In simple words, all the visitors that come from some other websites to your site can be considered as referral traffic. These sites can be other blogs, forums, social networking sites, directories etc.
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Your website link is placed on these sites, which means they are referring your website to their readers and when more and more websites refer your site on their blog, you will be getting more and more referral traffic.
It’s not a tough word so I hope that you now understand which traffic you should consider as referral traffic. If you still don’t understand then I will put it in another way.
The traffic that isn’t organic, which doesn’t come from search engines, can be considered as referral traffic.
Best Ways to Increase Referral Traffic
As there are lots of websites out there from where you can get traffic, there are a lot of different ways that you can implement to increase the referral traffic.
In this article, we are going to see different types of websites from where we can get traffic – blogs and websites, forums and social networks, YouTube – because these are the only ones capable of sending targeted visitors to your blog.
Referral Traffic From Other Blogs and Websites
I am pretty sure that you know about the methods that you can use to get referral traffic from various blogs in your niche.
If you are not familiar with these methods then they are blog commenting and guest posting. There is another one as well, but we will talk about it later.
1. Blog Commenting:
Commenting on other blogs has been considered to be the best way to build new relationships with other bloggers and get a lot of traffic and backlinks. But it’s not always that easy and not everyone is able to benefit from it.
If you are commenting on various blogs and you are not seeing any results then you are doing something wrong.
Commenting is not something that you can do today and expect to start seeing results from tomorrow. It doesn’t work like that. It’s more of a long-term deal!
First of all, you should be looking for some real blogs that publishes great articles and get a lot of comments on them. When you find such blogs, start reading their posts and go through the comments and see if the comments are real and informative and whether the blog owner engage with other commentators or not.
If there are informative comments, bloggers engage with each other and the blog owner also actively participates in the conversation then you have found a winner.
Then for the next step, all you have to do is start reading their latest articles and share your honest opinions in the comments. Don’t post anything like “Amazing content” or “Thanks for the informative article” because that’s not going to benefit you in any way.
Write something that adds more value to the article, if you found something wrong with the post then don’t hesitate to point it out to the writer because that’s how you gain the blog owner’s attention.
The more comments you publish on their blog, the higher are your chances of getting traffic from that blog and at times, you might also get featured in one of the upcoming posts.
Tip: When you find such blogs with a lot of comments and engagement, join their email list and see what type of emails they send out to their subscribers. If most of them are just affiliate offers or they are trying to sell something then I won’t suggest you to comment on that blog. The reason is simple, they are not giving important content to their subscribers so their blog popularity is going to decline pretty soon.
2. Guest posts:
Guest Posts are something that gives you amazing and long-term results. When you publish a guest post on an authority blog, you get referral traffic in the beginning and since you also get backlinks from authority blogs, you will see an increase in organic traffic in the long run.
But when you do guest blogging, you should keep certain things in mind. You cannot just go around publishing articles on any blog that you want. You should spend some time in finding the blogs that are relevant to your niche and the content of your article.
Make sure that the blog enjoys a high authority in search engines and has a large reader base. As long as you post the relevant article on relevant blogs, you won’t be penalized.
3. Third and a Superb Way:
Previously I said that there is another thing that we can do to increase referral traffic to our blog and now we are going to see which one is that.
This method won’t be giving you instant results but since you are a blogger, you should know this already that proper and long-lasting results can never be gained instantly.
When you create a high-quality content then I would recommend you to publish the article on your own blog. Make sure that the article has all the proper points for the topic you are covering, problems and solutions listed and proper resourcesmentioned wherever they are needed.
Then you should start contacting other bloggers through social media platforms or via their email and ask them to give your content a read. Don’t ask them to share the post or give a backlink to you, just ask them to go through it and share their feedback.
This way, not all, but some of those bloggers will read your article and if they are impressed, they might start recommending your blog to their own readers and share your posts frequently on social media.
Now since their reader base and followers count is much higher than yours, you can expect an increase in the referral traffic and you can also expect a lot of exposure and recognition in the blogosphere.
As I said that this method can take some time before it gives you any results so be patient and keep on working on writing the best possible content on your blog.
Drive Referral Traffic From Social Media
For getting traffic from social media, I am going to cover only 3 networks – Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I know there are other amazing websites like LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others but since I don’t have any experience with LinkedIn and the traffic from StumbleUpon has a high bounce rate, I am going to skip them.
1. Facebook
The simplest way to gain traffic from Facebook is to join some relevant and active groups and share your posts with them. I said, active groups because a majority of them are dead and you won’t be seeing any benefits by using them.
However, there are still some really awesome Facebook groups that you can join. No matter what your blog niche is, you will find a group on Facebook for it easily.
And to get maximum benefits from such groups, you need to stay active in the group. Like and share other people’s posts, comment on them – both articles and Facebook posts and be an active member of the group.
By doing this, you might get the attention of the admin of the group and if the articles you share are amazing, your post might get featured on the group.
On one, share only the article links, on the other share photos and videos along with some article links and on the other, choose a different approach. Find out which one works the best, which page gets the most engagement and which one has the highest organic reach.
When you find the winning formula to bring the maximum traffic through Facebook pages, all you have to do is just merge those pages.
2. Twitter
Some of you might argue that you can’t get traffic from Twitter, but I should stop you right there. If you use Twitter properly then you can get highly targeted visitors from Twitter as well.
The reason why you are not getting any traffic from the social platform is that you neither have a high follower count nor do you share proper tweets or take part in the various chats.
Getting followers on Twitter isn’t hard at all because if you share amazing tweets, not just updates from your blog, but tweets about the latest news, some new launches, sarcastic comments etc. and also take part in the Twitter chats then you are bound to get more followers.
So I would suggest you to join JustRetweet to start sharing other people’s tweets. However, you are going to find article links only so you are going to have to do some work to share other types of tweets as well.
If you are not free all day to tweet then you need to check out either Buffer or HootSuite so that you can schedule the time to tweet and also see the analytics of the maximum activity on anytime.
As I mentioned about the various Twitter chats, I am going to tell you about some of the best ones. The best chats to join are #Blogchat, #SEOChat and others which you can easily find.
Here’s an amazing guide on Buffer blog on how to host or participate in a Twitter chat!
3. Google+
I have had some success with Google+ recently because I found out that if you share an article on Google+ with proper description and proper hashtags then you are going to get some really good traffic.
To get traffic from Google+, all you have to do is join the biggest communities (groups on Google+) and be active there and share your articles – much like Facebook groups.
And you can also create a Google+ page for your blog. A Google+ page can be a great thing because when you share articles with proper hashtags on the page then it can also reach a lot of people giving you higher engagement and high traffic. You can connect with BloggerTipsTricks’s Google+ page here.
I will share some tips on getting high social shares from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in the upcoming posts, so stay tuned.
Drive Referral Traffic Using Forums
Being a part of an active and popular forum and engaging with other people’s posts can prove to be a lot beneficial to you in the long run.
Frankly speaking, I am not the right person to tell you how to use forums because I have never stayed active on any forums for a long time but I do know one thing, the forums are amazing source of traffic.
Whenever I decide to join a forum, I am going to follow all the below points and you should too:
- Create the perfect profile page – add a perfect bio, profile picture, social accounts, previous work and provide a way so that others can contact me.
- Stay active on the forums and utilize the signature space to add some relevant links.
- Start new threads based on relevant and popular topics and if there are older threads open then try to share your views in them.
- Always stay brief and to the point and always try to be helpful to others.
- Follow up to all my old as well as new posts and make some real connections with other members.
If you like to watch a video on getting started on forums then I would recommend you to check out QuickSprout University’s video on building traffic through forums.
Get Referral Traffic From YouTube
YouTube is the biggest video sharing platform where you can not only just watch videos but upload your own videos as well.
The site gets billions of visitors each month and a lot of people are redirecting some of that traffic to their own websites by uploading new videos regularly.
If you too know how to create videos then you should start creating a small and brief video for each new article and publish it on your channel. Not only you can get a backlink from the video but you can also get lots of visitors if your video goes viral.
If you are not able to create videos then you can always hire someone by going to sites like Odesk or Elance.
Other Ways To Increase Referral Traffic
There are a lot of other ways as well to increase referral traffic for a blog. Blog commenting, guest posts, social media, forums and YouTube are just the best ones out there but that doesn’t mean you can’t use others.
Here are some of the other ways you can use to generate referral traffic:
- Blog Community Sites: Community sites like BlogEngage and BizSugar allows you to share your article links on their sites so that its other members can see, like it and comment on it. When you stay active on such sites, it is likely that your post will get featured and you might see a huge surge in traffic.
- Infographics: This is probably one of the best but an expensive way to increase referral traffic. Even if you know how to create an Infographic, it will take hours or maybe days to come up with one because you not only have to design but you also need to get the best information and relevant sources to make it go viral.
- Content Curation: This method can be a little time-consuming, but you will not only get high traffic but also get quality backlinks. You can curate content of your blog and other blogs and articles from the Internet by using sites like Scoop.it and Storify.
So those were some of the best ways to increase referral traffic on your blog. I hope that you are going to try some of them right now and if you liked the article then do share the post with your friends. If you have something to say or you think that I missed something, then comment below to let me know about it.
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