Anatomy of a Traffic Boosting Scheme

"Why post about things like T-2000?" I've been asked.

"Aren't you just boosting their popularity - and your own by signing up for them?"

These are good questions. To get the answer lets have a look at how these schemes work once you have signed up.

Step 1: The Bait

This step is important. If you want the traffic you must make people think that this has already worked for you and brought in millions of hits. You have to lie to get people to sign up via your referral link. If you tell the truth (as I have) you are unlikely to get any extra hits at all.

Step 2: The Wait

At this point you can let the "magic" happen. Providing your sales pitch is persuasive enough and you can get enough people sign up via your referrals link you should see a small boost in traffic. Maybe a dozen or so over a couple of months. If your referrals do the same your traffic will get another, slightly larger boost.

Step 3: The Disappointment

Mathematically the traffic boost should increase with each passing generation of referrals. But wait! You will only be on the list for six generations of sign-ups. The actual sign-up rates are so low (you may only get a couple) that the magic million figures are unlikely to ever be reached even if you follow the rules.

Why? Well, chances are that if you are seriously considering a scheme like this then you are on a low traffic site, probably with less than 50 hits a day. The actual percentage of your visitors who will actually want to sign up via your referrals link is even lower.

If you are assuming that you'll get additional traffic from search engines then think again. Any searches that would bring people to your site are so packed with other people doing the same thing that the chances of anyone clicking on your site are somewhere between low and laughable.

. . . .

So back to the original question. Why blog about this? Well, if you believe the majority of posts on this you'd imagine that you will be gaining millions of readers and making a fortune in advertising revenue. You don't find as many posts telling the truth about these schemes.

At best you may get a small boost to your site, but probably only a temporary one. At worst you could find yourself in violation of Googles Terms and Conditions for Google Ads and have your account closed losing you what little money you have gained.

Still think it is worth your while?

Dramatically increase your visitors - yeah right!

This year I've decided to try and boost my blog audience. Now, I've got to admit that my stats are slowly increasing, but I'd kind of like my daily viewing figures to be in the triple digits or higher.

So I've started looking at ways of boosting my readers. Some of them like BlogRush I've already said about as much as I need to (they don't really do much). Others (like BlogCatalog) actually do seem to help bring some visitors in, providing you actually take part in the various discussions.

Well, here is another way to boost your earnings beyond your wildest dreams: T-2000 Ultra!

Let's take a look at some of the claims, and as it is a free service let's also see how it works.

Explode Your Income!
Boost Your Sales by upto 4000%
And Drive 1 million Visitors to Your
Site Every Month!
All Totally FREE!

Any alarm bells ringing yet? Apart from abuses against capital letters, punctuation marks, spelling and grammar, does any of this sound too good to be true?

Damn right!

So how does this work in practice.

Well, once you've got past the scam-style verbiage (not to mention the poor spelling) there are six adverts that need clicking on, these should be opened in a new window and will take you to someone elses site, but with a black border at the top of the page. After ten seconds or so an "Ad Code" will be generated which you use as part of your sign-up process.

Fill in the six required codes, enter your details (and those of your one-line advert) and click submit. As a side note, all the sites listed were, without exception, Make Money Online type sites. As if I'm surprised.

At this point you'll need to confirm your name and email address again before the confirmation emails are sent to you.

If you can't find the confirmation email then it's probably in your junk folder (take that as a hint folks!).

Now, it could be that this is entirely on the level and that millions of readers are going to land on my site any minute now, start reading my blogs and I'll be an overnight success. If you believe that to be the case (and I'll provide updates to this over the next 30 days) then feel free to click the referrals link below and sign up too. I certainly wouldn't recommend it though.

Warning - Referrals Link - Warning

What are you waiting for? Millions of readers are waiting for you.

As if!

Remember kids: We are willing to sign up for crap so that you don't have to!

Update:

It has been pointed out to me that this sort of thing isn't a good idea if you want to use Adsense on your site. Although you may increase your page views (although I have my doubts about that) any increase would almost certainly end in you loosing the chance of using Adsense in the future. Plus, it would be a bit dishonest now wouldn't it?

So, rather than not blogging on things like this (and personally I think that it is a story that could do with being told) I've taken off all the advertising from this blog.

Once things return to normal (and I'm pretty sure that it won't take too long for that) then I'll consider putting the ads back on.

Just like I did with BlogRush I'll make weekly posts updating on how well (or not) this is doing. If anything amazing happens between then I'll be sure to let you know.

Update 2:

Just to keep track on the stats I've added a statscounter link to the blog. I'm keeping the results hidden (for now) and will reveal the number of page impressions at the end of the 30 days.

Update 3 - 12 hours on:

Well, there has been some extra traffic - all from BlogCatalog. Even then we are only talking about an extra five or six visitors. So from the point of view of people reading this post - great! As far as the extra traffic gained by T-2000 - not so great. No extra traffic at all.

Update 4 - 48 hours on:

There has been no increase to the traffic by having the link etc on the site (although telling people not to click on it probably weights things against me) so I've cut this short and removed the referrals link.

I'll decide the future of adverts on this site later on, but for now remember, as a rule of thumb for any scheme to increase your traffic: if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is!