Wednesday, July 11th, 2018

Your beautiful website doesn’t mean much if you can’t get people excited to visit.

A business needs customers.

And a website needs traffic.

But finding traffic can be a challenge. Even when you think you have a system figured out, algorithms shift, customer tastes change, trends develop and you’re back to the starting point again.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is how willing bloggers and marketers are to share their successes so that others can learn from their own experiences. Want to know what works? Ask someone who already found success? Want to know what doesn’t work? Ask the same expert – he probably fumbled a bit along the way.

We took the liberty of asking dozens of experts about their experiences and compiled this list. We wanted to know as much as we could about the elusive traffic patterns of readers and customers and went to the source – the people who have found customers. Lots of them.

Referral traffic can be dependable traffic, and the relationship between your site and that of your referrer helps to cement your place online. Building a network is a core element of a successful online blog or website, but it’s an area where many would-be marketers struggle.

How do you break into the network that others have already established?

How do you find the right connections for the niche you want to target?

Fortunately we found the answers you’re looking for, and we got them straight from the experts. Read on to learn more than 100 tips for how to find, keep and expand website traffic from referral sources. No matter your site, no matter your marketing goals, there is wisdom here for all of us to explore and appreciate.

Note: About this roundup – Hey, am Praveen, a Growth Hacker from MYUKMailBox and a full time blogger and social media expert. Special thanks to Uttoran Sen, the CEO and Co-Founder of GuestCrew for helping me with this roundup. Please do signup to our Roundup List, that way you won’t miss out on any future roundups. Thanks.

Top Referral Traffic Sources

1) Ted Rubin – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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My top referral traffic source is anywhere and everywhere good content is appreciated. Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate… share your content via all social channels always including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, which also makes it easy for others to share. And don’t be afraid to do it more than once periodically sharing old posts via your social channels, especially those that were well received. Also let others freely repost your content with a link back to the original post.

2) Christopher Jan Benitez – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest

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As a source of referral traffic, nothing beats organic search.

By optimizing your site following the best on-page optimization tactics, you can increase your site’s visibility by ranking on top of search results for your target keywords.

Here’s how you can do it:

Determine the best keyword to optimize for – Find keywords with relatively high search volume and low competition. A free account on SEMrush ought to do the trick, although you are only allowed a certain number of searches a day. If you want unlimited searches to research for keyword ideas and find their respective search volumes, Ubersuggest is the tool to use.

Create SEO-friendly content – Write content about your chosen keyword that provides value to your readers. Make sure to format your post (use heading and subheadings), insert inbound and outbound links to relevant resources, and add hi-res images to help communicate your ideas much clearer. Regarding word count, you should write at least 400 words for your post. Ideally, however, you want to write over 2,000 words to increase your chances of ranking for your target keyword.

Promote your content – Post your content on social media. Use tools like EasyRetweet and Viral Content Bee to help you increase your reach and boost the social signals of your post. Submit your site on blog submission sites like BizSugar, DoSplash, or sites related to your niche. Use your post to answer Quora questions. Tastefully comment on blogs with a link to your post. Write a guest post that links back to the content. These are just some of the many ways that you can share your blog posts with lots of people.

3) Terri Maurer – Site | Twitter | Linkedin | Pinterest | Google Plus

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Rather than leave blog visitors up to chance, we use a multi-source strategy to get the word out to the world. Once an article is posted, we send it out through the usual social media platforms we use: LinkedIn, Twitter, Google + and Facebook. Of those four, we get more activity through our LinkedIn postings, with Twitter as our 2nd social media traffic resource. We follow up a couple of weeks later with an email notice that includes the latest posts and several posted earlier. Outside of those channels we submit our posts to BizSugar.com and Stumbledupon.com sites for further outreach to those not already on our mailing list. We are looking at Pinterest and Instagram as potential new social media platforms for us to try. This multi-channel approach works well for us, but we continue to watch for other channels that might be a good match for our ‘Designing Strategies’ blog posts focused on helping small businesses grow and succeed. We have managed to get noticed and recognized by two other sites in their ‘Top Small Business Blogs’, but aren’t really sure how they learned about us

4) Zac Johnson – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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I’ve always had an interest in creating websites and content, ever since the late 90s. With so much experience in this area, I still like to focus on SEO and getting really good content to rank. Unfortunately, fewer people are using search engines, desktops, and viewing full website content — so there are some downsides to this area. However, if you can rank on page one for your main target keywords, it’s still a great place to be! At the same time, even if SEO and search traffic is on a downward trend, all you need to do is refer back to your best content and invest in some paid social and media buying campaigns. Either way, great content that converts into a lead or sale still wins the day!

5) Erika Mohssen-Beyk – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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For me the top referral traffic source comes from being a member of the Power Affiliate Club PAC .through sharing my posts there and commenting.As I am not a professional blogger, I do not pay much attention to statistics. But I know from experience that for any blogger being a member of a blogging group is beneficial for referral traffic. Even after breaks it is possible to activate a blog again and get traffic.

Through meaningful commenting, Guest posting, accepting guest post and Roundup posts like this here, not to forget sharing in social media.

6) David Leonhardt – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Linkedin

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So far this year, search is tops, followed by StumbleUpon.StumbleUpon came in three spikes, including a small one today (Ooh, I need to check that out). But StumbleUpon referral traffic continued through most of the year at lower rate, so it’s pretty consistent between spikes.Search was mostly Google, my top referrer this year. But it hasn’t all been Google; I got some Bing traffic, too. And if I scroll far enough, there’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.

Other sources, although much smaller than Google, StumbleUpon and Bing, are Twitter, FaceBook and Pinterest. Traffic from LinkedIn and GooglePlus is somewhat disappointing – less than from Yandex.

7) Janice Wald – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram

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1. StumbleUpon: Sadly, StumbleUpon is closing its doors at the end of the month. As you can see, the soon to be defunct content curation site has provided me with a great deal of traffic.

2. Facebook: People have expressed opinions stating that due to Facebook’s recent privacy breaches, they don’t want to use Facebook anymore. Here’s the bottom line: Bloggers need Facebook groups to promote their posts. The bigger the group, the more eyes on your articles. These are the Facebook groups where I promote. They all allow daily self-promotion of your articles: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/facebook-groups/

3. Twitter: My Twitter guide explains how to use Twitter to get blog traffic: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/how-to-quickly-tweet-your-way-to-blog-traffic/ These are my Twitter tips: I make sure my follower count is greater than the number of people I’m following. I use tools like Commun.iT and Crowdfire to help me keep the ratio in check. I follow people in my niche. I follow influencers’ followers.

4. LinkedIn: I published a post about LinkedIn and my LinkedIn traffic exploded! This is not a LinkedIn tip. It’s a traffic tip: Write about a place you want traffic from. You have a built-in audience of interested readers.

5. Quora: I wish I had more time to spend at Quora. You’re allowed to leave your links in your relevant answers at this popular question and answer site. You promote traffic and help your SEO. Quora has a DA of 89! Getting links from Quora, in turn, leads to more traffic.

8) Minuca Elena – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

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There are many ways of getting traffic to a website. For me, the most important is getting organic traffic from Google. That’s why you should pay attention to your on-site and off-site SEO.

When it comes to off-page SEO, your main focus should be link building. Getting backlinks helps you rank higher, and it can also be a source of traffic if the site that links to you has a decent traffic.

Another source of traffic that I like is social media. I am active on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. Pinterest is great because you can treat it as a search engine and optimize your pins by using keywords in your pins and boards description. Also, take advantage of group boards. It’s one of my favorite Pinterest tricks.

On Facebook, I suggest you be active in groups in your niche. You can also try Facebook ads.

Another source of traffic is your email list. Each time when you email your subscribers, you get readers to your blog.

9) Enstine Muki – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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At the moment, most of my referral traffic is comming from links to my articles created by bloggers. This is followed by links on my guest articles. This is where I’m making more effort as this also has an impact on SEO.Blog commenting is also a great source of referral traffic. Focusing on CommentLuv enabled blogs is making a difference.

10) Emory Rowland – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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Across my blogs, the top traffic source this year by far is sadly, StumbleUpon, the social media site that started out as a browser toolbar and let bored users refresh to discover new pages. It’s passing into the digital night now but it became quite useful because of the large amount of sustained visits it could deliver. The traffic wasn’t as targeted and users weren’t as engaged but the numbers made up for it. All of my other social site referrerals spike and drop off. I have one page that has almost 200k stumbles. RIP StumbleUpon.

A second and much better source is Search Engine Land. When I am able to pen a really nice in-depth SEO blog for Leverable and it gets listed in SearchCap, I meet lots of engaged visitors focused on the SEO niche. Knowing that all those industry eyes can potentially be on the post pushes me to go the extra mile when I write or edit a post.

11) Lorraine Reguly – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

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Traffic comes from everywhere. I get most of my traffic organically from Google. But Facebook and Twitter are also popular places to get traffic.

Ranking high on Google is the key to getting organic traffic. This involves learning about SEO techniques… and being a good writer!

If you need help with any of this stuff, you can hire me (as a freelance writer) to help you write well-crafted articles that rank!

12) Jaime Buckley – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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I’m going against conventional wisdom here, because conventional wisdom flat out sucks. If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent a fortune trying to master the traffic aspect of your business, but it didn’t succeed any better than a one-handed clap.

If you want to know the real secret of traffic sources, I can tell you in a single sentence:

You are the #1 traffic source in your tool box.

Sure, I can say I get my traffic from sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pay Per Click, Ads, and even T-Shirts I sell all over the world and I’d be telling the truth.

But that’s not what you want.

You want the fine-tuned 1% strategy that gives you a crystal clear path from A-Z, along with an unfair advantage.

The key to long-lasting, sustainable, referral traffic is conversation.

Sound simple? Well it’s not.

You have to engage the world in such a way that people ask themselves, ‘Who the hell IS this person?’ and they click on any available link to seek you out.

That means you have to be interesting.

That means you have to be likable.

That means you have to not suck as a personality and clearly convey your thoughts and feelings in whatever form you’re delivering.

When you do, people will want to find you.

Years ago I worked with an online marketing expert. He was a highly sought after professional, and it took me over five years to get this guys attention. When he finally consented to work with me, he gave me an impossible task.

To reach my traffic goal of 30K new visitors a month, I needed to create 10-12 original forms of daily content using a specific strategy he gave me. He informed me that his large corporate clients had never lasted more than 2 weeks creating those sources in house, so they spent $10K/mo outsourcing.

Having 12 kids doesn’t allow for much discretionary income, so I said I’d do it in-house.

To this man’s amazement, I lasted 7 months, 3 weeks and 2 days doing this all by myself.

You know how many sales I got from that monumental effort?

Not a damn thing.

ZERO. ZILTCH. NADA.

For a professional who has created millions in annual profits for his clients, this man was dumbstruck. He had no idea why his perfect strategy hadn’t worked for me.

To put it mildly, I was angry, frustrated…and many rocks now have my shoe-print embedded on their faces.

If it wasn’t for my wife, I would have given up.

She looked me square in the eyes and said, “Try one last thing just for me, before you throw in the towel.”

“What’s that?” I asked, displaying one of those cute pouts I’d seen my 3 year old use.

“Be yourself,” she replied. “Just go out there and engage people online like you do face to face.”

So I did.

In less than 6 months, by being myself and interacting with people online through chats, articles, and every social platform I use, I more than doubled that original traffic goal.

No stress. No anxiety. Not a single penny spent on an ad.

My passion for people and simply being myself was all it took.

So I don’t give a fairy fart what kind of business you have or traffic goal you’ve set for yourself, it can be reached by building relationships.

Now I stream live on Twitch and have a talk show with my oldest son for fun, called ‘Life is like Fiction’. We tell stories and interact with other people in such a way that they seek us out and bring other people back to chat with us.

Just like you will.

13) Warren Whitlock – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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“The best way to get traffic is to have something worth seeing”

Be awesome. Whatever you write, produce or show people on your blog, make sure you get the finest quality content you can. People are attracted to good layout, graphics and visual but they share things that are either new information or an interesting story.

No matter where you get the traffic, remember that these are people, not mindless eyeballs for your stats. And regardless of what you create, there are audiences anxious to see it and share it.

Most of my audience growth comes from people sharing an interesting post or tweet. Referrals are not numbers. Make awesome stuff for people and they will find you.

14) Ron Sela – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Google Plus

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When it comes to driving traffic to sites, social media has dominated for years, but the game is changing now.

Visual platforms are on the rise. People like to look at pretty images.

As a result, Flipboard is making a comeback in a big way. Since its 2010 inception, the digital magazine platform has transformed into a content curation machine, and bloggers are seeing its real potential now, as Facebook and Twitter are so overcrowded and cluttered with irrelevant content.

Flipboard utilizes machine learning, allowing users to personalize the experience for their followers, delivering content that is targeted to their audiences.

Here are five tips to leverage the power of the platform:

1. Complete your profile. Add magazines for each category on your blog, with great articles in each category.

2. Curate evergreen content. Posting content that expires soon is a waste of time. Content that is applicable for the next year will continually get engagement.

3. Add Flipboard plug-ins that make it easy for followers to like and share your content on other platforms.

4. Follow influencers in your niche and interact with them, commenting on their posts and sharing their content. This will get your name out there in the circles you want to be known in.

5. Track your analytics so you know what your followers are engaging in. If you see a lot of likes and shares of a particular type of article, post more articles like that.

15) Steve Wiideman – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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Our consultancy thrives on relationships. The best referral sources for us come from contributing to content with industry platforms (example) and software providers. Sometimes, just volunteering our time to help a struggling business or share our industry knowledge results in a connection that publishes something truly humbling (example). These referrals come in and out in spikes and provide the overall best traffic for us since they act as “votes” for our brand. Looking back over 6 months, beyond the spikes, the highest volume of referral traffic comes from social networks, where we’re actively creating new content and having conversations. In order: LinkedIn, Facebook and Yelp (social-local).

16) Vladimir Gendelman – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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“One of our most important referral traffic sources is teachers and professors. We create a lot of educational blog posts and tutorials that educators like to incorporate into homework assignments; those get posted on education-related websites, which drives traffic to us. YouTube is also a major referral source; our tutorials on YouTube help direct people towards our design and mockup templates.”

17) Philip V Ariel – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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Of course, my top referral traffic comes via social media. Immediately after publishing my content I use the share button provided on my website and initially, I post it on Twitter Google+ LinkedIn and Facebook, My major referral traffic comes via through these media. And I curate my published posts via Growthhackers, BizSugar, Inbound (now Growthhub) Klinkk and various other forums and groups like G+ Facebook etc.

Twitter top in the list.

Yet another major source of traffic is from the comments I make on fellow bloggers posts. No doubt, this is one of the main strategies I use to get traffic to my pages. It really did wonders in my blogging journey in relation to traffic. Till today I have written 1000+ comments on my fellow bloggers’ blogs. I am sure that, posting value added constructively and strategically written comments on fellow bloggers post will catch the attention of readers and that eventually increase our referral traffic.

But one important thing you need to note in this regard is that make sure your comments should be relevant to the topic and it should invite the attention of the author as well as the readers. I am sure that such comments will pull traffic to your pages. I have written a post in this regard under the title The Power Of Blog Comments.

18) Chris Lee – Site | Twitter | Facebook

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My number #1 traffic source has to be organic search traffic from Google. I make it my focus because for my business model (affiliate marketing), I need to have a constant flow of engaged, targetted audiences coming to my niche websites.

Google (SEO) has been so far the best converting traffic I had for that same reason – and it’s good to note it’s also free.

Yes, there’s some work involved in getting it up and running but with a simple (yet consistent) content schedule, it will provide the best ROI for your time and money, guaranteed.

19) Pradeep Kumar – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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Since our blog is pretty old, we had a lot of time to experiment with various traffic sources, some of them include:

Search Engines: It’s evident that by default we prefer Google search results, but we optimized our blog for Yandex, Bing, and Baidu as well. Every search engine will probably have their Webmaster Tools, so you can sign up there and make sure your search results are appropriately optimized for their respective algorithm.

Social Media: Social Media is all about temporary traffic for us, we don’t rely on it much, but we thrive to build our brand name so that people trust us and they affectionately share our content whenever we publish them. We have Facebook Groups aka Communities for all our brands as well.

Giveaways: This might be little tricky but we collaborate with plenty of Instagrammers and YouTubers for promoting our products, we have our BookWritten and MoviesDrop mobile app, and we often conduct giveaways. We don’t actually drive plenty of traffic via Giveaways, but the whole point is to make all the participants into readers, subscribers, members, etc.

20) Srish Agrawal – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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Our partner/affiliate web development companies

Quora – We regularly publish informative/educational content on Quora with a subtle hint about our services. Thus, helping the community as well as opening avenues for traffic and business.

Authority blogs within our niche – we publish a lot of high quality content as Guest Posts

Digital Assets – We create digital assets in the form of Videos, Infographics, etc. that we get published wherever possible. These assets bring a lot of repeated referral traffic.

For Quora & Guest Blogging, the secret to receiving a significant amount of traffic lies in being relevant to the topic. It is all about providing the correct information at the right amount.

For Digital Assets, our strength lies in our Content & Design team which produces great content & quality graphics at the right time.

The major sources of our referral traffic are:

Partners/Affiliates

Quora Answers

Guest Posts

Digital Assets (Videos, InfoGraphics, eBooks etc.)

21) Matthew Woodward – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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When I first started my blog, my entire traffic strategy was based on one key concept.

Help people.

So I went to as many forums, Facebook groups and sites like Quora/Yahoo Answers as possible and focused on helping people and answering their questions.

Not only did this pay huge dividends in terms of traffic, but it also created a number of key relationships that helped carry the blog forward.

Take a look at how Quora traffic performs on one of my niche sites for example-

I applied the same strategy here – just focus on helping people and you will be rewarded.

This strategy was key to the success of my blog and if your thinking about starting a blog then I highly suggest that you take the same approach.

22) Ryan Robinson – Site | Twitter

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So far in June of 2018, organic search is still by far my largest source of referral traffic to my blog, as it’s continued to be for several years now. By ranking high on the first page of organic results for terms like “business ideas” and “how to make money online,” I’m able to drive in massive amounts of search traffic and subsequently email subscribers that sign up for my free courses, downloadable templates and other educational resources related to those search terms. The best investment I’ve made in increasing my organic traffic has been slowly building up the number of authoritative blogs, websites and publications I’ve written for—where I take those opportunities to build strong backlink portfolios for my content, which the search engines have (so far) rewarded me very highly for.

Screenshot of June 1-24 of 2018 for my blog’s traffic sources

23) Gareth Daine – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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One of the BEST traffic sources I’ve found recently, particularly for anything B2B related, is LinkedIn.

It’s a goldmine!

I’m consistently driving thousands and thousands of highly-targeted visitors to both my own and client sites.

What really sets LinkedIn apart from other ‘social media’ outlets is its targeting capabilities.

Whether that be organically by building a highly-relevant LinkedIn network via personalised connection requests, then using content and long-form posts to attract attention, or using LinkedIn’s paid sales tool, Sales Navigator, and refining your demographics with its search tool.

LinkedIn is one of my primary traffic channels and anyone not utilising the platform is missing a HUGE trick, in my opinion.

I run a LinkedIn group on Facebook (yes, LinkedIn groups still need a massive amount of work) called LinkedIn Growth Strategies (LGS), where I teach LinkedIn strategies and offer tips and advice, as well as cultivating an active, engaged community who help each other out.

Groups like LGS can help tremendously in generating initial traction on your LinkedIn content.

If you’re not using LinkedIn as a targeted traffic channel, then you’re missing out.

24) Shobha Ponnappa – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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I have a clear three-pronged strategy for traffic and income building, that I meticulously follow every day.

1. Long-term traffic strategy to build organic search traffic:

My site is relatively new yet by content marketing standards – it’s just about 5-6 months old. So, although I am gearing it towards getting greater organic search engine traffic, Google hasn’t started ranking my site high except on a few search terms.

Nevertheless, I keep up a relentless pace of blogging, making as many as 8-9 blog posts per week, on carefully chosen topics and their related keywords, each post of at least 2000-3000 words. This is my long-term effort towards organic search traffic.

But while I am thus steady with my long term traffic effort, I put my focus on two other sources for immediate traffic and incomes …

2. Shorter-term traffic strategy to build social traffic:

For social media, here’s what I do … I use two tools – MeetEdgar andSnip.ly. On social media I usually post updates of my own blog posts or the blog posts of other influencers on my nice topic. I post updates every two hours on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook …

I convert all my blog posts into about ten or twelve small social updates and attach suitable images and add links back to my blog. Then I post them on MeetEdgar – which then rotates and publishes all the updates packed in my library to all the social channels I have chosen. Thus, all my blog posts, old and new, keep getting a regular airing.

I similarly make about ten updates per day of other influencers’ blog posts and put that also into MeetEdgar with attached images. In this case, I use the tool Snip.ly to create little teaser-banners which can be seen at the bottom of the pages, if people click into these blog pages of other bloggers. These Snip.ly banners link back to my blog.

So, either way, whether I post updates from my blog or others’ blogs, the links lead back to my own blog.

I also keep adding to my social followers manually by very careful selection. I restrict myself to adding 5 followers to each social network daily – but take time to screen the targets I add to my networks.

Other than this I also repurpose every blog post into a slidedeck and post on Slideshare, and I then convert the same slidedeck into a mini-video (with my signature music) and post on YouTube. These are like little videos that advertise my blog posts.

Further I also post my blog post URLs in Reddit, StumbleUpon, GrowthHackers, DoSplash, BlogEngage, Pinterest, Instagram and other aggregator sites.

Every blog post also is posted on ViralContentBee where other members share my social updates from their own accounts and thus amplify my social footprint.

Currently, due to such intensity of social postings, I get at least 70% of traffic from social about 30% traffic from organic search. But I hope to keep at it to reverse these numbers eventually.

3. My influencer network that produces highly targeted income-generating clients:

Since I owned a company earlier which had a huge IT giant as an investor, I got to know many venture capital companies who wanted to co-invest in my company.

After I got into consulting and online business as a solopreneur, these friends from the venture capital world have become my power referral network. I have them on my contacts list and stay in touch via regular emails and newsletters every weekend.

These venture firms send their investees – highly targeted business prospects and entrepreneurs – to my site. Usually these are small businesses or solopreneur businesses that need mentoring or consulting services in content marketing.

So, these form my immediate income -producing traffic.

I have thus built a strategy for long-term and short-term organic search traffic plus social traffic – and additionally built a referral investors’ network that is email-nurtured, that sends me small businesses and solo entrepreneurs as my immediately paying clientele.

People ask me how I get so much done in a day. The secret is to have a schedule and follow it with persistence. I just tick off as I complete every task every day – and completing my day’s work is my reward. I don’t keep changing my strategy all the time. I stay with it and wait till it works.

25) Robbie Richards – Site | Twitter

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1. growthhackers.com: built an advocacy list that I was able to tap into for on-demand upvotes and comments. Basically, every 30 days I would aggregate a list of new blog commenters, sharers and linkers to my site. I would then share their content in return, start a conversation, and finally ask if it was ok if I reached out to them one time a month when I shared my best content on the GH. This worked really well in getting my content to the top of the trending category, as well as featured in the GH email digest. From just a handful of posts I was able to drive over 10,000 people to my site from GH submissions:

I wrote more in-depth about how the approaches I used in this blog promotion case study. Note: This tactic is less effective today compared to a year ago.

2. growth.org (formerly inbound.org): Similar approach to above.

3. wordstream.com: this was a passive mention in an article from a very high traffic industry site.

Outside of pure referral traffic, I get most of my traffic today from organic search (50%), direct (25%) and email (10%). I wrote a monster 12-step guide on some of the advanced processes I’ve used to drive more organic traffic for my blog and clients here.

26) Sam Hurley – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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My top sources of ‘immediate’ traffic can be (in random order):

@Twitter ??

@LinkedIn ??

http://Inbound.org ?? (Now shut down & redirected. Booo!) ??

@quuu_co / Quuu Promote ??

@ZestisApp ??

——————

& after time: Organic Search (@Google)

The core traffic driver? AWESOME CONTENT. Create material that simply WOWS, and you’re already halfway there!

Here are a few examples:

https://t.co/duz1jBCDjY

https://t.co/p2hZhA2bAl

https://t.co/zq2IacNbft

27) Jamie Spencer – Site | Twitter

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As with all my sites, I’m in it for the long term. I don’t buy traffic at all. Reason: Organic traffic is sustainable, free, and highly targeted. Also if you maintain the content, the traffic can be there forever.

It takes a long time to get to this level. I’ve spent years creating resourceful content and building links to that content in order to be rewarded with organic traffic from Google. SEO is a slug, but for me its the only way I know.

28) Derek Iwasiuk – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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Other than Search engines and youtube, My favorite sources of referral traffic are Reddit and Quora.

Instead of doing it the traditional way of writing content and submitting to these two. I do it backwards, I find trending topics and then write content that either fills in content gaps or creates controversy on the given topic, that acks as click back to my own content. This way is much easier than doing it in the write and pray method.

For example, if there was a thread about the tv show Mr. Robots and they had a product placement of a cool new ASUS laptop, and I was promoting laptops. I would create a quick article in news leak format about the show and go into details about Mr Robots showcasing the Asus Laptop model xyz and talk about the model and figure out how to monetize the post.

Rinse and repeat.

29) Santanu Debnath – Site | Twitter | Facebook

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Mostly we put our hard work to get organic traffic. Organic traffic is always the best source of traffic as it ?i?s driven by user search interest. But beyond that also, there are different other referral traffic sources which can bring huge ?footfall to your website.

Here are my referral traffic sources besides organic source.

Facebook: I have joined many Facebook groups related to blogging, SEO, WordPress and occasionally share related useful articles on those groups. Not only that, there are many discussions where I used to participate and share my experiences to help others. This is a very good source of referral traffic to my blog.

Quora: I am an active Quora member. In a week, I try to spend few hours to read various questions on Quora in my niche and try to answer them from my experience. My Quora answers are getting very good views every week.

Medium, Scoop.it etc: I also share my articles on platforms like Medium, content curation sites like Scoop.it etc. Although the numbers are not that huge, it is another source of referral traffic to my blog.

Blog Commenting: Blog commenting is one of my favourite activity. I love to read a lot and that’s the reason I can’t stop myself ?from ?writing a comment as soon as I find any article useful. High authority blogs with huge read?er base? is a good platform for referral traffic. The trick ?is to write a good quality comment as early as possible so that readers of that article can find it easily and if the?y? f?ind it? interesting, they will surely visit your website.

30) Emenike Emmanuel – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram | Linkedin

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My top referral traffic is Facebook.

To get more traffic from Facebook, part of what I do is explained in my free social selling mastery tutorial.

This is how it goes…

For every new post I publish which I consider to be relevant to my local audience, I create a different copy for it with which I will promote it.

Since I’m already good with copywriting, such article tend to get more traffic.

Other top referral traffic sources I have include but not limited to Google, Quora and other blogs I left comments on.

31) Evgeniy Garkaviy – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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My top referral traffic source is Facebook. I’m spending a lot of time on FB organic promotion. Usually it is not fast but when you can build a nice page with targeted followers – you can expect quite a nice daily traffic from Facebook.

I was trying to do the same for Twitter but no luck. I’m sure the reason is that I was not able to spend as much time on Twitter as I did for Facebook.

Facebook Ads. From time to time I’m using it but very often my page is getting general likes from people who are not really interested in my services. But when I need to push some event quickly I’m using Facebook ads and I’m quite happy with the result.

Facebook ads has very nice targeting options. You can reach the audience you need. It is very important for local events promotion.

32) Chad Pollitt – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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Bylines on other websites are consistently my top referral sources. Since I have over 20 of them it’s hard to call out just one. Almost any of them can lead to a homerun during any given month. Also, earned media can win the referral battle any given month, too. We once had an Inc.com contributor write an article about one of our ebooks. In two weeks it delivered over 800 incremental leads.

33) Jordan Kasteler – Site | Twitter | Linkedin | Google Plus

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My top referral sites, besides Google, are social media sites with voting mechanisms that can vote content to the front page. These are sites like Reddit.com, GrowthHackers, etc. But of course, that content has to be quality and fitting. I also love StumbleUpon, as they’ve been a top referrer for me, but unfortunately, they’re shutting down 🙁

34) Abhishek Jain – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Instagram | Pinterest

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Our website receive nice amount of organic traffic from search engines and if we talk about the referral traffic then Quora and Reddit are the main sources of our referral traffic.

On both Quora and Reddit we are very active. We provide detailed solution to the people who ask questions about digital marketing stuff. We do not share much links directly but tell them the path they should follow to get their problem solved. This builds an authority and when we post any direct link people just jump to it to get the information.

On Reddit I have a 5 years old account where I share insights about my campaigns and experiments ethically and whenever they need source. I help them with relevant links. We sometimes share our resource pages that helps us to get good amount of referral traffic.

35) Susan and Mike – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram

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The majority of Simply Sunday’s traffic comes from various search engines. Google is the largest percentage and we believe this is because we share posts in food related Google+ communities. This is a great way to share your content with readers who have the same interests.

It’s important to make sure your SEO is specific and contains words or phrases of what people will search for.

Pinterest is the next largest traffic driver. We contribute to many food related boards and pin relevant topics on a daily basis.

Yummly is a recipe sharing site and has brought in a ton of readers for us. Similar to Pinterest, you save your posts (in this case, recipes) and others who follow you or search for specific food items are brought directly to your website for detailed directions.

We do also have some traffic from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram The traffic is organic, which means we do not currently pay to boost posts.

36) Rachit Singh – Site | Twitter | Facebook

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More than often, I build micro-niche websites. For the success of such sites, or any site I build, the key is conversion/sales.

For conversion ratio to be high, I need to bring people who are not only target audience, but also I need people who have intent of buying a particular product/service. Paid ads on sites such as Facebook can drive traffic, but they drive based on interest.

For example, I may be a dog lover, and dog owner, but not always will I want to purchase dog food.

However, a person searches on google only when he needs a thing. Thereby, I can catch him in his purchase cycle.

SEO is hard though, you need time and efforts. But again, if you need constant flood of traffic, you have to work a bit.

37) Alice Elliott – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus| Linkedin| Pinterest

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There used to be a time when you could happily use social media platforms to get traffic back to your blog. Now this has all changed, because they want you to pay to promote your posts if you want more readers to see it. In the end, there is no thing as a free lunch, or free Facebook promotional activities.

So you have to pay to get what you want. I decided to subscribe to Blogarama to see what they could do for me. My traffic grew by 400% as a result! OK, I can’t guarantee all of these visitors being my ideal readers, but the stats say they hang around for at least a minute on each post, which means they are reading them. This is more than I got when relying on social media traffic to read my content.

If you don’t want to pay to promote your posts, you will need to write the kind of stuff that goes viral. It needs to resonate with a huge majority of people, with a subject that is immediately on trend, if it is going to get any kind of traction. How many bloggers nowadays manage to do this? How many bloggers successfully write content that gets anywhere near this kind of reaction? I bet you a very large percentage won’t be able to, or don’t want to, write that sort of post.

So if you are happy to pootle along with your blog with a small readership, that’s great. Encourage your followers to regularly read what you write and even feel compelled to comment as well. A blog that can guarantee frequent and loyal readers who generously provide feedback is much richer than one who gets a lot of traffic which doesn’t stick around to read you content properly, or even return for more later.

38) Madeline Osman – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin | Pinterest

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My best source of referral traffic is search. Whenever I create content for my blog (or for my clients), I take care of all onsite SEO factors, to give it the best chance of ranking in relevant search. Although that’s working out really nicely, I’m interested in diversifying my referral traffic sources so that major search algorithm updates won’t hurt my readership. With that in mind, I’ve been exploring Pinterest as my next focus for growing referral traffic to my website!

39) Atish Ranjan – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Pinterest

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Though I am a fan of organic traffic, I do care about referral traffic as well. When it comes to referral traffic of a blog, that is likely from guest posts, blog comments, social bookmark sites, Q&A sites, forum sites, etc.

My blog’s top referral traffic comes from Quora.com which is because I used to be actively participating in answering various questions in my niche. The traffic was huge from there when I was working consistently but from 2-3 months, I am not much working on Quora but still, I am getting 2000+ visitors every month from Quora alone.

I would recommend everyone to use Quora for multiplying their blog’s referral traffic.

The best tip I can share about this referral traffic is try finding the questions about which you have blog posts on your blog. Then, write detailed answers, and in the reference share your blog posts link. You can even first find some questions which are ranking on Google with some really very good keyword. Then create blog posts about those topics, and lastly write responses to those Quora questions, and share your posts link there. This will hugely improve your referral traffic from there.

40) Ali Raza – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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my blog traffic varies with various sources and usually it depends on my recent post and strategy. One day, one of my post get viral on social media and this source takes the lead, the other day it’s search engine or email marketing.

So summarizing my traffic sources as :

Search Engine Organic Traffic

Social Media Traffic

Email Marketing

Interviews/Roundups

Word of Mouth. (Since i’m focused towards personal branding and the blog is my own name).

However the traffic i liked the most is Word of mouth, followed by Search Engine Traffic.

41) Carolyn Nicander Mohr – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Pinterest

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“Google is my primary source of traffic by far, sending me nearly 10 times the number of visitors as the second source, which is Pinterest. By posting images to popular group boards on Pinterest I am able to drive traffic to The Wonder of Tech, even though I have fewer followers on Pinterest than Twitter.”

“Popular group boards on Pinterest can amplify your traffic because once you join a group board, your pins can be seen by the members of the group, which could number in the hundreds of thousands. These group board members can then share your pins to their other boards and further amplify your traffic.

I will miss StumbleUpon, which was once my second highest source of traffic. Every so often one of my articles would be stumbled and my stats would soar for the day. Fun times.”

42) Emily E. McGee – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram

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My top two traffic referral sources are Pinterest, which accounts for about 60% of my traffic, and organic search, which is about 30% of my traffic. I’ve spent a lot of time building my presence on Pinterest because I saw traffic early on there. Since then, I’ve optimized my pin designs, joined dozens of group boards to share my pins more widely, and automated my pinning so that my audience is regularly seeing my content. As a result, I’ve had great success getting traffic from Pinterest.

Organic search is my second largest traffic referral, and it’s a bit more passive for me. When I started blogging I had no idea how to do keyword research or optimize my posts for SEO. I’ve never intentionally gone after search traffic, but luckily when you create good content that’s useful for readers, search engines recognize that and prioritize your content in search results.

43) Vishwajeet Kumar – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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The Majority of Traffic coming to my blog is Search Engines. I think it is one of the best and highly convertible traffic sources. It’s every bloggers dream to bring huge traffic from search engine. When it comes to referral traffic sources majority of traffic coming from social media sites and the blog where I am guest posting or dropping comments. I am using Yoast SEO plugin and follows its SEO instructions while creating posts and pages and it’s really help me to do a Good onpage SEO for my blog.

Today Social Media sites are becoming a part of our day to day life and big companies are pumping huge money into social media advertising. You should definitely build up a strong social media presence by creating Facebook page for your brand or business. Connect with your targeted readers and customers. It creates more user engagement. Build your own Facebook page and connect with people. Regularly update your Facebook page to create more engagements.

Many of you think that blog commenting is not good for SEO. I am also completely agreed with you on this. But when it comes to referral traffic it is a big player. In fact blog commenting helps me to drive a good amount of visitors plus some great loyal readers for my blog. It also gives me the opportunity to connect with some likeminded and pro bloggers. You have to drop authentic, conversation comments that encourage readers to engage with it. Don’t drop comments for the sake of gaining backlinks.

44) Sean si – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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The SEO Hacker website receives thousands of views on a monthly basis through our loyal subscriber base, along with a good amount of referral traffic that helps more users discover our content. Most of our referral traffic comes from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where a lot of digital marketing professionals and enthusiast can be found.

Social media is also where a lot of our clients are able to find us, as they also want to improve and expand their social media presence and branding with our help. Our content is also shared through these platforms as well, which provides users with helpful and reliable information on various SEO and digital marketing matters.

Another source of referral traffic comes from our email subscriptions and marketing. By subscribing to our website, users are constantly updated on our latest articles, which generates a high amount of traffic weekly. Email marketing campaigns have also been very effective in generating traffic as well, as we have established successful marketing campaigns that have not only increased our traffic, but also connected us to clients inquiring about our services.

45) Tom Buckland – Site | Twitter | Facebook

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One strategy we’ve been using for close to 2 years is Quora. Answering questions on Quora isn’t something that many people enjoy, but personally It’s kind of interesting. You also get some really good insights into what your target audience is struggling with (which you can then of course integrate back into your site and copy for improved conversions.) Spending 20 minutes a day on Quora has been a really good time investment for our agency which now generates a few leads each month and continue to scale without any additional input.

Another key strategy that was implemented very consciously was our guest post campaigns. Although this is officially done for the links involved based on our specific process. Another benefit is simply the amount of referral traffic the site or client’s site receives. The more visited the blog & the more unique and valuable your piece of content, the more referral visitors we seem to get through to the site as a result.

46) Virginia Nussey – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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The biggest traffic referral sources for MobileMonkey.com/blog are:

Social referrers, topped by Facebook and Facebook Messenger

Email

Search

We use Facebook Messenger to chat blast blog posts. Blasting content to chat subscribers gets 65%+ open rate and 2-3x the click-through rate of email. That’s a crazy traffic spike.

We use Facebook Messenger ads to promote top-performing posts. We amplify the reach of top blog posts with Facebook ads. Click-to-Messenger ads drive impressions and capture new contacts for Messenger chat blasting.

Add Facebook Messenger marketing activities to search and email to see blog traffic trends climb.

47) Brenda Stoltz – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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My top referral sources are the sites where I contribute as a Subject Matter Expert. Sites such as Forbes.com, AllBusiness.com and others make up the majority of my referral traffic. It may take time, but consistently providing quality content on topics of interest will get results. Being an expert blog contributor pays off in referral traffic and leads

48) Baba Nature – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Pinterest

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Facebook traffic is one of the best place to get unlimited traffic,

especially if you use it with chatbot.

With just a little $, you can get some good amount of subscribers that

would increase your income and keep coming even after you’re not using

Facebook ad.

49) Swadhin Agarwal – Site | Twitter | Facebook

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Most of my traffic comes from organic search results. I think SEO is a valid source of traffic that is perennial (unless you do something that warrants a penalty) and brings you the right visitors with the right intent.

The most important thing I do for getting awesome organic traffic is to write for my audience but optimize it for the bots too. I’ve laid down my detailed step by step on page SEO plan I use to optimize my every single blog post.

Another very important referral traffic source for me is, Facebook. I have been active on almost every other social platform that my audience uses but Facebook has the best results as far as social media referral traffic is concerned.

If you want to cash in on social media traffic, specially Facebook, I have a post titled “how to get a lot of Facebook likes” that will help you in promoting your blog on the platform, get more likes and shares to your blog posts and also a secret technique called “master posts” that I’ve discovered to perform better and crush the Facebook algorithm.

50) Russel Lobo – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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I own multiple sites. Depending on the type of my site the referral traffic source differes. In the IM space, my primary blogging website is RussLobo.com where I offer premium content writing services at reasonable rates. By far the biggest source of traffic is Facebook via Facebook Groups. I have been actively contributing to various Facebook groups over the last 2 years and I have a Facebook group with over 9,000 members.

51) Arman Assadi – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

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My recommended method for getting referral traffic is writing for A-list authority sites like Entrepreneur.com. Write for whatever authority site is top in your niche, the nice thing is there are multiple benefits to this, one of them being referral traffic.

52) Ronald Segura – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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Quora and Pinterest are the main sources of traffic besides search engine traffic, I also get traffic from other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but must of the referral traffic always comes from Quora and Pinterest.

Quora is a question/answer website in which thousands of people ask questions about nearly any topic, every day. It’s also a great resource for me to find new ideas when I’m about to create some fresh content.

I just have to go there and do a search on any topic that I may be interested in writing about, and then I see what are the type of questions that real people are always asking so that I can provide an answer to those questions in my articles.

Everytime I publish a new article, I always go to Quora and look for any questions people might have about the topic and then I provide a valuable answer which also includes a link to my article.

Pinterest is known as a social platform, but for me, it’s like an image search engine. Pinterest gives people the option to perform a search on any topic, and it will show image results for those topics, which most of the time ends up directing them to a website where they can find information about the topic they were searching for.

Every single article I publish also includes an image that’s specially designed to be Pinterest friendly, given the fact that not all images can really perform well on Pinterest.

53) Sudhir Shukla – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

I never depend upon a single source of traffic source. So always try to get multiple sources like,

1. Social Media- Active groups on social are playing awesome role to get traffic.

2. SEO- It’s evergreen and long term method. Most of us are depend upon this single source of traffic only.

3. Paid- It depends upon your requirements, you can get paid traffic from, Facebook, Google, Quora, Linkedin etc.

4. Content Sharing Sites- Sites like medium, linkedin articles are also best ways to get your articles republished and get huge traffic.

5. News Aggregators Sites- This is one of my favorite way to get referral traffic. Sites like reddit, growth hackers have huge potential to get awesome audience for your blogs.

54) Allan Pollett – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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Google statistically represents 60% of most sites’ traffic source. This is why if you aren’t ranking on Google then you are missing out on your #1 source for business.

55) Elizabeth Derby – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin | Instagram

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As a coach and collaborative copywriter, my primary sources of referral traffic are my relationships with fellow service providers and private Facebook groups. My target market is service providers on a mission to make the world a better place with their gifts. Like me, they tend to be community-centric helpers who maintain deep and real relationships, which means we often connect through word-of-mouth or private Facebook groups where we share stories and support one another. For me, blogging is a way to speak directly to my community. I treat each blog post as an act of service—a gift from me to the man or woman who wants guidance and support connecting with perfect-fit clients and moving the needle on his or her dreams. Quality matters so much more than quantity! If my content reaches just one person, but it provides the deep and powerful support they need right now, I consider my work successful.

The truth is, every successful referral starts with an authentic relationship and a willingness to serve. Maybe you connect with someone in real life before they ever read your blog, or maybe you write your blog as if you are having a heart-to-heart with one specific person. No matter what, focus on providing service with an open and thoughtful heart and you can make a real impact online—and in real life, too.

56) M. Kerry Clement – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Pinterest | Instagram

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In fact, I spend more time on Twitter than on any other social media site after Google analytics, Jetpack, and Shareaholic all showed that Twitter is my leading referral traffic source.

How did I make it happen?

It is a simple strategy. Tweeting at the right time when your target market will see your tweets. But like everybody else, I have other things on the to-do list that will not allow me tweet at selected times.

For this reason, I use social media automation tools to make life easy for me. I schedule my tweets to be posted at the best times when my targetted audience will be online to engage with my tweets.

It is a worthwhile venture

57) Anna Bennett – Site | Pinterest | Linkedin | Google Plus

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Pinterest has been my #1 source of referral traffic from the day I started my business. What if I told you that on Pinterest your blog content continues to work for you long after you’ve pinned? This does not happen on Facebook and Twitter. You see your content has a shelf life. What I mean by shelf life is that at some point after you save your images, tweet or post, people stop engaging with it. On Pinterest, your pins (your blog posts) continue to work long after you pin them which increases your odds of engagement and that could mean more click throughs. As a matter of fact I have content that is five years old still being shared by Pinterest users. No other social platform can do that for me. In terms of ROI, that’s phenomenal. What this means to your business is MORE visibility over time. Isn’t that what you want…to get more ROI (return on your investment) with less effort?

58) Tara Jacobsen – Site | Twitter | Pinterest | Google Plus | Instagram

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My top referral source is Pinterest which is 12.63% of my total with Facebook following up at a measly 7.2%. I know that seems weird in a world that says “Facebook is King”, but I don’t like Facebook and have not been successful using it for my business posts. Because I like graphics and SEO, Pinterest is a great fit for me. I think it is easy to assume that we have to be involved in all of the social media sites no matter who our audience or what our interests are. My secret is to pick just one social media platform and master it rather than being a dabbler in them all!

59) Navin Rao – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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Traffic is always been a struggling aspect for bloggers of all sizes. It’s not simple, but there are countless areas to focus, from where you could drive massive traffic for your blogs.

Although, here we are not about to talk about the SEO aspects as the Title won’t suggest it. Referral traffic is crucial and opens up several doors towards your blog growth in several aspects. Let me line up a few.

A gradual approach always towards driving traffic always works, I believe in “Crawling in the right direction is always better, than running towards the wrong one”

Quality Approach towards Forums

Forums are awesome, you just need to find and sign up, based on your niche. And start answering the questions which you could, and always provide a valuable resource to the readers help solving their problems.

I am active on Q and A sites and try to interact with the fellow bloggers all the time. Quora is my favorite. It has immense potential to drive massive traffic to your blog in no time if done in the right way. Don’t do it for the sake of adding links, provide valuable information and link to your blog, only where required.

Blog Commenting

Add value in the comments, make it appealing, so that it could make other readers curious to go to your site and eventually that will start building relationships, with the site’s owners where you comment and their readers as well. Do you get new readers? Making a habit of commenting on 5 blogs daily, a gradual traffic increase can be seen from multiple blogs. As the comment and link, you put in there will live for a long time.

Social Platforms

I use many of the social platforms for my blog post promotions and to get instant traffic and SEO boost to the particular page. Apart from Facebook, Stumbleupon, Google Plus, Scoop.it, I can always be found on twitter promoting mine and others as well.

Although, there are many more ways from where I drive traffic. but these are the key.

60) Andy Sowards – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Pinterest | Instagram

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Referral traffic sources are always changing for me – I used to always obsess over these things but in the end you can never really predict, or grow a certain one, but it does help to know where your traffic is coming from so you can figure out why and what you did! Right now the big 3 are Google, Pinterest, and Facebook – not too surprising there. Over the course of the last few years i’d watch Stumble Upon, Hacker News, and other Directories that my posts were submitted to skyrocket and dwindle to nothing – it’s fun to watch them as they ebb and flow – but don’t let them become an obsession. Keep your eye on the prize!

61) Seb Brantigan – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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YouTube is an underrated platform to get very targeted traffic, in particular keyword search traffic. Many people are distracted by Facebook and forget other platforms like YouTube that still get over a billion hits a day. Also, people who watch videos tend to be a warmer prospect than someone consuming other media. If you can give a few tips offering value in a short video, or a few more in a more detailed video, then people will engage with it and form part of your audience.

62) Julian Sakanee – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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My best source of referral traffic has to be guest blogging.

Most blogs credit the guest blogger with a link or two within the content and the author bio. So if you write an amazing blog post for one of the top blogs in your niche/industry, you can expect to see a pretty nice spike in referral traffic.

63) M. Shannon Hernandez – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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“My top two traffic referral sources continue to be Google and Facebook. In the five years I have been in business, I have not paid for Facebook ads or Google adwords (and I have a multiple 6 figure biz). I continue to use, and teach, that quality content is the best way to get found–and to have the right people joining your email list. This approach takes consistency and a solid marketing strategy, but in the end, you will never be able to compete with the quality of leads that come your way when you are building your Thought Leadership through content. Content marketing works to position you in the market place and build your expertise online.”

64) Raelyn Tan – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest

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“My biggest traffic source as of now is Google. The basic requirement you need to get Google traffic? Write quality content that people will share and link to.”

65) Stacy Caprio – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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Sharing genuine stories on Reddit is a great traffic source I use for special launches.

66) Robin Khokhar – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Pinterest | Instagram

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“The best source of Traffic for me is Organic traffic. I get almost 50-60% of organic traffic from the Keyword on my blog and 20% of my traffic is Referral traffic from Guest posting and roundups post and other related sources and the rest 20% traffic is from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and many other sites like them.

And I Manage to get Traffic because of the hard work along with the smart work on my Website. It includes Proper SEO and SMO..”

67) Mark Newsome – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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“As often as you can, strategically leverage, far more advanced

marketers and or more established professional blogers

various assets! Such as their audiences and blog reach!

“After all, they have already invested tons of their extremely hard earned money

and other extremely valuable resources, to develop bankable trust and credibility

with their specific target audiences!

When you and I strategically tap into these proven resources, it literally

shaves years off both your learning curve and you instantly

borrow their established credibility! For fraction of the traditional time

and cost!”

68) Shameer Shah – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Pinterest | Instagram

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For the relatively short period of time that Nature Kicks has been operating, we have gathered momentum and a good amount of traffic every month. As the company is very niche in terms of what we do, my goal was to devise a strategy that gathered traffic from not only the most relevant audience, but also an audience that was actively seeking out our adventures. This was very important as the core of the business is outdoor pursuits and adventure activities and not necessarily accommodation and flights.

If I was to give you a break down of our top 5 referral sources today, they would be in this order – Google organic (content), Pinterest, Facebook, Email Marketing and Twitter. We do get traffic from external blogs and Flipboard, but nearly not as much as the 5 mentioned sources. I guess you could say, we use external blogs and Flipboard more as an awareness program.

There is no magic wand to building quality, relevant and consistent traffic back to Nature Kicks. I make sure we provide quality content that the audience instantly understands and wants to find out more about. It is important to be where our audience is… showing up is Step One. Showing up with good quality and engaging messages is Step Two. Step Three, being proactive and provide a super customer service is paramount to success. You could have Step One and Two, but without Step Three you’re worthless.

69) Marcus Miller – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Instagram | Linkedin

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Our top referral source at Bowler Hat is Google via organic search. Nothing else comes close. In fact, everything else added up does not come close. And the majority of what drives volumes of traffic to the site is our content that helps small businesses improve their SEO. Posts like our beginner’s SEO tips and small business SEO tips enable us to help people which is a core value we hold at Bowler Hat and a percentage of these people will decide to reach out for help so it helps us generate more business. Win-win..

70) Zak Mustapha – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Instagram

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My top source for traffic is search engine traffic. Second best source are referrals from existing customers. The visitors also convert to customers far better than any other traffic source I’ve seen so far.

My top source for traffic is search engine traffic. Second best traffic source are referrals from existing customers. They also tend to be the most valuable to my businesses as the number of visitors who come from those traffic sources convert to customers well.

Search engine traffic was built using white hat SEO consisting of mostly building links. This is done with the help of SEO experts that I hire since I like to outsource nowadays but you can surely do it yourself.

Referrals come as a result of providing an awesome customer experience. A simple rule of thumb to follow is whatever your competitors are doing, do better than it to stand out with customer experience.

71) Tony John – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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When I started building websites in 1998, that’s the same year Google was incorporated, I didn’t have search engine traffic in mind. But over a period of time, I built traffic to the websites primarily through search engines. One of our website – www.indiastudychannel.com – gets about 8 million page views per month and most of its traffic comes from Google search. While getting organic traffic is a good thing, I think we are missing the opportunities to generate traffic from referral sources.

While the traffic generated from search engines are always fluctuating, the referral traffic seems to be pretty consistent. We have a jobs section and that gets a lot of referral traffic from other job portals like jobisjob.co.in, jobsmitula.in, Indeed etc. I never had to put a lot of efforts to get this referral traffic. Most of the job portals that generate traffic for us found us through search engines and decided to link to us as part of syndicating our job posts with them.

For any website, it shouldn’t depend on a single source of traffic for obvious reasons. Generating traffic from a variety of traffic sources including referral traffic, organic search and social media sources is the sign of a strong traffic pattern for a website.

72) Sathish Arumugam – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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Diversifying the website traffic is a wiser practice. Solely depending on direct traffic or organic traffic from Google or any search engine might dread you. There are more experts who lost their traffic immensely after Google’s Penguin update. If those websites traffic is driven through multiple sources, then the impact would be low.

Hence, referral traffic sources are one among such. I pay more attention to drive referral traffic. However, it may be contributing only to 10% of your total website traffic. Still, it matters a lot.

I strongly believe and concentrate more on these sources in getting decent referral traffic.

1. Blog Commenting

2. Facebook

3. Quora

Blog Commenting

Dropping valuable comments on high traffic driving sites in your niche will ensure good numbers of referral traffic. I could see most of the top bloggers preferring to be earliest participant in the comment section. It claims for the benefits in getting reasonable referral traffic being the first commenter. Subscribing to those email lists to notify once if new blog posts published, and commenting at the earliest is considered as a good practice.

Facebook

Investing in Facebook ads is another source of material. Running paid ads on Facebook will your followers, website referral traffic and also you can build your email list.

Quora

Earlier, I was not considering Quora as a great referral traffic generating source. Once, I see public interaction level on that question and answer platform; I started. Having a professional Quora account and being the active participant in Quora platform will get you notable results in terms of referral traffic.

Other than these three major sources, I still prefer StumbleUpon to contribute a quantity of referral traffic

73) Bill Achola Otieno – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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I don’t keep all my eggs in one basket and my top sources of traffic are Email subscribers and Search Engine Traffic. So how do I get exposure from the two sources?

I primarily target long-tail keywords that’ll help me earn authoritative backlinks and optimize my website pages for Google. This will help me capture new leads and increase my email traffic.

74) Himanshu Gupta – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

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My top referral traffic would be-

1. Quora

2. Facebook Groups

3. Reddit

Quora is a great place to get that initial visitors. If you invest time in Quora, you are sure to get back decent results. Many people are using it for lead generation.

75) Shane Barker – Site | Twitter | Instagram | Linkedin

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It’s no secret that everyone wants to generate tons of high-quality referral traffic. There are numerous ways you can go about it. I, personally, like to focus the majority of my efforts on three tactics.

1. Guest Posting: Guest posting is a particularly effective strategy I rely on. By writing for other blogs relevant to my niche, I’m exposing my content to a larger yet very relevant target audience. It’s not just high-volume referral traffic, but high-quality too.

2. Forums and Q&A Sites: Q&A sites like Quora or forums like Growth Hackers have served me well. I look for questions and topics relevant to the digital marketing domain and try to address at least one every day. I also add links to my content, when relevant, if I feel readers may benefit from it.

3. Infographics and Gifographics: The majority of us tend to be visual learners. Which is why I give a lot of importance to creating industry relevant infographics and gifographics and sharing them on blogs, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

76) Anand Srinivasan – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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One of my biggest referral sources is Quora. Quora is a Q&A site where members post long and insightful answers to questions on thousands of different topics. Because the site is also so highly reputed, it ranks highly on Google. I routinely post helpful answers on topics related to my industry and this helps bring a significant chunk of targeted customers to my website. The Q&A nature of the site has meant that there are dozens of different questions essentially asking the same thing. It takes a lot of perseverance adding unique answers to these questions, but the results are well worth the effort.

77) Ibro Palic – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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“Google, followed by bing, facebook, youtube, “duckduckgo, Reddit, forums, Quora, and Google + … jk

https://spokaneseoservices.com #seo

78) Ryan Scollon – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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Our top referral traffic source is Search Engine Land, as we have a monthly column covering SEO topics.

79) Marko Saric – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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My top referral traffic source is Google. It’s not that I optimized my blog for search engines only, but I think it’s more that the type of content that I publish fits better for search than say Facebook. People type a lot of questions into Google looking for answers and this helps them discover the guides and instructions that I publish.

80) Karan Chopra – Site | Twitter

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The three sites which works as a referral trafic source for us are

Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

All three are from same social media niche but in actual, different in

nature, if one consider thinking in actual way.

Facebook – the generic social media, LinkedIn – the business social media

and Instagram – the pictorial media sharer.

81) Rob Cubbon – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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My top traffic referral source is Google. Always has been. I’ve been blogging about online entrepreneurial subjects for years.

82) Sasidhar Kareti – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

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This question made me recheck of my referral traffic sources once. My major referral traffic comes from YouTube, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Facebook, Pinterest and Indiblogger. There are lot more websites showing up in my reports. Referral traffic sometimes help us realize how better how efforts are paying out. The more referral you get defines the authority of the content on your website.

83) Nirmala Santhakumar – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Linkedin

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1. Blog Commenting

2. Guest Blogging

3. Quora

4. Facebook

Blog Commenting – I write meaningful and helpful comments on some dynamic blogs and it helps me drive the aimed audience to my blogs.

Guest Blogging – Contributing the guest posts on the good blogs is a great tactic of getting referral traffic. I have recently appeared as a guest author on some popular blogs like Long Tail Pro, Hellboundbloggers.com, Mostlyblogging.com & successfulblogging.com and hence got a chance of boosting my referral traffic.

Quora – Quora is an excellent place to grab the targeted referral traffic to my blogs. I used to share my blog posts over there and write useful replies for the relevant questions with my blog link.

Facebook – As I have link-minded followers on FaceBook, I can easily drive the referral traffic by sharing the good-quality blog articles.

84) Kelvin Mah – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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The majority of Human Proof Designs referral traffic comes from social media ads and guest posts. While the majority of our overall traffic comes from organic. Referral is still 3rd, after direct traffic but we know every type helps us stay in front of our audience. So we have no problem investing where we can.

85) Satish Kumar Ithamsetty – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Google Plus

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My biggest referral traffic is Facebook, Linkedin and Google Plus.

I am using Scheduling tools to get constant traffic. For Facebook, using I am using Hootsuite, and For Linkedin and Google plus using BufferApp to schedule my blog posts.

86) Cormac Reynolds – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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We have a lot of large authority websites with large audiences we can guest post on. What we do is pretty simple. Find one relevant to a new service we offer and then check in Ahrefs it ranks for similar keywords to the ones we’re after. We then create guest blog content that’s well optimised on-page and use the authority of the guest posting website to rank for the service term we want to on our own site, while also linking back to the page in question on our own site. It provides relevant traffic and also helps our own site rank for the term long term. It’s simple but often leads to our service being mentioned and placed on the first page a number of times.

87) Jignesh Padhiyar – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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iGeeksBlog.com is one of the most reputed iOS blogs. We never focused on quantity wheather is content or backlinks rather we are focusing on creating best possible content that helps users to solve their queries and creating quality backlinks. And leaving the rest to the Google.

88) Abdullah Prem – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus | Pinterest

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I have many traffic sources like Google, Facebook, etc. But I always concentrate two traffic sources to get sales, one is Google and another is forums.

I’ll always concentrate on Google’s traffic because these queries are user intent queries. They click my website because they searched for it so I always have 80% chance of converting those traffic into sales.

Other traffic sources are forums I do some search on the forums and find people who are talking about the product which I promote and join their discussion and answer to their queries as much possible by linking to my website article. By doing this I get free targetted traffic and leads obviously.

89) Shamsudeen Adeshokan – Site | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

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Apart from paid traffic, which at the moment is my #1 referral traffic sources, Facebook drive the most “free” referral traffic to my website at the moment in terms of traffic volume.

Over the course of time, I have managed to build a decent audience size on Facebook (facebook pages and relevant groups) through engagement, content marketing, conversations, helping others, and running paid ads for some published posts.

Among the free traffic strategies I have tested on Facebook that result into something significant is running a live questions and answers section. Twice I have done it, twice I have experience it’s massive effect on driving free instant website traffic.

Live questions and answers section is really something you should consider doing if you have good knowledge of your industry topic.

It drive instant traffic back to your website, and elevates you to an experts status in the minds of your audience.

But while Facebook drive the most referral traffic, its certainly not the best traffic sources in terms of user engagement and conversion.

Base on my experience, “free” traffic (not paid ads) from Facebook are blog tourist. A good percentage of visitors from Facebook are just curious to see what you’ve shared but not really interested in the information.

When it comes to engagement, free traffic from Twitter and relevant blogs channels beat Facebook traffic hands down. Judging from my blog Google analytics traffic stats.

90) Mike Jones – Site | Twitter

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My topmost preferable referral traffic source is Quora. Quora is the place, where anyone can access easily. Indeed, I don’t require spending a more time on Quora. Being consistently participating and answering is enough to do. If your answer is valuable in providing solutions to the users, in turn, drives more friendly traffic to you.

What I meant friendly here is, that traffic would be your organic traffic probably. Because they are visiting your page (clicking on your link in Quora answers) as they wanted something from you.

Moreover, Quora is available for free. Through Quora, you could get an almost equivalent quantity of traffic you are driving through paid sources.

Quora supports me greatly to broaden my referral traffic sources.

Guest Blogging on other more traffic driving websites or blogs would help further immensely. It is better not to leave even a small traffic generating ways to improve the total website traffic. Meanwhile, practicing white hat techniques is preferable.

91) Yatin Khulbe – Site | Twitter | Linkedin

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My referral traffic comes from authoritative publications—HuffPost, Entrepreneur Magazine, Lifehack, ShoutMeLoud, to name a few. I publish articles on trusted websites to earn the confidence of the search engine and my potential clients. With guest posting, new readers give birth to new possibilities; referrals come from social media shares; quality communication kickstarts with qualified visitors; and personal branding adds a feather in my cap.



Always remember:



Intention matters. Everything else is irrelevant.



Before looking for a referral, start with a pure intention—educate readers with your quality content. Guest posting is not dead; dead are your objectives if you just want the referral without understanding the industry and target audience whom you are writing for.