Increasing the amount of traffic to the website in order to get more business leads is one of the important goals of most of the marketers, isn’t it?
And that’s important for the success of your business.
Because just building a site and waiting for the people to visit it makes no sense.
You need to promote your site to drive more traffic so that you get more leads and increase conversion rates.
But, how to increase traffic to a website?
There’re various ways to drive traffic to your site such as SEO, paid advertising (PPC), blogging, social media marketing, etc.
SEO is helpful and it does show results but takes time.
Related: On-Page SEO: Top 12 On-Page SEO Techniques (In 2020)
Paid advertising (PPC) is expensive and everyone can’t afford to run paid ad campaigns.
There’re four kinds of website traffic:
- Direct Traffic (A visitor comes to your site by typing your URL in the browser)
- Paid Traffic (Traffic coming to your site through paid ads such as Google Ads, etc.)
- Organic Traffic (SEO)
- Referral traffic (Visitors come to your site from other websites by clicking a link to your website)
All four kinds of traffic are important and serve specific purposes.
But, in this article, we’ll be focusing on referral traffic.
Here, we’ll explain what referral traffic is, why it is important, how to view referral traffic, and the best ways to increase referral traffic to your website.
So, let’s get started.
What is Referral Traffic?
In simple terms, Referral Traffic is the traffic that comes to your website from sources other than major search engines. These sources can be other blogs, social media, directories, forums, emails, push notifications, etc.
Let’s explain it this way.
Suppose there’s content on another website or social network with a link back to your website. When people click on that link, they’ll end up landing on your website. Such visitors are considered as “Referral Traffic”.
And website or social network that redirects traffic to your site is called the “Referrer”.
Why is Referral Traffic Important?
Referral Traffic sends targeted visitors to a website from trusted domains.
So, Referral Traffic is important for inbound marketers.
As your content gets in front of new people, you have the opportunity to convert those visitors into leads who can then be converted into customers quite easily. Thus it helps you get more business and increases your revenue.
Referral Traffic is also important for SEO.
Since it provides a source of traffic outside of search engines, the visitors from referral traffic visit your website after clicking a link or completing some type of social activity.
If these visitors come from trusted websites, the search engines consider such links and social signals as positive ranking factors.
How to View Referral Traffic?
To view your Referral Traffic, you need to log in to your Google Analytics account. Once you log in, click on Acquisition < All traffic < Referrals.
A graph will display that shows website visitor statistics for your website.
And the table below the graph shows all the domain names and social sites that sent traffic to your site. Here you can monitor the percentage of users, new users, sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration.
What Are the Best Ways to Increase Referral Traffic?
You can use various tactics to increase referral traffic to your site. Here’re the 7 best ways:
#1. Guest Blogging
Writing guest posts for some popular blogs is one of the best and effective ways to get referral traffic for your website.
Tim Brown, the owner of Hook Agency, says,
“The best way to get referral traffic is to focus on guest posting on websites that have serious traffic in your niche.”
What is guest blogging, anyway?
Guest blogging is all about writing blogs for other websites. In return, the owners of those websites allow you to link back to your site.
Guest blogging gives you a great opportunity to drive visitors from other popular and authoritative sites to your own website and thus encouraging referral traffic.
A well-researched and quality guest blog post also enables you to establish yourself as a brand in your niche, build trust with your readers, and increase search traffic to your site.
So, how to find guest post opportunities?
Enter your main keyword and phrases like “submit the guest post” or just “guest post” in the Google search bar. For example, digital marketing + “submit the guest post”.
This will give you a list of sites accepting guest post submissions and you can pitch them for your guest post idea.
Pro tip: Ensure that the sites you’re pitching for your guest posts are high-traffic sites and have an active and responsive audience. Once your guest post is published, you should respond to all the comments of your readers. This helps you drive more traffic and establish long-lasting relationships with your readers.
What are the Rules to Follow When Guest Posting?
Following are some of the important points you should keep in mind when guest blogging:
- Guest posts should be related to your niche – The blogs you want to write guest posts for should be related to your own niche. If you write content about finance on your own blog, then your guest post should also be about finance.
- Always write content under your own name – When writing content for guest blogging, always keep in mind that you publish it under your own name. Only then can you get full credit for your work. It’ll also help you with personal branding.
- Follow the guidelines – Some blogs have strict guidelines regarding word counts and the number of links you’re allowed to embed. So, when writing guest blogs, you need to read the guidelines carefully.
- Link to influencers – This might be very helpful in increasing the referral traffic to your site. This is because if the content of your guest post is valuable and high-quality, they’ll definitely promote your post which may increase the traffic manifold.
#2. Leverage Social Media Network
You just can’t afford to ignore social media.
Why?
Here’s a famous quote by Andrew Delaney, Senior Manager of Social Media, HubSpot:
“It’s important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow.”
Social Media has become one of the most popular online activities. The number of social media users is projected to increase to almost 3.43 billion by 2023.
Most of the marketers are using social media to generate exposure for their business and get more traffic, leads, and sales.
Tweeting, sharing, liking, or pinning your content helps you drive referral traffic to your site.
And the referral traffic helps you in getting potential customers as well as improving your search engine rankings.
Related: What is Social Media Marketing?
So, what are the effective ways to drive traffic through social media?
You need to get active on different social networks if you want to increase referral traffic to your site.
Here’re some effective ways to drive much-needed referral traffic to your website through social media:
- Create a Facebook Page – Create your Facebook page and start sharing your blog content there. You need to add CTAs to it so that your readers land on your website once they click those CTAs and thus increasing your referral traffic and leads.
- Launch a YouTube Channel – Having more than a billion active users, YouTube is the internet’s second-largest search engine.
Obviously, YouTube has become one of the most essential tools to get more traffic, improve your search rankings, and build your brand presence.
- Use Instagram – The number of active users of Instagram is over 1 billion, just behind Facebook but ahead of other popular networks including Twitter and Pinterest.
You just need to post high-quality images related to your brand and you have a great opportunity to connect with a lot of audiences here.
Also,
The engagement rate of Instagram is 23% more than their Facebook counterparts.
And the brands get 10X higher engagement on Instagram than they do on Facebook.
- Build a Community on Twitter – If you use niche-specific hashtags you have a great opportunity to drive referral traffic through Twitter.
Also, include images and videos in your tweets which will result in more and more shares.
- Build a Strong Presence on LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a professional network and is a powerhouse social network especially for B2B marketers.
If you’re really serious about your business, you simply can’t overlook LinkedIn.
This is because it is the most-used social media platform amongst Fortune500 companies.
According to HubSpot, LinkedIn is 277% more effective at lead generation than Facebook and Twitter.
Content Marketing Institute’s study says that 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing purposes.
All you need to do is keep posting valuable and relevant content.
And yes, don’t forget to engage with your audience. You can engage with them by writing comments on their posts and also replying to their comments.
IMPORTANT! Timing also plays a crucial role as far as sharing your content on social media is concerned.
You gain more shares as well as more referral traffic if you start sharing your content when your followers and audience are on those social sites.
You can check out “What are the best times to post on social media?” to learn more about when exactly you should be sharing your content.
#3. Blog Commenting
If done in the right way, you can build a lasting relationship, get backlinks, and drive a lot of referral traffic through blog commenting.
Neil Patel says that his 249 comments resulted in close to 4000 visitors, 6 qualified leads, and generated $25000.
While writing blog comments, make sure that you’re writing something valuable and insightful.
The comments like “Great article. Keep posting.” Or “Hi there, thanks for sharing such an amazing post” will only put you in the category of spammers.
On the other hand, if you write some thoughtful and useful comments, it’ll only show that you’re an experienced and knowledgeable person on that topic.
So, what are the essential tips to write valuable blog comments?
Here’re some helpful tips:
- First of all, try to find some popular blogs in your niche. For this, you can take the help of BuzzSumo. It’ll help you find the best-performing content.
But make sure that the blog you’ve chosen for writing your comment allows links in the comments.
How can you drive more referral traffic without adding a link to your site?
- Before commenting, you must read the article thoroughly. Only then can you find if there’s scope for any correction or some points need to be added.
IMPORTANT! Always keep in mind that your comments are valuable and not just promotional in nature.
- The higher your link is in the comments list, the greater will be the chances of getting more clicks and traffic.
But to get your link at the top of the comments list, you’ve to be an early commenter. And for this, you need to subscribe to the email list of those blogs you want to write comments for. They’ll send the notifications when they publish their new blog post.
#4. Join Quora
Quora is a popular question and answer website.
Here you can answer a question related to your niche and also vote on others’ answers.
Since your main focus is driving referral traffic to your site, you must add the link to your site in your answers.
By reading different answers to a question, you have a great opportunity to discover how people react and experience products and services related to your business.
And then you can learn how to improve your products and services.
Just try to find the questions people are asking related to your niche and provide inspiring, helpful, and excellent answers to those questions.
When others read your answers and find them valuable, they’ll definitely be clicking on your links and thus driving a lot of traffic to your site.
If you actively participate in Quora and keep providing the best and relevant answers, very soon you’ll build strong relationships and trust with the influencers also.
And you can yourself imagine if approached right, to what level these influencers can take your referral traffic.
#5. Create and Publish Infographics
When marketers were asked to select the most important form of marketing for their business, 37% of them picked visuals.
Why?
The reasons could be the following:
- Human brains consume an image more easily than a text paragraph.
- If you create an eye-catching infographic, more people will like and share it which will increase your referral traffic and leads. They can also embed it in their own articles which will create links to your website.
Through infographics, people can understand complex data quite easily.
You can post the infographics on your own website as well as on the other website like Pinterest.
With Pinterest, you have the option to link your infographics to your website.
People find it easy to share those infographics on their own boards as well as on others.
The more people share your infographics, the more referral traffic your website will generate.
You can use the following free tools to create infographics:
#6. Get Published on Online Directories and Review Websites
Submitting your website to online directories and review website is also one of the easiest and effective ways to increase referral traffic and boosting your brand.
But you’ve to be a bit cautious here.
There’re many spammy directories out there that may put you at risk.
So, before you begin submitting your website, do thorough research.
And submit to those directories that are of high-quality, the ones that are relevant to your niche.
In your research for finding the quality directories, you can take the help of Moz. It helps you find the top directories by category and city.
Similarly, review websites are also a great source of getting more referral traffic and more leads for your business.
The great thing about review websites is that the visitors of these websites are at the final stage of a buyer’s journey – the decision stage.
And this could be the best time for bringing your products or services in front of them. Since they’re ready to spend, your revenue will also increase.
But again, don’t publish your site to every review website. There’re so many spammy review websites.
Go for some high-quality and authoritative sites.
#7. Join Blog Community Sites
There’re many blog community sites you can join to promote your content and drive traffic to your site.
For example, you can share links to your articles on sites like BizSugar, BlogEngage, GrowthHackers, etc.
If other members of these sites get value from your content, they’ll like it and comment on it.
Best part?
With these sites, you also have the opportunity to engage with other bloggers and influencers.
All you need to do is stay active and keep providing value.
Very soon, you’ll see a great increase in referral traffic to your website.
Some other ways to increase referral traffic to your website:
The abovementioned ways are the best and the most effective ones to increase referral traffic to your site. Besides these, you can also use the following tactics for generating referral traffic:
- Content Curation: Though a little time-consuming, content curation helps you to get more referral traffic as well as quality backlinks. There’re many content curation tools like Scoop.it, Paper.li, Storyfi, Curation Soft, etc. which will help you in collecting interesting and relevant content such as blog posts, articles, social media updates, etc.
- Newsletters: Keep sending email newsletters to your subscribers on a weekly basis, or at least a few times every month. If your newsletters provide value, then these can be a great source for generating referral traffic to your blog.
- Enable Push Notifications: Enabling push notifications on your blog will allow people to subscribe to your content updates. When you publish a new post and send out a notification, it will appear as a small pop-up in your subscribers’ browsers. And just by clicking on that pop-up, they’ll land on your website.
Conclusion
And those were the 7 best tactics to increase referral traffic to your site, but these are far from being a complete list of ideas.
Nevertheless, implementing these techniques should give you a good start.
Here’s a quick summary of the ways covered in this article to increase referral traffic to your website:
- Guest Blogging
- Leverage Social Media Networks
- Blog Commenting
- Join Quora
- Create and Publish Infographics
- Get Published on Online Directories and Review Websites
- Join Blog Community Sites
What other methods do you use to increase referral traffic to your site? Feel free to share in the comments below.