Firstly let me point out categorically that we NEVER employ this (or any other underhand) technique. We deal honestly and openly with all our clients. The stats quoted here come from a project we have under development (not a Lanzarote site) and I did this just to illustrate this article.

If I was trying to sell you advertising, it would look pretty impressive wouldn’t it? Really, it’s not. It’s a very simple deception technique used by unscrupulous web site owners.

Now – how did we take a site from 16 page views to over 9,000 in less than 48 hours?

Simple – I bought the hits from a website – for $9.99. There are a number of sites where you can do this, and on some you can even set a daily rate (which if you are using this to be deceptive) which you can control to show an upward trend – one such site is “Buy Hits Cheap” (www.buyhitscheap.com)

The thing to note – is that hits from this type of source are worthless. In this instance, I haven’t shown you it of course – the vast majority came from China, so even if they were real and not just automated or users tricked onto the site by some means – they would not be able to read your content anyway!

There’s four reason people might use this…

1. They are stupid, and believe they are buying genuine, worthwhile, human visitors

2. To improve their rank on the Alexa website (or similar sites) that measure sites by traffic rather than more thorough means

3. An SEO company can use tools like this to deceive less knowledgeable clients and impress them with improved performance

4. Most commonly, a small web site owner hoping to sell ad space can create charts like the one above to deceive prospects. Picture a site with 200 visitors a day (or even less), if the owner was to ‘buy’ 1000 hits a day they have a chart which has 1200 hits a day (and they only need to do this for a week or a month occasionally to get a nice print out for their sales folder. Simple, but very effective to a potential client with little or no understanding of the internet.

So – next time someone comes knocking on your door selling advertising – don’t take their impressive statistics as gospel.

Here’s a couple of things that you should be aware of…

1. The term hits means files loaded which includes images and other files – each page can contain many items. For instance a hundred hits a day could simply be a couple of pages viewed!

2. Unique visitors, is exactly what it says – as is page loads. The ratio of visitors to page loads is crucial – lets say a site gets 1000 visitors a day and 1000 page loads, it means that anyone who his getting to the site is jumping off right away, they are not reading the content. If its 1000 visitors to 10,000 page loads – obviously users are finding the content useful as they are reading 10 pages each.

3. Ask where the hits come from geographically – does it reflect your target audience?

4. Ask where the inbound links in come from – they should be from quality sites – not “I’ll click yours if you click mine” type sites like Twitter!

It’s a simple thing. Statistics, charts and spurious numbers look great – but they can be formed and twisted to say whatever the person sat in front of you wants to say if they are less than scrupulous!

Ask questions! Even better have a look at who’s advertising already and talk to them!

And the big question is – have you ever heard of the site before someone walked through your door or that email arrived in your inbox?

Related posts:

1. Are you a shopkeeper?
2. Contextual advertising placement…
3. Using Google Alerts

All to often we rely on the ‘judgement’ of these systems – this is what can happen when it all goes horribly wrong.

Click on the image to see it full size and take a look at the headline on the left, and then the ad that shows up on the right.

Related posts:

1. L – Q
2. How to get more hits…
3. A – C

It’s a nice little system for generating a bit of extra income from your website.

As opposed to AdSense, Adbeans the monthly value of the ads for your website based on a number of criteria, and then sell the space on your behalf. All you need to do is add a bit of code – or if you are using blog software it can usually be added with a download. We had a few problems on one of our sites – but their support was fantastic! The ads are easily made to fit your site content – if you look to the bottom of the left column you can see the ads that appear on this site.

You decide how many ads to show and on what pages – and you can also veto any specific ads if you feel they are not right for your site. Not that we have needed to – the ads assigned to our account appear to have been well selected.

Let´s be honest the AdBeans website isn’t great – it sort of looks a bit unfinished – but the emphasis is on functinality rather than promotion. But take our word for it – their system works fine once you are registered and is bringing us a nice little side income.

Your not going to make a fortune using them – but it is guaranteed income rather than pay per click. The big difference is AdBeans is not their just, or maybe in some cases not at all for the click through. It is their to support the SEO activities of their clients – it’s about creating quality inbound links.

It is certainly worth signing up to AdBeans to see what it can do for you.

Interested in finding out about other affiliate programs? Take a look at the affiliate marketing category.

Related posts:

1. Fake Google Adsense payments…
2. Google AdSense – how closely targetted is it?
3. Affiliate link for Spanish websites