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It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.

I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.

On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.

Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.

Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?

Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.

About the Author

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.

No more Cat's, please

The next release of OS X will debut next month (August 2006). It may be called Leopard, though it's obvious that there aren't many good cat names left and Apple is going to have to move to a different species soon or suffer the embarrassment of a "Tabby" release.

...ran a heroin distribution ring that was violent and tightly knit, making it difficult for informers to penetrate it, federal authorities say.

The gang also had a secret weapon: It cultivated a police officer to dig into a law enforcement database to figure out which of its customers might be undercover informers...

"This case personifies exactly the effectiveness of the system," the chief said. "We had intelligence that somebody was running people's names involved in narcotics cases without a legitimate reason, and we ran those names and found out who it was, and took the appropriate action."

Mokwa said officers use REJIS on a daily basis, and tightening security would be burdensome. "You have to rely upon the integrity of officers to use the system properly," he said. "To change it, you would have to restrict their access."

Jon Udell posts an interesting and informative piece that lays out his approach to spam defense.  It's clearly a professional's approach, since as a journalist with a well publicized email address, he's likely to get a boatload.  However, the fact that as a user he's forced to put three lines of defense in place strikes me as extreme... It shouldn't be this way. 

In his closing comments, he mentions an approach by which a receiving mail server can verify whether the sender's IP address is authorized to send from the domain indicated in the email's "sender address".  This approach, if implemented, seems to go a very long way toward providing a major reduction in spam... an SMTP-based e-mail approach which provides for (some) verification of the sender's bona fides.  I heartily concur.

I've heard a lot about how Outlook 2003, both alone and in combination with Exchange Server 2003, has been beefed up to fight the war on spam. From a client-only perspective, it doesn't look too promising. Apart from filtering messages that have been externally processed -- for example, by SpamAssassin -- the primary strategy appears to be blacklisting or whitelisting senders. As this screenshot illustrates, Sobig-like worms destroy that strategy. I can neither whitelist nor blacklist email appearing to be from Dave Ogle or Anne Manes or Tom Thompson or Lowell Rapaport. Quite likely, none of these folks has even been infected with the worm. Their names just happened to be chosen randomly from the address books of users who were infected. 

[Jon's Radio]