Buying traffic without getting burned

Everything here is written from the buyer's side. No traffic is sold on this site.

Buying traffic is easy. Buying traffic that behaves like a human being is the part nobody explains before you pay.

This site covers the sources you can actually buy from as a small operator, what each one is good for, and the checks that take five minutes and save you the price of the order. It is written for the person spending their own money, not for an agency with a media budget.

Start here

Where you can buy traffic and what each source is good at. Read this first if you are still deciding.
Solo ads explained. You pay someone with a mailing list to send their readers to your page.
Three numbers to check before you pay. The shortest useful thing on this site.
Getting your first 100 subscribers, with the real cost of each route including the free ones.

The one rule worth carrying around

Clicks are not the product. Readers who do something afterwards are the product. Any seller can produce clicks. Ask instead what happened after the clicks, and ask for it as a number you can see rather than a screenshot they send you.

Who writes this

One person who buys traffic and writes down what worked. Pages get dated when they carry anything time-sensitive, and anything we have not verified ourselves is left out rather than filled in with a plausible number. See about.