Given all the buzz around paid marketing, search engine optimization and email engagement, referral traffic is an underemphasized lead generation source that marketers should prioritize.
There are actually several ways to acquire more referral traffic to your website.
Once you know the best tactics to generate qualified, high-intent traffic, then you can start leveraging this channel to generate regular leads. This article will explain the top ways to generate lucrative leads from referral traffic sources. Let’s begin!
What Is Referral Traffic?
Referral traffic refers to people who visit your website by clicking through from other websites. For example, traffic acquired via social channels such as Facebook or Pinterest are often counted as referral traffic.
Similarly, traffic from review sites and business directory sites are also counted as referral traffic sources.
Referral sources that convert into leads are the ones you should pay careful attention to.
The Best Ways To Generate Referral Traffic
To acquire referral leads, you need to know the best techniques to generate referral traffic.
Here are some proven tips to generate lots of quality referral traffic.
1. Guest Posting
Guest posting is a gold mine of referral traffic. If it’s done correctly, audiences will continuously flow into your website.
Here are the four steps of guest posting:
- Choose a credible and authoritative website in your niche or relevant niche (if it is an industry expert site, it would be great) and start pitching them.
- Choose a topic that most of your target audience is searching online.
- Create well-curated content with your website link, following the guest post guidelines provided by the publisher.
- Link some of your industry’s top influencers’ names or quotes in your article. This way, if they share it on their social media, it will drive quality leads to your site.
You should always aim to land guest posts on sites that are relevant to your industry. Showing your expertise on industry-leading websites enhances your profile reputation, which ultimately converts to valuable leads.
2. Social Media Promotion
Around 4.62 billion people are on social media. Social channels are a treasure for businesses to keep themselves in touch with their target audiences, and some 89% of marketers agree that social media generates immense exposure for their businesses.
If you’re consistently delivering value to your audience, you can gain their trust and user confidence in your brand, ultimately driving more leads to your business.
It is crucial to select a social channel where your target audiences are present. For instance, if you are a B2B business, you should use LinkedIn to connect with prospects. Similarly, if your business is related to home improvement, you can use Pinterest, because it is an excellent social media site for driving qualified traffic for home remodeling brands.
3. Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is another way to drive referral traffic. You should find high-traffic sites related to your niche for blog commenting. Also, you should leave relevant comments that are not spammy.
Valuable comments on niche blogs will attract lots of relevant traffic.
As a bonus, if you find blogs that support “dofollow” links in their community comments, then this represents a great opportunity to improve your SEO.
4. Affiliate Sites
An estimated 90% of advertisers say that affiliate marketing is essential to their digital marketing strategy. Indeed, it is one of the best ways to drive quality leads. Using affiliate programs, you can attract different website owners to sell your products and services. Traffic that you receive via affiliate programs converts the most.
Analyzing your competitor’s referral traffic source is one of the best ways to determine your affiliate partners. To find your competitors’ referral sources, you can use dedicated tools that help you identify the affiliates and referral links your competitor is using to gain profits.
You can then target these sources for your referral or affiliate programs, to feed your own funnel. Additionally, you should review your affiliate program from time to time, determine which referral partners send the most converting referral traffic, and identify opportunities for further growth.
5. Community Forum Posting
Forums are a great way to engage with your potential audience, share values, and drive referrals.
Choose an active forum, participate in it on your brand name, tell stories, share insightful links, and boost your referral traffic.
6. Online Business Directories
Choose the best online directories based on your target city and industry, and list your business with your website link.
Since it might be hard to initially rank for some highly competitive keywords, you can list your business on directories that already rank for your target keywords. For example, if you are a marketing agency, then you should list your business on marketing agency directories.
Remember, while choosing directories, only the quality matters, not quantity.
7. Review Sites
Some 92% of B2B buyers are likely to purchase after reading reviews.
Listing your brand on the review sites with positive testimonials from your clients helps your leads gain trust and referrals you receive via review sites are always of the highest quality.
8. Infographic Submission Sites
You have less than three seconds to grab your audience’s attention. Nothing does the trick better than visuals.
Sharing insights through infographics can quickly grab the audience’s attention and help them collect information without spending much time. You can post infographics on infographic sharing sites and grab some useful referral traffic to your site.
Analyze Your Existing Referral Traffic Sources
Once you have implemented the above mentioned strategies, it is vital to document them. This allows you to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Keeping an eye on it all helps you to refine your strategy.
To collect your referral traffic data, you can use the analytics platform of your choice. By collecting this data, you can easily acquire crucial information about your most engaged audiences – interests, personality traits, demographic, geography, websites they often visit, etc.
This helps you constantly improve your referral lead generation strategy to bring more prospects to your website.
Conclusion
Word-of-mouth is the best marketing technique to grow your business. In a sense, referral marketing is the digital version of word-of-mouth. If you can list your business on authoritative and industry leading sites, you can improve your chances of generating awesome leads.
Use the above referral techniques to improve your referral traffic and grow your business revenue by generating more leads.
