Effective Strategies to Increase Referral Traffic to Your Website

There are a lot of ways to encourage people to visit your website. You can use search engines, paid ads, and of course, referrals. However, all these methods require you to put in some work if you want to see success, and that’s particularly true when it comes to referral traffic. Aside from publishing quality content, there are a lot of ways you can drive more traffic from other places around the web. Apart from publishing quality content, de ve lop ers can implement various strategies to drive more traffic from other online sources.

Why is Referral Traffic Important?

Referral traffic is important to inbound marketers because it sends potentially qualified visitors to your website from trusted websites. This in turn gets your content in front of new people, giving your website the opportunity to convert that visitor into a lead and your sales team the opportunity to convert that lead into a new customer. But that’s not all! Referral traffic also has SEO benefits. When someone visits your website from another site they are usually clicking on a link or completing some type of social activity.

Press Releases

Press releases are a quick and easy way to get a wave of fresh traffic from referring URLs. It’s a great idea to do a press release for an event you’ll be hosting or to announce milestones like executive changes, earnings releases, acquisitions, and product launches. But to be honest, if you are paying for a press release, you can write about pretty much anything and pretend it’s newsworthy.

Pinterest has been all the rage lately and it’s no surprise Shareholic recently released a new study showing that Pinterest drives more referral blog traffic than Twitter. Heck, Pinterest beats Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined for referral traffic.

Leverage Local Partner Sites

Sponsor local events: You’ve got very little to lose by sponsoring a local event with a few hundred bucks. If the event is highly targeted, you can expect qualified visitors to your site. You should always stay updated on local events so that when you find a scheduled event with the right audience, you can quickly get on board as a sponsor.

Affiliate Programs

There are a number of ways to build backlinks on the internet. While a robust SEO strategy includes building quality backlinks through a variety of methods, the best way is to have links on websites with a similar target group. That way you don’t have to work on building trust. Start an affiliate program to take advantage of the following that someone has built.

Get Smart with your Social Media Strategy

Social media use varies when it comes to which platform your target audience or demographic prefer. Doing some homework in this area is therefore advisable. Tag people, businesses and brands in some of your posts to gain more reach and, traffic, in the end. Being active on social media platforms is an opportunity to like, share, pin content, and engage with customers.

Organic Search Traffic

Most of the Internet-using population makes daily use of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and, as such, they are the best source of free, organic search traffic. Organic search traffic is fairly high-quality amongst the various types of referral traffic. It’s comprised of users actively seeking out your site their click-through is a vote of confidence that you have the answer to whatever they were searching for.

Promotion and Syndication

The best way to support your content is through a cycle of promotion and syndication. With promotion, you’ll use social media marketing and similarly inexpensive channels to raise awareness of your content’s existence. You might also share it in a company newsletter, pay for advertising, submit a press release about it, or share it to a community forum. Ideally, this will get hundreds to thousands of initial eyes on your work, and those readers can share your content even further.