Pretending to sell your blog to get traffic is a waste of time and money
I read a post by Jason Neuman of JakelDaily a few days ago in which he encourages readers to list their blog for sale somewhere to get cheap traffic. Jason got the idea from a post John Chow wrote the day before. John has wrote some fantastic posts in the last few months but I have to say this is very bad advice. OK, perhaps bad advice is a tad strong, however it remains a very poor way to promote your blog.
Before I explain why pretending to sell your blog to get traffic is a waste of time, let’s look at what Jason from JakelDaily actually did.
- He paid $40 to list his blog for sale in the SitePoint Marketplace.
- He set the auction to end within 30 days.
- He set the buy it now price of his blog to $25,000 so that no one would bid (and if anyone was willing to pay that amount he would sell).
- He then posted about how much traffic he’s getting from the whole thing.
According to Jason he has had 822 hits within 2 days.
You want targeted traffic, not just traffic
I have been a member of SitePoint since 2001 and I browse the marketplace every week. When I’m interested in buying a website I first check the website out and then I do some background checks on it eg. backlinks etc. Hundreds of other webmasters do the same thing so when you list a website for sale at the marketplace you will see a spike in traffic. I have sold hundreds of websites over the last 5 years and when you post a website for sale you always see this surge in traffic however the traffic always goes back down to it’s normal level after a week or so.
The reason for this is simple, the extra traffic you receive from the sales post is not targeted ie. very few people (if any) will return to view your site after they have checked it out. This is not because the site being sold is poor, it’s because the people who are checking the site are looking to see if it’s worth buying at the price listed and nothing else.
Targeted traffic is what will make your blog a success and it’s what will make you money in the long run. You should bear this in mind when you are looking at ways to increase traffic to your blog.
Do I believe the $40 Jason paid for a marketplace listing to be good value for money? The answer is no, I believe he would have received more subscribers to his blog with a paid review or a $40 ad run on Google Adsense. Traffic jumps might make your stats look pretty but they don’t pay the bills.
ameyjah | July 11th, 2007 at 6:46 am #
Hey Kevin, you have correctly said that. We want targeted and not just random traffic. And in last week problogger pointed out that adsense click rate is much depended on targeted traffic.
I think we agree on this point.
Tay | July 11th, 2007 at 8:57 am #
I agree with you completely, I do not understand why anyone would do that. If I had forty dollars to throw out and try to get some traffic, I would more quickly spend it on advertising that I knew would get me some loyal visitors instead of this. Great post.
DerekBeau | July 11th, 2007 at 10:04 am #
I agree completely. I also browse the SitePoint Marketplace on a regular basis and I don’t think I have ever become a regular visitor of a site that was for sale, even if it was on a topic I was interested in.
So you are correct, you don’t get repeat visitors, and in addition, that traffic certainly won’t click on any ads or buy anything from affiliate links.
Ram | July 11th, 2007 at 10:29 am #
I agree Kevin. It would have got him a better and targeted traffic, if he had bought a review in Kumiko’s blog or any other blog as you said. The traffic that comes from a paid review is targeted which you might already have experienced as you have bought some good reviews.
Brian Heys | July 11th, 2007 at 3:12 pm #
I used to regularly read a site called Harpzon.com, which disappeared a while ago when the owner, Mitch Harper apparently decided to sell. He has since staged a comeback, and is blogging again, but I can’t help wondering if the ’sale’ was a publicity stunt of some kind.
Fatgadget | July 12th, 2007 at 10:45 am #
I can think of a better way to get traffic for $40
A well placed text link add for $30 for one month would probably get you more traffic than that.
Todd | July 14th, 2007 at 4:03 am #
Man, honestly I havn’t seen john chow post anything good for months, it’s all pretty self serving, nothing of value for the reader. and the posts that are supposed to help people are shit like that, bad advice, or send shoemoney a tshirt, i mean really, he’s had nothing to say for at least 6 months.
More Merchant | July 15th, 2007 at 1:57 pm #
There are some excellent ways to get traffic for $40 and I would always prefer a few visitors that are targeted to my site over hundreds that are not.