Every website owner wants to get traffic to his or her site. However, how exactly to get traffic is a big concern. Website owners know that the more people who visit their sites, the greater their chances of making sales or making money through advertising.

But as the number websites popping up everyday continues to grow, the fiercer the competition for getting traffic. Ideally, traffic to your website should be coming from a variety of sources. When it comes to generating traffic for your site, any method that does the job is considered good.

However, there are some methods for generating traffic to your site that you should avoid because they are not worth the effort. Two of these methods are paid hits and safe lists.

Don’t confuse paid hits with legitimate and worthwhile online advertising programs like Pay Per Click Marketing. The kind of paid hits you should avoid are those being offered by companies that promise to send XX number of unique visitors to your site for XX dollars. If a company is promising to send you 10,000 unique visitors to your site for just $9.95, be cautious.

Companies selling this type of paid hits are highly dubious. After all, how is it possible for them to deliver that many visitors for such a cheap price? The answer is that they can’t. What these companies do is either use a script to “hit” your site repeatedly or they are members of “paid to surf” programs wherein they pay people to visit sites. If a company delivers visits to your site with via their “paid to surf” program membership, all they’re really doing is adding your URL to their queue and simply pay people who visit your site.

The “visitors” who come to your site via paid hits aren’t really buyers. In most cases, your site will simply sit in the background while they do other things. Your site will be visited, but it’s very rare that a visitor will actually read what you have to offer.

Safe lists are another traffic method you need to avoid. Safe lists are composed of e-mail addresses of people who “supposedly” agreed to receive e-mail promotions. A big problem you’ll face if you use safe lists is that you can’t really know for sure if the people in a safe list really subscribed or really want to receive e-mail promotions. Th owners of these safe lists may have simply harvested the e-mails from sites, blogs, forums and discussion groups. If you use this method of advertising to generate traffic to your site, be prepared for the consequences. People who never opted in a safe list may report you as a spammer. Your entire site may be banned by your ISP and webhost.

It is not worth your money and time to use these two traffic generating methods. They are risky and can get your business and your reputation in trouble.