subject: Verify Site Traffic Before Buying Ad Space or Backlinks [print this page] Verify Site Traffic Before Buying Ad Space or Backlinks
Advertising and placing backlinks is important for getting traffic to your website. There are plenty of websites or blogs that look pretty and claim, "advertise here and get your site in front of our 7,000 members" or "backlinks on this site will have millions of impressions from our thousands of daily viewers."
Some sites like this may charge $50 to $500 a month or more for backlinks or ad space on their website. A newbie web advertiser may fall into this trap and find themselves wasting a lot of money and getting low impressions and clicks as the website they are advertising on receives minimal traffic.
Before purchasing ad space or paying for backlinks on any website, it is important to first do research to confirm the amount of traffic the site receives. One good place to start your research is on Alexa.com. Alexa ranks websites from 26,000,000 to 1, with 1 being the website with the most traffic on the internet (Google) and 26,000,000 being the least traffic (There are plenty more than 26,000,000 sites on the internet, but that is where Alexa stops keeping track).
I saw one webmaster related site claim to have 10,000 members and thousands of daily visitors. The website's Alexa ranking was in the 17 millions which means that the site probably had 5 visitors a day--max. This website was charging 90 dollars a week for backlinks on their advertising page, which was certainly not worth the cost.
Another way to confirm if paying for backlinks or an ad on a website is worthwhile is to ask the webmaster if you can be linked to their Google Analytics account. If the webmaster says no, do not advertise there. Chances are, the advertiser is lying about the amount of traffic that they receive. Being linked to the advertisers analytics account is like having them open up the drapes on the window and letting your look inyou won't be allowed to make any changes, and this is why they should not have a problem letting your link to the account.
There are several honest websites out there that will get you a great amount of traffic for the ads or backlinks you pay for. After doing research, we have gotten backlinks placed on websites that charge $30 dollars a month and those sites have been some of our best ad placements.
So, before wasting money on low traffic ad space or backlinks on websites, do your research first. Confirm everything.
