slipped up, and didn't disguise their origin as well as they should have...

I kept seeing the same IP address over and over and over again about 900 times in one day. I thought somebody out there really must love my web site or it's the scam hit company I hired. Well I clicked the link that night which was labeled with an IP address, not the actual web site .com name itself just the numbers of the IP address....I clicked that and wouldn't you know it? I received just a site telling me it doesn't exist.

With my campaign still running the next day along with all the "unknown" places I seen a peculiar URL and had to click that to see where over 500 of the same people were coming from and I ended up in Pop-up hell! You know that hell don't you? Where you are swarmed with so many pop-ups that you literally have to pull the plug on your computer to get out of it? The sad part about that link is that all the Pop-ups were from PORNO sites!

It's no wonder these companies don't tell where they deliver their traffic from! After all, what ethical business wants to advertise on those disgusting adult sites?

So you want to know exactly how this all works?
After following the slipped up referral link, I was directed to a website where anyone can post their own free adult site. (If you’re going to try and follow these links yourself, I would suggest switching your browser to text only mode, as I did. Otherwise you'll get flooded with pop-ups, and disgusting porno pictures.)

Now we have determined that my traffic was coming from this site, but I didn't see my site at all...

I switched back to my traffic log, and hit refresh. I WAS STUNNED! At the top of my log, I had 12 hits to my site, all with my IP address!!! By viewing this site just once, I received 12 hits!

I switched over to Alexa.com. Alexa is a site ranking service, that can tell you how popular a site is. This adult site that I was listed on was receiving 786,376 hits per day, on average during that week. Multiply that by 12, and that's where all my traffic came from!

So now we know what site is generating the traffic, but how are they disguising the IP address. Why wasn't my site ever shown on screen to me? The answer lies in the HTML source code...

Here are the secret codes!
One of the tricks that these companies use is the way they hide where your traffic is coming from. The way they do this is through a redirect code. A redirect code is simply a code that webmasters use on their websites to take one website and send it another way.

The biggest trick is how they can mysteriously load your site multiple times, without you seeing it. They do this by embedding your site into theirs, and making it tiny. So tiny in fact, that it looks like a period. So instead of using periods at the end of their sentences, they just embed their clients sites to look like a period.

So you’re thinking, they just embed my site into that ‘period’, 10-15 times on the page, and that's where my hits come from. Yes, and No. Essentially that's how it works, but if they put your website into that square, you could easily trace the traffic back to the adult site. So what they do is put their redirect page into that square, and redirect it to your site, so now it looks like all the traffic is coming from them.

So let's put it all together.
You order traffic from a traffic company. The traffic company creates a free adult site and lists it into a directory of free adult sites. According to our Alexa review these sites get 786,376 hits per day. If their redirect page gets 12 hits every time someone loads the adult site, that means they have an average of 9,436,512 hits per day, which they divide among their clients.

For some of the Monster Traffic Companies, 9.5 million visitors a day just isn't enough. They can easily turn that 9.5 million visitors, into as many as they need. Instead of embedding the redirect page. they embed a page full of these periods. That way, when their "period farm" page loads, they can have as many sites load as they want.

They simply change the redirect page to whatever client they want the traffic sent to. Your counter goes crazy, and all your hits are delivered.

But you never make a sale. Now you can understand how you could have thousands of visitors sent your way, and never make a sale. Your site is never really displayed.

The traffic company has delivered exactly what they said they would, and are clear from any refunds.

BUYERS BEWARE!!!

Now, to end this article on a positive note, if you are interested in becoming an ethical traffic reseller, we have a dedicated website just for resellers at wholesale rates as low as $1 CPM (per 1000). www.Sell-Traffic.com. Go check it out.

Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Josh_Walsh