The truth about social traffic gigs on Fiverr and SEOClerk

Before I get into it, and for the lazier readier, my one, and most important recommendation is - don't do it. Everything else that is about to follow, are my experiences with them based on 7 gigs I tried myself.

The test
In general, being a person able to think, you should think twice, or never think at all, before ordering a social traffic gig for $2 - $10. And I doubt even the more expensive versions are any better on those two sites. But, considering their popularity, I decided to give it try anyway.

I chose 7 gigs, 4 from SEOClerk, 3 from Fiverr, to try to promote 7 articles from four of my sites. The seven gigs cost me a total of around $40. And if you didn't get a hint already in the beginning of this post - no, it didn't pay off. What's even worse, the ROI could be considered to be -$200 (yes, minus). Or more.

How come?
Out of those seven there were two different, yet the same, outcomes. One outcome actually produced visitors to my site that even analytics software could track, and there were couple of thousands. The other outcome produced nothing, maybe one visitor from 'promoting' the article to tens of millions of facebook or twitter users. But as I soon realised, the fact whether I got any visitors or not, didn't matter. What matters is how it was done and whether it could hurt your website.

And the truth is that yes, those services, instead of helping you, can actually hurt you a lot. Some of the sellers actually provide you with screenshots of all the Facebook pages they have posted to, and they are simply awful. You've probably seen facebook spam yourself - well, that's what they do. They take your article link, and post is EVERYWHERE. Let's say your article is about politics, or a humour story. They post that article, and post it to Jessica Alba's twitter wall, real estate and business communities in facebook, facebook pages in totally different languages. Very often, the screenshot even shows the posting guidelines that say 'No Spam, or you will be banned' - yet, they send me the screenshot, and are even proud of what they have done.

This kind of stuff can hurt your site a lot, whether now or in a near future. And this $5 that you paid can cost you hundreds or thousands in your sites being banned in social networks.

Did the traffic convert?
As I mentioned, some gigs actually brought in some traffic. I also said that whether they did bring traffic or not, it doesn't matter, this kind of promotion can only hurt your. But we should look at the quality of traffic anyhow - it didn't produce any ad clicks, it didn't produce any comments to the articles, it didn't produce anything at all. Oh, wait, no, it actually produced one comment to one article saying I shouldn't spam.

Should you ever order a social traffic gig from Fiverr or SEOClerk?
If you're a smart person, definitely please don't.