There are a few things about the online world that are truly maddening. At the top of the list are the con artists who attempt to lead you down the primrose path in an effort to take your money. These people distract you with a lie disguised as a legitimate option.

One such lie comes from those who claim that they can sell you traffic. They dazzle you with stories of hordes of eager buyers swarming to your website. Of course, the method is always claimed to be easy. Some claim that the system works forever and on autopilot too, no less. How stupid do they think we are?

If you have a website, even a new one, you should never, ever, ever have to buy traffic. After all, no one ever comes to you and asks you what you are looking for and then suggests a website where you can find it. You have to search first. Even Siri, the new intelligent assistant on Apple’s iPhone 4S, waits for you to ask first before making a suggestion!

So that means that the only way you can “buy” traffic is through a pay-per-click campaign such as through Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. But this is not easy, it does not work on autopilot, and it is certainly not free.

Getting visitors to your website requires strategy and a good deal of tinkering. Most of all, it requires building a great website full of useful, informative content. This is not easy and certainly not something you can do once and then forget about it. Any successful webmaster or blogger will tell you so.

How do those who claim to sell traffic fool the gullible masses? After all, you can check your traffic logs to see if it is working. Sometimes, they create an autopilot script. This simply sends a robot to your site that visits for a few seconds, just long enough to register on your tracking logs.

These bots come over and over again to your site, each time with unique tracking codes that make it appear that they are coming from all over. However, notice that not only do they never buy anything, but they never stay for longer than a few seconds. Even if some clever programmer sets them up so that they appear to stay for hours, it will not be real traffic.

You see, every website has what is known as a conversion rate. If you are selling something, then you know that for every X number of visitors, X amount will actually buy something. For example, you may know that for every 200 visitors to your sales page, you will make one sale. This is useful and measurable. If you have a ton of hits and are making no sales, there is either something wrong with your sales page or the traffic is not legitimate.

Yet the hucksters will tell you that the traffic is “qualified.” True qualified traffic is when Joe goes to Google, performs a search, and from there goes to a site that looks relevant.

Because Joe went to your site as a result of a search, he constitutes qualified traffic. A computer program does not. It is merely a way to get money out of your pocket and into someone else’s.

If someone claims that he has a secret to easy traffic, you should run the other way immediately. You would be better off spending the money on voice dictation software for your Mac or PC like Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.5 and creating your own content, or hiring others to do it for you.