The Internet is positively riddled with traffic generators. They range from low-quality autorefresh bots using proxies to appear as though they come from around the world, to sophisticated traffic exchange systems powered by real people and real advertising. Ideally, you’ll strike upon the most valuable of these networks when you’re searching, but there’s a few problems.

For one thing, legitimate traffic exchanges are few and far between. The services we sell are far from typical, and they work because we put a lot of time and effort into them. We don’t use low-quality bots like you’d find on Fiverr.

For another thing, the Internet has somewhere in the neighborhood of two decades worth of traffic bot programs littering the digital ground. Some have gone through upwards of a dozen name changes and rebrands, moving from one site to another. They disappear, leaving existing users in the lurch, never to receive support or updates when the program stops working. Then identical software comes out under a new name, charging anywhere from $5 to $250, scamming people out of their cash with the same back-end software.

Finally, of course, there’s the issue of what exactly an automated traffic generator typically is and does. More on that later. For now, why not take a look at a list of the best traffic generators we can find?

This particular site isn’t really an automatic traffic generator. Instead, it’s an old, long-running network for email lists. The idea is to build an email list independent of SEO or Google, which frees you from the rigors of content marketing. You still need to work to generate leads, and you still need a website to pull in opt-ins, but FFA gives you a wide range of tools you can use to succeed. For example, a heat map and Google Analytics integration ensures the system gives you all the information you need to succeed. You can split-test as many as 100 variants on a given page, to make sure you’re using the best one. And, of course, the network is old and long-running, meaning it has a positive reputation and a history of being effective. You can find plenty of support from the staff and other users.

You can also take advantage of their signature free for all email exchange. When you register, you add your link to a list, an a selection of that list is send out in a newsletter every day to FFA members. You’re not just signing up for a valuable tool; you’re signing up for a ready-made audience already potentially interested in your site.

PBP is sort of a cross between a traffic generator and a multi-level marketing scheme, only without the threats that MLM traditionally entails. You’re not absolutely required to sign up under someone, though the program does cost money on a monthly basis. You’re granted access to traffic generation tools, as well as other promotional information and training. The MLM comes in with their referral commissions, which many people use more than the marketing tools themselves. There’s a sizable commission for enrolling new members, as well as seeing them succeed.

Monster-Traffic is another traffic exchange, though it’s initially a little off-putting due to the 1995-style website. It’s a free for all styled advertising list, where anyone signing up becomes part of the audience and an advertiser at the same time. You sign up and you can enter a link into their system, and that link is added to a roster that is send out to every member of the group. Additionally, registration allows a free solo ad; an ad that isn’t drowned out by other advertisers in that mailer.

Monster-Traffic has two primary benefits; the first is that they have a free account. While premium accounts cost $10 monthly, there’s also a referral bonus. Signing up a user with your referral link earns you a free year of premium membership, so it’s easy to get the ball rolling and end up with free traffic year after year.

TrafficWave is, again, not quite a traffic exchange. Rather, it’s a valuable tool to use with the traffic you’ve already attained. It’s a fairly sophisticated autoresponder for email lists, with a 30-day trial and a suite of tools designed to help you put together the best autoresponses available. Use it in conjunction with any of your affiliate or referral programs for a sizable benefit.

As the name implies, 1MC is a program that allows you to rack up a sizable number of clicks to your website in a very short time. It advertises itself as a “fake traffic generator” and that’s really what it is; it’s not going to earn you any money through commissions or referrals. It may earn you cash through pay per view ads, particularly if you use a proxy list, but its primary purpose is typically for testing. If you want to make sure your analytics are accurately reporting clicks, you can schedule a number of clicks through the software and track them. You can also set it to freely spam a site with clicks, to test the server under load. You should, of course, avoid targeting competitors; they won’t take kindly to an unwanted server stress test.

No, this isn’t a tool to generate traffic jams on your way to work. Instead, it’s a piece of software a lot like 1MC, designed to send hits towards a website repeatedly. This one is a quick and easy to use program, with very little in the way of customization options, but that’s okay. It’s designed to do one thing and one thing only, and it does that thing.

This is another program doing much the same as the previous two, but it has a few unique aspects that put it on this list above the hordes of others. Particularly, it comes in many forms; a web interface, a stand-alone browser, a windows or mac executable or even a paid version. In a fit of goodwill, the paid version – costing $30 for the cheapest version – comes with a huge warning to try the free version before buying. It also warns of a lack of refund policy, so buyer beware.

These paragraphs are beginning to sound like broken records; Traffic Magnet is yet another source of bot traffic. It will get you the hits you want, this time powered by a minor traffic exchange. The software itself looks hilariously like a poorly designed powerpoint, but in the end, the interface doesn’t matter if the program does its job.

A unique flower in the world of traffic generators, Daytona – a codename – uses a command line system. It’s also designed to work on Windows 7, it allows QoS throttling and it supports IPv6, which surprisingly little enterprise software does today. It’s also freeware developed by Microsoft.

Finally, we have yet another traffic generator. This one is one of the slickest available, and it’s powered by a decent back-end network that has the potential to actually funnel real views your way rather than just blind bot traffic. It also bundles in analytics and marketing tools, including keyword research tools and conversion analysis.

As a final note here, you always need to be aware of the difference between high quality traffic, traffic exchange network traffic and bot traffic.

High quality traffic is the best kind of traffic, consisting of real people who are interested in your product and are visiting your site to learn more. These are the leads you want to nurture. They’re also hard to acquire.

Traffic exchange users are comparatively low quality, but they’re still real humans. You’re getting real people to view your site, you’re just not bringing them in organically the way Google intends. You can make money from these users, but your conversion rate will be typically lower than what you might see from organic traffic. Of course, it’s also much cheaper and faster to find this traffic than it is to invest in SEO and content marketing.

Bot traffic, finally, isn’t very useful at all unless you’re selling advertising that earns you money based on pageviews, not by referrals or commissions. You can use fake traffic for testing or for abusing such programs, but you won’t sell products to robots. Always be aware of the kind of traffic you’re bringing in.