Understanding the different sources of free traffic to your website/blog can make a huge difference to your business. Unfortunately, many bloggers and website owners are just throwing their feet in the dark.
As a matter of fact, readers come to your blog from 2 major traffic sources. These are:
- Free sources
- Paid sources
We want here to focus on 05 different channels that can be studied and developed to raise profit from current levels.
Some channels are more targeted than others. Some can drive huge traffic within a short period of times. Some won’t just work in some cases despite the numbers.
It’s therefore important to do some statistical studies and come out with data-driven results to maximize your online campaigns. Let’s now take a closer look at these 5 traffic channels.
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06 free Traffic Channels to kill the silence on your blog
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1) Natural Channel
This is by far my most exciting source of traffic. The simple reason is that traffic from Search engines is Organic and most targeted. As a matter of fact, SEO traffic converts the most for me.
Searchers tend to click your links because they believe you have the exact (or something very close to the) information they are looking for.
SEO on its own is a university. But here are some few points to help your blog get more results from search engines:
- Add your keywords to the titles of your posts. This will effectively boost your CTR on SERPS
- Add LSI keywords to the description meta section. It really won’t help in ranking but has a huge CTR effects on SERPs
- Use the right SEO tools to get more results. Neil Patel has a list of 10 free SEO tools to start with.
- It is recommended to do keyword research before starting your blog posts. Some folks may think otherwise.
- Don’t write for Search Engines. Write for your readers.
2) Referral Traffic Sources
This is a quick traffic source and bloggers can easily find their ways out with this. This sources sends traffic to your website from links on other websites.
Generally, you can easily get this through blog commenting and guest posting. Commenting on CommentLuv enabled blogs can highly boost this traffic source.
Other referral resources are forums, Q&S sites, mentions on other sites, etc. If you create highly engaging contents, readers will link back to your posts and that will bring you referral traffic.
3 ) Social Media
Some people see Social media traffic source as referral channel. It really is but social media is an Internet property with distinctive set of characteristics.
Contents posted on social media are short-lived. According to Moz, the average lifespan of a tweet is a mere 18 minutes! Whereas, comments and links on guest posts, forum posts, Q&A sites can still drive traffic after a very long period of time.
Links on social media cannot be manipulated. You don’t set the anchor text and other link properties. You take what you get from social media sites.
Here is how to get effective results driving social media traffic:
- Don’t be influenced bu numbers. Focus on quality and targeting.
- Respect social media platform rules
- Join targeted groups on Facebook
- Join targeted communities on Google Plus.
- Be social and participate in discussions
- Etc
4) Direct traffic Source
This is traffic from users that typed your URL directly into their browser, or who had bookmarked your site.
Here are some few ways to boost your direct traffic source:
- Print your domain name on Business cards, Invitation cards, Calendars, Brochures, etc.
- Create exceptional content that will cause readers to bookmark your site.
Note that traffic from other sources like email, url shorteners, search, etc may be reported as direct by your analytics apps due to browser issues.
5) Email List
If you’ve not started building a list for your online business, you’re probably leaving out an important element of your campaigns.
Your email list is a sure source of targeted traffic. Each time you send a mail to your list, you are sure to get clicks.
List building on its own is another course. However, you may want to check out my post on MailerLite Vs MailChimp and how to build a list and earn trust from your readers
6) Pinterest
Pinterest has become a serious social media and SEO source of traffic you must not joke with. With over 250m people using the platform every month, developing an active pinning strategy is a way of building another solid traffic channel to your website.
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How to know which traffic channels work best
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It’s important to know what works best so you can focus on it to rinse and repeat. These are several tools that can give you this information.
However, you may want to start off with Google Analytics.
Go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels.
You may still want to dig deeper and know which Facebook group or Google Plus community generates the best results. An easy way to go about this is Google Analytics’ Campaign Url Builder
OK that’s it…
Drop a comment and let me know which of these gets the best results for you. Please share this post on social media for more exposure.