Then you have Jeff Johnson promoting his Traffic Voodoo which seems to be concentrating on the various Web 2.0 sites that you can leverage to get traffic and no longer rely on just Google. I can’t comment on what his product is like but I’ve watched a couple of the free videos here and here and the stuff he’s talking about seems really decent.

Finally there is another web traffic product that is being promoted called Traffic Siphon. A bit of an odd name but I guess all the good trafficXYZ.com’s were taken. This product is by a guy called Mark Barnard who I’ve not heard of before.

Traffic Siphon Review

The package looked good so I went ahead and purchased it. Here is what I’ve got to say about it…

The Price

At the end of the day the price is the most important deciding factor when it comes to buying these products. At $67 I think it’s reasonably priced for the content that you get inside (more on that later). However, they are very sneaky and underhanded by charging you a monthly $47 fee unless you cancel the subscription. I couldn’t find any mention of this on the sales page and I think it’s fairly unethical to do it.

I managed to grab TrafficSiphon.com on a special $1 5 day trial but they seem to have removed that option now. I still had to make sure I canceled the monthly subscription though!

The Content

The content is presented in a series of on-site videos loaded up via Amazon S3 cloud storage. There are some 20 videos in total, including some bonus ones and they are all between 5 and 20 minutes in length. I found the videos to be really slow loading even on a 2MB connection. I would have to open up several tabs and load the videos in the background for several hours so that I could watch them uninterrupted.

If you are not already aware, despite the claims of earning thousands of dollars from Clickbank as an affiliate, this is not an affiliate training guide, it’s 100% focused on how to get traffic to your site so your results will definitely vary!

For most people who have been building and promoting websites for several years a lot of the traffic generation methods should be well known to you – I mean honestly, who hasn’t heard of directory submissions, article submissions, press releases and social bookmarking – all of which are covered here.

There are a few golden nuggets to be found, for example I learned about a fantastic new technique to get my EzineArticle content viewed more often and get it ranked higher in the search engines.

A lot of the techniques are borderline blackhat (what us SEO’s like to call greyhat), such as using Yahoo Answers for traffic, getting your links / signatures on forums that don’t allow you to post these things, finding blogs for the sole purpose of commenting, finding the .edu and .gov links etc. A lot of them I already use anyway, but like I mentioned above, a few nuggets of information that helps refine my own techniques.

Summing Up: The Good

The $67 price point is very reasonable for the content you are getting, especially if SEO is still new to you. The videos are all very easy to follow and you can start implementing the strategies right away. Even as a person who has been promoting sites for over a decade I still learned some new techniques thanks to this course.

Summing Up: The Bad

Like all good Internet marketers, Mark Barnard has implemented an upsell once you have made a payment. Except he’s gone overboard and there are no less than 4 upsells and downsells trying to get you to buy products and information for up to 3x what you just paid. I didn’t find any of the up/downsells to be compelling enough and got a bit annoyed with that.

Also, the sneaky trick of charging you $47 per month to access the information is a bit unethical – I can’t even see how he’s justifying the ongoing cost unless he plans to add new content each month, but there is no mention of that.

Should You Buy Traffic Siphon?

If you are looking for new techniques and don’t mind being borderline blackhat with your SEO (I personally don’t have an issue with it) and promotion then I can recommend this course at $67. Even though I already knew most of what he teaches, I consider myself enlightened on a number of areas now.

Click here to buy TrafficSiphon now

There seems to be about a dozen or so of these automatic website valuation sites, each with their own opinion on how much a website is worth.

The way they work is that they take public data like Alexa, Compete and Quantcast ranks and try and estimate the traffic based on that. They then estimate how much advertising you can sell based on that traffic. There are some other factors like the pagerank and whether it’s listed in DMOZ and Yahoo.

So how accurate are these estimations? I entered my webste, PLRArticleShop.com to get some valuations, and this what I got back.

ValuateMySite.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $241,687 USD
Traffic: 23,126 page views per day

Estimix.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $25,000
Traffic: 9,600 page views per day

RealWebsiteWorth.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $6,589.71 (which is a very precise figure!)
Traffic: 13,523 page views per day

WebTrafficAgents.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $7,957.70 (again, precise!)
Traffic: 11,032 page views per day

WebsiteShadow.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $9,508
Traffic: 7,277 page views per day

So how accurate are these figures? The traffic figures are well out, all of them, about 10x too much. The site valuations are also grossly inaccurate with none of them even close to what I believe the true value of the site site (based on 12 months of revenue).

I think the purpose of these sites are to be glorified adsense sites since the information isn’t really very useful to anyone and has no use when it comes to selling a website.

With that said, if someone wants to offer me $250,000 for my articles site, I would probably accept!

How much is your site worth according to these online site valuators?