Media Buying Paid Traffic VS Organic Free Traffic

I am a very frugal person, my biggest expenses are gas, rent, hosting, food and tickets/fines but media buying is something not frugal for sure.

I have started my journey with affiliate marketing with media buying. Since I am a fast learner and a solutionist, I started to make good money immediately thanks to AdWords.

AdWords is the PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising network from Google. I loved it to the bones, I was able to run ads for as cheap as for $0.01 per click. Thanks to my superpowers, I was able to make extremely profitable campaigns with a huge ROI (Return on Investment).

The only problem is that I have started to run campaigns all over the internet, without having read the terms and conditions.

3 months later, after having pictured my life surrounded by millions of girls and lambos! Everything vanished, Google banned me for life on AdSense and AdWords.

I have crossed the line of a really bad state of mind, and all I wanted to do was to cut my head. There are many other sources of traffic but no one will ever beat Google.

Now, a few years later, I think that this was a good thing that happened to my life. I have started to learn SEO and how to rank sites after that.

Now, I get traffic to my sites for free with even a bigger ROI than before.

Here in this article, I am going to tell you what are the pros and cons of media buying and organic traffic. And why you should learn both and become excellent in at least one of those. I have decided to be excellent with SEO and free organic traffic.

Table of Contents

What Is Media Buying?

Media buying is placing your business, links, ads or whatever can be profitable for you on someone else websites.

The most famous and effective is AdWords from Google. You will pay some money to Google and you will get your business on the first page of Google.

It is not so simple like I have written before but at the end of the story, you will have that kind of results. With media buying, you can start to drive traffic and/or be making money in a few hours.

All you have to do is to find a traffic source. There are millions of traffic sources, I am gonna list some of the most famous later.

And then, you will have to pay money to get whatever you want in front of millions of people. This is very expensive and if you don’t know what you are doing you can just lose money.

I got banned from Google for life, so for me, it’s over with them, and I have blown $500 in 45 minutes with another traffic source with no profit.

I have also made good money a while ago, but only with AdWords, with Facebook Ads or other sources, my luck was not the same.

Some famous traffic sources are:

What Is Free Organic Traffic?

This kind of traffic is the holy grail for anyone. If you are able to put your business on the first page of google you will be making loads of money, no matter what.

The problem is that it takes a lot of time and you need to know what you are doing for good. The most important things that you need to take in consideration while trying to ramp up on google are the Google algorithms updates and the SEO ( Search Engine Optimization).

Some of the most famous gurus online talking about SEO are Neil Patel and Brian Dean. You can learn so much looking at their videos and blogs.

But they are more focused on big topics and on white hat SEO. The SEO world is divided in:

Whitehat SEO. (Google Likes It)
Grayhat SEO. (Google Semi-Likes It)
Blackhat SEO. (Google Doesn’t Like It)

SEO tactics are the best practices to use so that Google will love your website and you will go to the first page.

In other words, keep playing around with your sites, and learn SEO along the way. Based on your needs, in a couple of years, your website will be noticed and you will get constant traffic.

Having Blogs Or Forums On Your Website

No matter what your business is, the most effective way to boost your ranking is keeping your website alive with new content. You need a blog on the side of your website, or a forum or both.

If you have a blog you can control your content and write it yourself, with forums the content is user generated and Google likes it as well.

The best way to be first on Google is to write your business blog about a niche that is not over saturated. Like if you have a website talking about diets, you can not pretend to go first on Google for the search “diets“.

Instead, you could go first on Google in a few years for a long tail keyword search like “best keto diets for kids”.

Marco Diversi’s blog will be all about how to rank using SEO techniques! So if you are interested, follow my blog on Feedly, bookmark it and Subscribe for newsletters.

In the picture below you can see my opinion and comparison between these two traffic sources. This is like a summary of this whole article in an infographic.

Direct Media Buying

As you may have understood, I am no longer a big fan of traditional PPC media buying or even buying ad space from networks.

In addition to PPC media buying like Adwords, you can also buy ads via ad networks or ad spaces on websites with a lot of traffic.

If you decide to do this you need a network like juicy ads for the adult niche for example. And you can buy a banner space for like even 1200 euro or more for a week. There is some ad space for $20 a week also.

If you get a banner on a website niche related to yours, you will have unlimited clicks you can have on this banner for the same fixed price you pay a prior.

This can be good or it can be a risk! What if people don’t click on the ads or that week that you buy the ad not a lot of visitors are going to that site?

If you want to buy ad space you can either use a network like juicy ads or traffic junky, or whatever you want. Or you can directly contact the owner of the website and ask them to put your ads on it for money.

If I have to do some media buying this is my favorite way to do it. I look for websites I love and I am interested in, and if are niche related to mine I just contact the owner and pay him directly to place an ad or something on his website.

This guide and tutorial from trafficgenerationcafe is more detailed than mine on direct media buying and I suggest you read it.

Shoutouts are also popular for cash on social media, and this is a kind of direct media buying as well!

Best Practices To Use When Doing Direct Media Buying

You are going to spend cash to put an ad on a website! You don’t want to waste money on a website with no traffic or no authority at all. In this picture, we can see that a website like answerthepublic, charges $7000 a month for that ad space.

There are a lot of factors to consider when placing links or ads on other websites. If you want to know more you need to stick to this blog posts. I will cover everything sooner or later.

But three instant checks you can immediately do are:

The Alexa Rank: will give you an overview of the traffic on that website. The closest the number gets to 1 the more traffic that website has. i.e. Google will rank #1 and YouTube #2 and Facebook #3
The DA from MOZ: will tell you in a few seconds if that website has good backlinks pointing at it. It is measured on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100. The bigger the number it gets the harder it is to reach 100. It will be easy to have a DA of 10-12, kind of easy to get to 20, a bit harder to pass 30 and then it will become harder and harder. If you are dealing with a website with DA above 30 or more you are dealing with something interesting. You need to install the MOZ bar from this link to check this metric.
SEMrush: will give you millions of indicators But the one that you need to look immediately is the organic search volume. If the organic value is above 5k and growing, it is interesting.

Media Buying Is Like A Game Where You Make Cash

If you want to be a good media buyer you need to learn how to analyze data and mostly track everything. I have written an article of the best free tracker you can use, called redtrack.io. I advise you to make an account with them and use it in any of your campaigns.

MAKE A FREE REDTRACK.IO ACCOUNT NOW

You need to track also your direct media buying campaigns of course! With redtrack, it will be easier since tracking from domains is possible.

In this article, I am a bit vague about how to do it and what to do! But I will be covering everything and be more specific in other articles.

Top Networks To Monetize Your Paid Or Organic Free Traffic

Here is just a list of the most profitable ad networks you can use to monetize your traffic! Just make an account from all of them now so you have them already.

Conclusions

To wrap up, I am a free organic traffic lover but I also work 19 hours a day weekends included. I am like putting down the seeds now so that I can eat the fruits later.

If you want to see some instant gratification and you are willing to throw some money on advertisements. Just sign up for the Top Ad Networks listed above and famous traffic sources above.

Then you will need to create landing pages or just send direct traffic to those offers with media buying. I really like to buy ad space on well-known websites instead of using a PPC system.

But the most profitable traffic source is organic traffic! People are looking for that specific topic or product and a lot of people hates Ads as well.

If you are working on SEO on your websites you will get a lot more sales from people reaching you out organically compared to paid advertisements.

In my opinion, if with paid advertisements 1 person out of 100 will pay, with organic traffic 8 people out of 100 will pay. This is just an example and proportion I have estimated from my experience.

To rank a website on Google, if you did everything right and worked a lot it usually takes 1 year on average.