Is High Traffic Academy by Vick Strizheus Worth Its $997 Cost?

If you are a newbie affiliate marketer or website owner, you know how hard it is to get traffic to your site(s). It can be disheartening when you write a brilliant blog post, publish it, and get no comments or even views.

That’s why High Traffic Academy initially caught my interest. High Traffic Academy is the creation of Vick Strizheus, the “King of Online Traffic,” who also offers group and one-on-one coaching/consulting sessions ranging from $5,000 to $100,000.

A guy who charges such hefty fees for his time and expertise must really know what he’s talking about, right?

So, Vick is now offering an online version of his coaching sessions, called High Traffic Academy.

What is High Traffic Academy?

High Traffic Academy (HTA) is a membership site, created and operated by Vick, that teaches its members how to get quality traffic to their websites. To this end, Vick offers video tutorials, webinars, e-books, traffic campaign examples, and select products.

The HTA operates on three basic pillars:

Website development

Here you learn to purchase a domain and hosting, create your landing page, and link your landing page to an email autoresponder. To this end, Vick gives you access to his landing page builder.

Traffic Generation

This is the meat of the program and Vick tells you of several paid methods that can help you generate traffic to your landing pages. The PPC methods are provided through his software programs and traffic exchanges including Offline Goldmine Traffic, The Penny Traffic, The Underground PPC Traffic.

There is also software that teaches you how to work with Google image ads (i.e., Secret GIA Traffic), software that tells you about buying email lists (i.e., Email Media Traffic), and software that teaches you about using banner ads (i.e., Banner Media Traffic). You are also introduced to CPA networks and ad swaps.

List control

In this section, Vick instructs you on what you need to do after you have paid traffic coming to your landing pages. For example, how do you get a customer to become a repeat customer? Vick also shows you a secret method for following your competitors’ traffic online and building your email list off of this traffic.

You get the following items with your paid subscription:

• Email autoresponder
• Click tracker
• URL scarper
• Sales page templates
• Video/YouTube marketing tutorials
• Social media traffic generation techniques
• Lead capture techniques

Is HTA worth its hefty $997 price?

HTA isn’t cheap, and a full membership plan costs $997. Even at its occasional promotional rate, HTA still costs $197/month to get started. So, is HTA worth the money?

I say no, and here are my reasons why.

1. Vick focuses on traffic, not content.

The HTA training is focused almost exclusively on generating traffic with PPC ads, banner ads, image ads, etc. There is very little time devoted to creating a quality website and filling it with valuable content. In fact, Vick makes it appear that you don’t even need a website, just a bunch of sales pages.

Google won’t even index your site if it contains nothing but a sales page. You’ll get no organic traffic whatsoever if you don’t have content for your viewers to peruse. And therein lies to key to Vick’s methods…

2. The recommended methods aren’t free.

Vick tells you next to nothing about generating free, organic traffic by creating a quality website, publishing tutorials and videos, etc. He also says nothing about content SEO and how you can get your web pages to rank well on search engines like Google. The only SEO that’s mentioned is ad SEO (e.g., how to match headline and ad keywords).

However, Vick tells you quite a bit about how you should buy traffic and email lists. Most of the recommended exchanges and marketplaces just happen to be his own products, which he generates a profit from when you make your purchases.

3. You’ll be spending more than $997.

The full year membership to HTA costs $997. However, you’ll be spending much more than that after you shell out the $997.

Vick’s trainings and webinars are nothing more than dressed-up sales presentations where he attempts to have you buy paid traffic, paid email lists, paid ads, etc. Even though Vick claims that you’ll get really cheap traffic (“as low as $0.05/click!”), you’ll still need to spend money to generate that traffic.

Vick also proposes that you test out his traffic-generating scenarios within your PPC and ad campaigns. To complete many of these scenarios, you’ll need some really deep pockets. Furthermore, without an optimized website to back up your sale pages, you’ll be paying high fees to Google due to your low Quality Score.

4. Getting a refund can be tricky.

Current HTA members are complaining about their difficulties with getting refunds. For example, here is a complaint posted by Geoffrey:

5. The online reviews might be biased.

Several HTA members report being offered monetary compensation in exchange for a positive review of HTA just days after first joining HTA. It’s one thing to ask for an unbiased review and offer some kind of compensation, but quite another to pay for biased reviews.

6. Some of the material is outdated.

HTA members have made online comments such as the following regarding the outdated nature of HTA trainings:

7. Vick isn’t exactly innocent.

We found this YouTube news video showing his 90-day sentencing on a charge of grand theft in South Dakota.

We’re passing on High Traffic Academy

Affiliate marketers and website/product owners who don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on paid traffic, email lists and advertising won’t find HTA of much use to them. Also, HTA spends little if any time teaching about building quality websites that are indexed well by search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Almost every recommended method has to be paid for, and the commissions from those payments invariably go to Vick.

If you are interested in generating traffic and sales in ways that won’t kill your wallet, there are plenty of other quality affiliate marketing platforms out there, including Wealthy Affiliate.