Paid traffic is any traffic to your website that you paid to obtain. Some common forms of paid traffic are Pay Per View and Pay Per Click (PPC) on YouTube, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or Facebook. Strictly speaking, it also includes Direct Mail and Media Buys (TV or radio space).
There don’t seem to be any courses that truly teach paid traffic well. I recommend a book by Brad Geddes called Advanced Google AdWords (the latest edition) if you want to learn more about paid traffic.
The good thing about PPC Marketing in particular is that when you build a particularly profitable group of PPC ads (called a campaign), you can ramp up from making $100 profit a day to making $1,000 to $2,000 profit a day (maybe even $3,000 on a good day) in the span of a week.
The bad thing about PPC is that you need to spend a lot of money, time, and effort to reach that point. Plus, people who can afford spying tools are able to check on your campaign. When they see that it’s profitable, they can underbid you and build out funnels that have higher lifetime value for their visitors than your campaign does. In the end, you’ll get pushed out of the market you cornered.
Who SHOULD Pursue Paid Traffic
Some aspiring Internet Marketers think spending $5 a day for a couple of months and then scaling up a campaign will make them rich. Sorry to say the game doesn’t work that way. Believe me, I know. I used to do this myself when I started out in Affiliate Marketing, and I learned my lesson the hard (and expensive) way.
The people who should pursue paid traffic are those with thick skin and plenty of money to burn. I’m talking $2,000 and up while you’re learning the ropes.
Pursuing paid traffic requires money to pay for a ton of data that needs interpreting, and, based on those interpretations, the ads and landing pages you’ll need to tweak. You can drop hundreds and thousands of dollars just to have access to that data. By the time you’ve built up a profitable campaign, you may have dropped thousands of dollars into it.
Pursuing paid traffic also requires thick skin to avoid the panic that comes from the fact that spending thousands of dollars of your money without breaking even is a very real possibility. You need the patience to learn how to make it work, pore over spreadsheets of data, fine tune your ads and/or landing pages, and then try again. This cycle can go on for weeks before a campaign becomes profitable. The important thing is to stay level-headed throughout all the learning and tweaking and interpreting.
Who Should NOT Pursue Paid Traffic
The people who shouldn’t pursue paid traffic are those who are looking for low-cost and relatively easy methods of getting traffic. Some people have misconceptions that paid traffic is an easy way to get qualified traffic to their site, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Qualified traffic takes money, time, effort, research, crunching numbers, analyzing data, looking at spreadsheets, and analytical skills.
Is PPC Worth It? My PPC Story
My latest PPC site was an ecommerce site that was earning $100,000 or more a month in revenue. That translated to around $25,000 to $30,000 a month in profit because I was spending $20,000 to $30,000 a month on Facebook advertising.
It fizzled.
The success from the site came and went in the span of four months because the competition increased to the point that I got pushed out of the industry. Nevertheless, I’m currently testing new methods and trying to crack back into the profitable side of that niche.
Nothing compares to the rush of raking in the profits. At the same time, that success can be swept right out from under you.