Article Surfing Archive

Do you ever feel you might be getting obsessed by the narcotic influence of website traffic? Do the big search engines offer you complete satisfaction or do you find yourself tempted to pay $30 here, $99 there, $200 someplace else, all because of promises of great hits?

I have spent a small fortune in recent years, chasing elusive hits from search engine PPC campaigns, email-shots, popunder campaigns and expired traffic. It's almost as though I had developed an addiction to hits and the elusive unique visitor.

Along the trail, I have discovered that most of the alluring advertisements that suggest it only takes a few bucks to solve my traffic starvation problems, are as phoney as the belief that search engines play fair. Fair play it may be for scavengers who have taken money and arranged for automated bot hits to create the illusion that money was well spent. Congratulations to those PPC merchants that have convinced me and others that it's the way ads are written or what keywords were chosen - that have failed to deliver genuinely interested visitors. Seems like these days, the vulnerable are fair game and their money need only be wrestled from their grasp no matter what method is used.

Like mad, sad addicts, we continue to trudge through the minefield of a playground that is full of dodgy promises and money grabbing traffic pushers. Everywhere you look there are golden nuggets of shining hype, stoking the fires of hope that perhaps one day it'll be payday.

I see the internet melting into a gangland garbage dump, full of pessimism as more and more folk fall prey to merchants who can only make money by imaginative manipulation of the vulnerable internet newbie. Some will escape and become successful, others will like addicts, keep spending more and more. Most will just give up and eventually slide away, deluded, disappointed and tainted for the experience.

What a pity'