Are you trying to get referral traffic?
Have you ever tried to use referral traffic?
Guest author Emenike Emmanuel will explain 7 ways to use referral traffic to massively grow your blog.
How To Use Referral Traffic To Grow Your Blog
If there’s one thing that matters a great deal to a blogger as far as their blogging career is concerned, it’s how to get huge traffic.
Unfortunately, many amateur bloggers suck at that. They have spent many years in the game but growing beyond 100 page views per day has been too hard a journey.
I know what it feels like because I have been there, but what some of us don’t realize is that with over 2 million blog posts being published every single passing day, as revealed by MarketingProfs, it’s now obvious that for you to get tons of traffic to your blog, you must start thinking beyond the scope of what you were taught before now.
You need a proven system for generating recurring traffic that’s guaranteed to work. One such technique is REFERRAL TRAFFIC.
By the end of this post, you will learn how to use referral traffic to grow your blog.
What Is Referral Traffic?
Referral Traffic is the visit to your site that came as a result of someone clicking on your hyperlink placed on another site. Traffic of this kind, coming from sources outside search engines, is what Google Analytics consider to be referral traffic.
Why Traffic Matters So Much To A Blogger
Whether you are focused on getting search engine traffic, referral traffic or both, what I consider to be of great significance is knowing why you are focusing on getting traffic so that you can generate the traffic effectively and consciously.
Why do you need more traffic to your blog? How can increasing traffic to your website contribute to growing your list, income,, and influence?
Having been in the business of blogging for quite some time now, I discovered that most bloggers who work so hard to keep their blog traffic high do so for any if not all of these 4 reasons.
- Social Proof
More traffic is proof that your blog is growing. When you generate more traffic to your blog consistently, it’s an indication that you are an expert blogger who newbies can trust with their resources in exchange for your resourcefulness.
Here are other unique ways to boost your social proof as a blogger very quickly. Once you’ve established social proof, you could plan to launch a new tutorial as a means of monetizing your blog.
- Ranking
How highly ranked your blog is on Alexa and other platforms built for calculating site metrics is partly an indication of how much traffic you are getting to your site. Though there are others ways one can influence their Alexa ranking, consistently increasing your blog ranking is a surefire way to achieve that.
A well-ranked site, if focused on a specific niche, stands a better chance to appear first on the search engine result page (SERP) anytime a query containing its keyword is made on a search engine.
- Advertisers Consider It
If you ever thought of allowing advertisers on your blog, one good thing you must never fail to do is to pay rapt attention to whatever it will take you to grow your blog traffic.
Advertisers don’t want to waste their effort and resources. It’s obvious they won’t look in your direction if your site doesn’t have huge traffic. The goal of every marketer before reaching out to run ads or sponsored post on your site is to generate more quality leads. But how will that ever be possible if there’s no traffic?
- Income Growth
The more traffic you get, the more visitors will click on your AdSense display, the more a good number of them will click on your affiliate links and the more people will see your products and services.
Imagine your blog generate 5,000 unique visitors every day and 200 of them end up clicking on your affiliate products while just 20 proceed to the checkout and purchase a product worth $32.5 in commission, you’ve succeeded in generating $650 in a day.
Do this for 30 days, increase your page visitors and in 6 months from now, you will be proud enough to call yourself a successful blogger.
Bloggers in niches such as insurance and law with high pay per click (PPC) who monetize their blog using Google Adsense should invest extra effort mastering quick and enduring site traffic generating strategies.
- Relevance
Blogs with a high level of traffic send an impression to search engines that your content are of great relevance to internet surfers. Same thing applies to social signals. If more people are liking and sharing your posts on social media, you will always dominate for keywords in your niche.
How to Start Getting Referral Traffic To Your Blog
One of the easiest and most guaranteed ways to generating explosive traffic that will keep you on Google’s good book as long as your blog exists is referral traffic. If you ever desired that, here are steps you need to take now, not tomorrow.
- Guest Post On Authority Blogs
You will have a chance to get hundreds of referrals to your blog if you are privileged to guest post on authority sites with tens of thousands of daily visitors. What that simply means is that the more authority blogs you are able to feature in, the more your traffic, list, income and influence grows.
In order to make the best use of such guest posting opportunity, you are advised to have a lead magnet or simply a product or services for sale that hot audience landing on your site for the first time can easily grab.
- Participate In Expert Roundup Posts
An expert roundup post is a type of blog post whereby the owner of a blog reaches out to other bloggers in the same or different niches to make their contributions to a definite topic. Often, the host blogger will send out one question to all and expect them to respond based on their experiences and knowledge.
Participating in expert roundup posts is a good way to get referral traffic consistently. Imagine having an average of 2 daily referrals for a period of 365 days from all the blogs you’ve participated in their roundup posts. Think of how that will help your blog to grow.
To position yourself as an expert so that you will be invited to contribute from time to time, create enough viral posts and master how to build a relationship with other experts in your niche.
- Grow Your Email List
The same way you can use referral traffic to grow your email list, you can also use your email list to grow your blog traffic. It’s simple. All you need to do is to create a weekly roundup post that highlights all the topics you discussed within the week or you can put a hyperlink in all your emails to your subscribers that will point them to the site.
The more your email list subscribers increase and your open rate goes up, the more referral traffic you will generate as long as your contents remain relevant.
- Comment On Other People’s Blogs
You are wrong if you still think people don’t read comments. In fact, people do, especially if the author delivered a high level of valuable content or the topic is a controversial one.
The best way to use blog commenting in increasing your referral traffic is to stay away from writing spammy comments and focus on using the comment section to add meaning and add value to the post. Don’t fire your comments just like that, act like human – mention the author’s name (as in, Hi Emenike,) before you proceed with your opinion.
Here’s how and why it works if done like I advised.
When readers are not satisfied enough with the information the author shared, they will check out the comments section. If your comment was the one that caught their attention, they will stick to you and will most likely visit your blog.
- Accept To Be Interviewed On Other Blogs
There’s money, growth, and dignity in exposure if well-managed. The more you get into a new audience, the more your influence grows. Aside from that, one of the best ways to brand yourself as an expert is to become featured on many platforms, especially popular platforms where your ideal audience congregates.
For each blogger you grant an interview, make sure your link is placed somewhere in the post where anyone that considers reaching out to you will see where to click.
If you consider this to be included as one of the marketing strategies for your business, (which I often recommend because it serves two purposes) here’s what you should do: write out authority blogs you would like to be featured in and pitch them. Some will accept, while others may not accept. Additionally, some may ask for a review fee.
- Register With Link Sharing Sites
I’d be hiding a lot from you if I don’t mention this particular strategy my clients and I have been using to get tons of referral traffic and social shares from people we don’t even know. In fact, it literally took a new blog I built in a very competitive niche to a whole new level.
Here’s how they work: when you share another person’s link on social media, you get a credit and when another person shares yours, you are debited. The owner of the link will give you options of social networks they would like their article to appear on.
A good example of platforms that allow you to do this is ViralContentBee[dot]com. Log on to their site, register and start sharing other people’s posts so that you can earn their credit. Scoop.it, Medium.com, Kingged.com, etc are also examples of sites where you can get referral traffic.
Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are also a huge source of traffic to sites. If you have a large audience following you on social media, and your posts are always interesting, you will pull huge referral traffic to your blog.
- Help Other Bloggers Replace Their Broken Links With Your Active Link
There are so many sites on the web you can use when you want to know how to find broken links on your blog. Some of them will charge a premium to deliver a detailed work but majority of them are free.
If you are running a WordPress blog, I recommend you install this plugin, Broken Link Checker, to help you monitor, detect and edit broken links.
Like the subtitle says, you can help other bloggers in your niche detect broken links on their site, write a new blog post that will match the one that had a broken link, email the blog owner and ask if he would like to replace the broken link with your active link.
This is a subtle way to get a legitimate backlink and consequently, referral traffic from authority sites. Trust me, many bloggers will be glad to replace the link with yours because you helped them to identify broken links on their site.
If you are serious about growing your blog, these strategies we listed here are things you must not fail not fail to do.
Now over to you.
What other strategies do you use in order get more referral traffic to your blog? Share with us in the comments below.
Emenike Emmanuel is a freelance business writer and coach, owner of Entrepreneur Business Blog, a social media strategist and an enthusiastic online marketer who help small and medium scale businesses to grow their sales online. Connect with him on Twitter and Instagram with @ebusinessroom.
Host blogger’s comments:
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