Traffic is no doubt one of the most important things to any marketer, so it’s important to understand and use every traffic source available, in order to really make those traffic numbers happen. What’s interesting is that most assume they’ve found the major traffic sources (Google, social media, etc.) and they just need to do something better.
While this may be the case, you can’t discount the things you’ve never heard of in the past. In other words, many company owners and webmasters are surprised to learn that there are many different traffic sources out there that they have never heard of before.
Moral of the story: get over the surprise as soon as you can and start using these traffic sources to your benefit!
Top 5 Traffic Sources to Pay Attention to This Year
As discussed above, if you’re looking for new and creative ways to drive traffic to your website or blog, it’s not always necessarily about how you’re marketing this content on certain platforms or the specific topic of the content — sometimes it can be as simple as shifting your focus to different, sometimes unheard of, traffic sources.
Below are five top traffic sources you may not have heard about in the past:
1. YouTube
Hardly any reader of this site doesn’t know what YouTube is. But while it is a great content and monetization platform, hardly anyone ever talks about it as a traffic building tool.
And yet, it can do wonders to your traffic. In fact, it is #3 most powerful source of clicks on one of my sites where I take time to create videos.
YouTube does require great video content to generate views and clicks. Luckily, there are tools like InVideo that make it easy to create professional videos effortlessly.
When publishing your video on YouTube, make sure to include your link and call-to-action in the first line of video description as the rest of the description will be hidden behind the “More” link.
2. Scribd
Scribd is a document sharing site that lets you upload your documents for a community of readers.
This sharing center is a high-authority website that gives users access to over 400,000 books from over 900 publishers, including everything from The New York Times to simple “how to” articles from user-uploaded works (that could be you!). The idea behind this business is simply a personal digital library, compatible for mobile devices and tablets including Kindle Fire.
As a Scribd author, your reading is available for an audience of 80 million monthly readers around the world. In other words, you have a huge potential to gain traffic through this system if they take the time to download your work. eBooks are an even better option to download if your company has been thinking about getting started or has a few eBooks already in the works.
3. SlideShare
SlideShare allows you to take your content and convert it into PowerPoint presentations.
This is another site where you can upload your content, except it needs to be in the form of a slideshow (imagine that). This works incredibly well, if you take some of your most popular content and then convert it into a PowerPoint for the site.
You don’t have to do too much writing, but you get the opportunity to have this content in front of SlideShare over 60 million unique visitors each month. In fact, according to SlideShare, they are the world’s largest community for sharing presentations and other professional contents and are among the 120 most visited websites in the world. Remember to add a link to your blog, and the traffic benefits could be great.
4. Quora
Quora is a social networking site that allows you to answer and follow different questions, connect with users, and of course reference your own content.
This is one of my favorite websites on the Internet, but unfortunately not too many businesses are taking advantage of the traffic opportunities it can offer. Its main job is a social networking site that allows people to follow other users and questions, but it opens up the floor to all types of subjects and audiences (including yours) to ask questions directly.
Not only is it a great way for someone from your company to answer these questions, start conversations, and ultimately improve the visibility of your brand, but Quora also allows you to add links to your answers if they are relevant. If you have written a post detailing someone’s question (or you want to hurry up and publish one), add that link to your answer and try to get traffic to your website this way.
Quora is one of those websites that always seems to rank very highly on Google, so it is incredibly popular. Work to give the best answers you can and refer back to your website.
The best answers do rise to the top, so if you’re doing everything right, you should get a lot of eyes on your contribution (and hopefully clicking to your site).
Traffic generation is not the only way Quora can help your business. It has powerful branding opportunities allowing you and your employees to become known as experts in your niche. Encourage your team members to create personal websites to link from their Quora bios.
That will motivate them to use the site more actively. Namify allows you to pick a domain for as cheap as $4 a year, so it is a very affordable task and will benefit your main site if you invite your employees to link from their personal site to your main brand.
5. BizSugar
BizSugar is a bookmarking site that uses a voting system to produce relevant results for different audiences.
This site allows business owners and marketers to upload content that will automatically be published on the site. Readers can then vote for the content that they find most relevant or most helpful, which helps to bring that piece of content up to the homepage of the site (which, as you might imagine, increases the CTR of that post).
There is always a way to put a link to the original place where the content was published, so you have a good chance to drive traffic this way. The better your content, the more successful you’ll be.
The site includes categories like marketing, finance, management, technology, and startups, all with sub-sections under each tab. In other words, the targeted traffic here is great, because the site is focused on only business-related niches.
Analyze and Monitor
You will only be able to build an effective traffic source if you know what’s working and what to focus on. WebCEO offers a useful traffic analytics tool that is able to combine different sources of data and allows you to easily monitor traffic for multiple entities.
Additionally, WP Beginner lists a few plugins that turn your website dashboard into a traffic monitoring platform.
Wrapping Up and Other Options
Believe it or not, there were many more traffic sources I found while researching, that I had never heard of before, but the ones above are those that I found most popular and most beneficial to the majority of people.
A few other opportunities include coupon sites, answer sites, and sites like Amazon, eBay and Craigslist, etc. Guest blogging is another great way to generate targeted referral traffic. SE Ranking offers a great guide on how to generate clicks using guest posting.
Diversifying your traffic sources as much as possible means securing your business against Google algorithm updates and changing social media advertising rules. Good luck!
About the Author
Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of regular Twitter chats #vcbuzz and #myblogu.
