In our Case Study: Quality Traffic Part 1, I discussed about the quality of traffic that comes from Paid to surf and Search engines. There are a lot of tips in that article and I recommend you to read it. In this part 2 of the case study, I will talk about referral traffics. Referral traffic means your blog visitors that come from other sites to yours. The most common problem with referral traffic that you might come upon is the huge bounce rate statistics to your site. But those can be prevented.
Traffic exchange
In traffic exchange, you exchange banners with other sites with certain credits or this could be an internal arrangements. If you really want the traffic exchange tactic to work, make sure that you are working with sites of your same or close to your niche. Or else, visitors from those sites would just ignore your banners.
I consider Entrecard as a traffic exchange site. Entrecard members have to browse other member sites on the exchange program to earn credits that they could use to “advertise” in other sites. The problem of huge bounce is rampant in this. Because some people tend to just drop their cards then leave without even waiting the page loading to finish. It would be advantageous if you advertise on sites with your similar niche. Entrecard has a huge database of blogs and you will find most of them helpful.
Directory listing
Some are free and some are paid in order to be placed in the listing. It wouldn’t hurt to be listed in directories especially when it’s free. But you need to have an ecstatic description when listing your blog. Besides, if the web directory has high page rank, it would be beneficial to your blog.
The traffic you would probably get from directory listing is from those owners who listed in the directories like you. They would appreciate your blog more than any other because you are in the same niche.
Social bookmarking sites
Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit. Submitting your post on these sites improves your seo ranking but only temporarily. I once experimented with SEO and social bookmarking sites which cause my article to be seen on the first page of Google search.
The thing with social bookmarking sites is you need votes in order to get on top or front of the page. If the article that you’ve submitted in this sites isn’t that appealing at all, people wouldn’t notice. But if it gets enough of votes, you’ll get visitors which are truly interested with your site’s content. Do not mislead your readers with your article title and description, or they won’t ever come back to your site.
Paid advertising
Pepsi vs Coke. Taste-wise, I don’t think that there’s a huge different between the two, whether who’s more carbonated or not. Both are sodas anyway. But the real challenge is in advertising. Both are same products, but who has advertised and marketed their product really well. The truth is, blogging is not just about writing great content but it is how you market and project yourself to the viewers.
Your banners and text links must be catchy to fully utilize your paid advertisements. Your advertisements need to stand out in the crowd. Quality of visitors from paid advertising is really high because they are really interested in your site that’s why they clicked your ad from other sites.
I feel like I did not cover most of the referral traffics. I’ll probably add more on my next series of Case Study: Quality Traffic. Do not underestimate referral traffics, some of the websites succeed because of this kind of traffic.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The problem with referral traffic is that it takes a lot of work and usually doesn’t sustain itself. These methods generally take a lot of time if not effort. I would suggest someone take a little time everyday promoting their blog through these methods then once they have a return audience then they can start focusing on other methods of building up readership.
All that being said I totally agree that the above methods are the best for building up referral traffic.
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I Nice talk about Quality traffic, I totally agree and second the social bookmarking part.
Thanks Again
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Excellent post, and another thing people often forget is quality. I surf through entrecard, and quite a few blogs have made regular readers out of me as their blog is high quality - like this one. People want to toss up some blog, and expect readers without putting the time in.
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Hey,
great article on seo.. i love social bookmarking specifically. i stumbled this.
thnx,
ojal
Ojal Suthars last blog post..What have I learned
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I second what Johnson said in that quality traffic is returning, interactive traffic that comes from building good ol’ fashioned readership. I think some of that can be obtained via referral traffic (some of the passersby stop to actually look, they like, they come back again) but a lot of it just wooshes on through.
Is it that blog owners are content with certain stat numbers being high that they pursue fly-by traffic?
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In my opinion the best form of traffic is from SE’s, Very targeted.
Social media is good for publicising content and gaining links etc to help boost its ranking in SE’s and get Targeted visitors back.
Directories etc have limited traffic value and debatable PR value.
Paid advertising/ sponsoring etc though has a lot of potential if done correctly.
Donaces last blog post..Rule the Seas - Macros 2
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