There are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your new drop ship website. You could, for example, buy targeted leads and paid inclusion in industry related newsletters and blogs. PPC ad campaigns like Adwords from Google work wonderfully well in driving quality shopping traffic to your site.
What we do not recommend is buying bulk traffic. There are a huge amount of websites selling bulk traffic. It goes something like this:-
John Doe builds a lovely online shop.
John then searches online to find a way to build an audience and stumbles across a website selling visitors.
John then buys 50,000 visitors for $43 or about £30.
John’s new traffic package hits his new shiny website creating a mini DDOS attack, smashing the hell out of the server, in quickly sending what he has ordered too quickly.
John then phones XTrader and says “I have had 50,0000 visitors but no orders”
“Sorry John. You have wasted your money”
We have a lot of experience is analysing, and auditing the type of traffic that comes from these packages. Only a fraction of it is often real. Some networks are better than others but we have never seen one actually produce any sales. You can see very quickly from your statistics that come with your website, the tell-tale sign that it’s generally bot or manipulated traffic you have purchased:-
1) Mostly single page views. None of the visitors seem to have a look around.
2) A massive 70-80% bounce rate. We would expect to see a real traffic generate a 40% bounce rate.
3) No purchases, email signups or any interaction with your website.
Some of the more unscrupulous traffic sellers generate traffic from pop up, or pop under advert related tactics. We have even seen traffic from networks and computers infected with a virus acting like a bot-net to fake a visit.
Since you are running a sex toys website you may find the company you buy traffic from assumes your fall into an explicit category and you will receive porn related visitor traffic. People perusing porn are not suddenly going to whip out their wallet and buy something from a sex toy site. However close you think the industry is related.
Traffic generating networks that sell these bulk visitor packages are generally associated with separate websites offering incentives for people to, host adverts, popup or to even click on links. These traffic generating methods bring no value to your website. It’s not targeted and furthermore is very low quality. Ask yourself. When was the last time you were forced to view something or redirected via an advert, pop up or another irritating method unrelated to what you were doing?
Amongst the tiny fraction of real humans, without fail the traffic will mostly be fake or useless. Please do not try it.
We are of the opinion that 1) PPC campaigns are a definite must 2) paid inclusion on blogs, in newsletters, ads and banners, can be successful if they are well placed and well designed, and that 3) bulk targeted traffic is a scam.