Gadooney.com

In many ways, there’s no such thing as “bad” traffic to your website. With bandwidth costing next to nothing these days, there’s really no downside to getting lots of surfers on your site who are immediately disinterested in your content and back out or close the browser in 0.02 seconds. It’s not “good” traffic, as you can’t profit from it, but it’s more neutral than “bad”.

The only time traffic goes bad is if you can’t profit from it and you’re spending time and/or money to acquire it. If you’re spending $1 in labor or advertising to attract traffic that makes you $.10, that’s bad traffic, assuming you’re doing everything correctly on your end to optimize your site to generate money.

Remember, your time is valuable and you need to account for it when you’re trying to generate traffic to your site. Just because you’re not spending any money on traditional advertising doesn’t mean that your acquisition costs for traffic are $0.

Let’s look at some of the more common sources of traffic:

• Search engines: This will likely always be both the most common source of traffic to your affiliate site as well as the most cost-effective. Getting search engine traffic is as easy (and hard) as simply writing good content that people are interested in and search for.
• Links from other websites: Pretty straightforward, as we’ve all clicked through a link from one site to another. These links arise in different ways, naturally and artifically, but they involve the same basic mechanism of links between websites. These also include links from leaving comments yourself on blogs and other sites that both allow for comments and display your URL on the comment.
• Social bookmarking sites: These are your Diggs and del.icio.us and other sites where surfers keep lists of bookmarked sites that are shared publicly. Most of the social bookmarking sites keep lists of most popular bookmarks, recently bookmarked sites, etc., and you’ll typically get a burst of traffic (or an avalanche of traffic if you land on Digg’s main page) when surfers bookmark your pages and they show up on the recently added pages.
• Forums:  There are tons of forums out there on tons of topics. You’ll get traffic from these when users post links to your sites and other forum users click through. If you’re a member of forums that allow linked signature lines, you can create a signature line with links to your sites and generate traffic from your own forum posts, as well.
• Word-of-mouth/email: We’ve probably all been told by someone to check out a cool site and typed it in directly into the browser, or have been sent an email with a link to a page on a site somewhere out there on the Internet tubes.
• Paid advertising: This takes various forms but typically is generated by programs like Google Adwords, where you bid on certain keywords related to your site and pay a fee per clickthrough to your site. This would also include buying ads on other sites or even traditional methods such as buying offline advertising.
• Traffic exchange, hubs, and click exchange rings: These are basically links from other sites, but completely artificial, so I’m listing them separately. These just circulate traffic endlessly, for no purpose other than to boost traffic to sites.

So the question becomes which of those are good, which are bad, and what should you be doing to try to get more of the good traffic while avoiding the bad traffic?

Like anything, it all depends on your site and the nature of the traffic, but in general the best traffic for affiliate sites is search engine traffic. You can control it to some extent by writing good, focused content, so the traffic you get is usually pre-sold and inclined to click on links that make you money. They’re after what you’re advertising, which is why they landed on your site, so it’s a much easier sell.

All search engine traffic isn’t good, though, as you’ll inevitable get ranked for weird terms that really have nothing to do with what your site is about. This happens and really isn’t something you can do much about, other than to write focused content. It’s neutral traffic, for the most part, unless you’re wasting too much time on creating the unfocused content that’s attracting it.

If it’s just surfers landing on your site from stray words in your focused content, that’s fine, but it starts to become bad traffic if you’re investing too much time slapping up any old content for the sake of getting hits.

Traffic from other websites that link to you is generally good traffic, but it’s hard to get. You can’t make someone link to you, so you can’t scale this one up as quickly as you can with search engine traffic. It’s usually good traffic because sites that link to another tend to share similar themes, so a surfer that was interested in the original site is likely inclined to be interested when they click through a link and land on your site.

While you can’t control who links to you, you can encourage it by linking to them yourself and clicking through that link on a regular basis. Webmasters are obsessed with stats and watch like a hawk to see if anyone is linking to them. If they see consistent traffic coming from your site, they’ll usually link back to you, out of professional courtesy. Linking to similarly themed sites can also help you in search engine rankings as long as you do it in moderation and don’t have a ginormous number of links going out from your site.

Comment link traffic can also be good, if you do it in moderation. If you spam comments just trying to get a boost from all the links back, you’ll get crap traffic and possibly punished in some search engines. If you judiciously leave comments on blogs of a simmilar nature to your site, though, this can be a good source of traffic. 

Traffic from social bookmarking sites looks nice but it’s often hard to monetize. Digg can bring your site to its knees if you’re on a shared server and the general consensus is that it’s hard to make money from the traffic, as people on those sites are generally fairly savvy and not as inclined as a grandmother from Wisconsin to click on an Adsense link.

Like anything, though, this can be good traffic, especially if you’re smart enough to optimize your pages specifically for the social bookmarking sites sending you traffic. It becomes bad traffic if you spend too much time trying to game the system, obsessing on getting certain pages bookmarked and not spending enough time simply cranking out good, focused content.

Forum traffic is generally decent traffic, as it’s often on a similar theme and of interest to the surfer clicking through. It’s usually slightly better if it comes organically from some unaffiliated party on a forum saying “Hey, check out this cool site” and linking to you, as opposed to generated yourself from putting links in your signature line and posting a lot on forums.

If you’re spending a lot of time posting solely for the purpose of getting forum traffic, you’re probably wasting time and would be better off writing more good content for your site.

Word of mouth traffic is good but extremely hard to get. All you can do to get it is to have a kick-ass site or one that entertains people in some sort of unique fashion. Think of the things that prompt you to recommend sites to other people, as far as examples of what you have to do to get this kind of traffic.

Paid advertising is a mixed bag. If you’re experienced and know what you’re doing, it can trump all the other traffic sources in value, as you’re attracting surfers that already have their credit card half way out of their wallet. But it can get pricey quickly and optimizing your site for paid traffic is difficult and not for the faint of heart.

Because of the expense, paid traffic can also be the absolute worst for you, as unlike all the others listed above, it’s not free. You’re paying good money for it so it’s disastrously bad traffic if you pay that money and see no return.

Traffic from traffic exchanges, click exchanges, and hubs is just useless. Don’t waste your time with it.