Making money with any sort of commodity investment is simple in theory; buy low, sell high. With arbitrage, the process is streamlined; the purchase and the sale are the same transaction, you simply skim the difference between the purchase price and the sale price off the topic when you deliver. With website traffic, it’s trivial to do, but the biggest key is volume. With traffic arbitrage, you’re making fractions of a penny per view; you need thousands or millions of views to make any appreciable money.

Step 1: Set up a site.

This is arguably the biggest and most important step. Without a site, you have no storefront. You have no way to make money from your traffic arbitrage.

When you start making your site, go ahead and investigate other sites that sell traffic. There are hundreds of such sites out there, but they all have a few things in common. They all talk about how safe their traffic is for various ad programs. They all have a pricing page with different levels of traffic for different prices in different quantities. They all have a strict legalese set of terms and conditions, as well as strict refund policies.

You’ll want to model your site after these sites, but as always, you can’t directly copy anything. That’s just begging to have issues with the closest thing to Internet Law there is; Google.

It’s up to you if you want to go the extra mile and create a blog while you’re at it. A blog tends to make your site look more legitimate and give your users more confidence. On the other hand, it’s very time consuming to run.

Step 2: Make connections.

The second step is to make connections, specifically with ad networks. More specifically, a lot of connections. Contact as many ad networks as you can and look for any way you can find to get the absolute cheapest traffic. You’re looking for traffic at $.002 per view or less.

Every ad network in the world is going to give you a Talk when you go to buy this kind of traffic from them. They’ll let you know that, at cheap prices, they can’t guarantee the quality of the traffic.

Here’s the thing; they know full well that they’re buying bot traffic. So do you. There are no illusions in this business, right up until the moment when you or they get caught out, in which case you had no idea and it’s all someone else’s fault.

The reason you make so many connections is three-fold. First, it allows you access to the volume you need to make significant money. When you’re dealing with tenths of a penny per view, you need a lot of views to make back even your cost of hosting, let alone cost of development, let alone making any profits off the whole thing.

The second reason is to have backups in case something happens. If you’re accused of sending bot traffic and need to bail, you can claim you got all your bad traffic from X network and drop them, temporarily or not, and you still have networks to get your traffic from.

The third reason is to shop around for prices. If one site is giving you views at $.0024, but another is willing to sell the same volume for $.0021, that’s a good change to make. You make that extra tiny bit of profit.

Step 3: Find buyers.

Buyers are the most important part of the equation, and you need as many of them as you can get. While you can get buy for a while with just one seller, you need a lot of buyers, and you need them ASAP.

Again, it’s a matter of volume. The more buyers you have, and the more they’re willing to buy, the more money you can make. Buy your views for $.002 per view, sell those views for $.005 per view, and for 1,000 views you’re making $3. You need to sell thousands of views every day if you want to make more than beer money each week.

I recommend private buyers. Communicate directly with marketers and site owners who want more views and either don’t know what they’re doing or don’t care.

The dirty secret of traffic buying, when you’re talking about extremely cheap traffic, is that the buyer also knows it’s probably mostly bots. They might hope some users come through in the flood, but for the most part, they’re just looking for unique views for their pay per view ads. You should be happy to oblige.

I don’t recommend using sites like this one to sell your traffic. They’re an arbitrage model of their own; they want to buy your traffic low and sell it higher. Any additional middleman you add to the process is going to cut into your profits. If they’re willing to buy your traffic at a price high enough for you to make money, they’re going to have a lower volume because they need to sell even higher. Conversely, if they have the volume, they won’t want to buy your traffic higher than the rate you bought it for in the first place.

Step 4: Never guarantee quality traffic.

Traffic quality guarantees are the bane of an arbitrage model. They open you up to all sorts of litigation, which you can only avoid by having a very aggressive – and thus off-putting – terms of service.

Everyone involved in traffic arbitrage knows more or less what’s going on, but no one will admit it, because doing so violates a sort of brotherly code of ethics. Don’t be the one to break that code.

As a final note, you can leverage traffic arbitrage into a more legitimate business with better traffic. You can find higher quality suppliers for real targeted human views, but those views will be significantly more costly. In fact, they can run you as high as $2 per view. You need to find buyers who will pay premium rates for good traffic, and you still need enough volume to make money per view. I recommend that you use bot arbitrage as a starting point and work your way up to higher view counts, higher quality views, and higher prices along the way.

Join the Discussion

1. 

   Vince

   says:

   May 28, 2016 at 2:47 am

   Hi, I’m looking a starting my first Arbitrage website or paying someone who has done it before to site it up and show me how to run it and advertise. Can you PM me or I PM you to discuss details? Thank you,

   Reply

Built for advertisers.
Set your budget, target your visitors, get traffic.

Drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, online store, or affiliate links, and use powerful geolocation and interest targeting. Track your campaign daily in our reporting dashboard. Change your URL at any time and split test between multiple pages to see which performs best.