Millions of webmasters rely on search engine traffic from the big G (Google), but if your traffic has been ripped from you after the latest algorithm, you are probably cursing Google right now.
Let me add an important tip here though, when your website rankings have dropped quickly, Google is not always at the heart of the problem.
Sometimes your site is riddled with bad code, plugin conflicts or just general website errors. I would definitely investigate that and then grab yourself some alternative traffic streams.
Now is the time to ignore all the complicated guides on the Internet which claim to tell you how to increase your website traffic.
You can easily increase traffic using just four incredibly simple techniques:
Increase Your Website Traffic #1—Post More Content
The more reasons people have to visit your site, the more visitors you’ll receive. It’s the old movie quote: “if you build it, they will come.” This is one of my favorite sayings and I use it often. If you give people what they want them will come for it.
Each post you put on your website can attract more traffic. Maybe the post will attract just a few visitors. Maybe the post will breakout and attract huge heaps of visitors. Either way, you’ll increase your website traffic.
Don’t feel like small posts which receive little traffic are wasted. You can use a little bit of traffic to get more traffic using techniques such as link bait, subscriptions, and contesting. It’s hard to build an initial audience, but it’s easy to grow an established audience.
Lets add this up. Just say you get an average of 5 visits per article, per day, and you have 1,000 articles. This equals 5,000 visits a day. Image if you had 2,000 posts?
I see a lot of blogs and websites that look great, have awesome content, and gorgeous images that might do well on Pinterest, but do not publish content often enough. Not just that, the content needs to keep flowing in at a consistent rate, because when it stops, your site feels the pinch.
Search engines are not the only creatures that like your fresh content. Just remember, people social share new content, get notified about it through syndication, and wait especially for it.
Increase Your Website Traffic #2—Help More People
There are amusement parks all over the world, so why do thousands of people fly from all across the planet to visit Disney World? It’s because Disney provides an incredible experience which can’t be matched by any local amusement park.
If your website offers information or another valuable service which can’t be found anywhere else, you’ll almost instantly increase your website traffic as people come to get what you offer.
Too many sites out there follow only the advice in the first section of this article. They post more content—but it’s weak content, poorly-written or poorly-produced.
If you publish high-quality content when everyone else publishes low-quality content, you’ll attract people to your website in droves. Well they might not be in droves but you will attract highly targeted traffic. This traffic is the most valuable.
If you offer news when everyone else offers opinion, you’ll be the primary source for every other site in your niche. If you offer tutorials when everyone else publishes top–10 lists, you’ll be the authority people turn to when they need help.
Increase your website traffic by being the best in your niche.
Increase Your Website Traffic #3—Find Partners
There’s an old saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Few truer words have been spoken.
There are probably hundreds or thousands of people in your niche. Some of them are content producers like you. Some of them are customers. Some of them are sellers.
Take your time to get to know as many of these people as you can. Every relationship counts. I know Ileane has built her empire by building relationships and if anyone is an expert, she definitely is!
How do relationships help you increase your website traffic? The more you know about people—and the more they know about you—the easier it will be for you and them to form partnerships which can grow your website by leaps and bounds.
Consider how much it will increase your website traffic to start a partnership with another top content producer in your niche. Or how helpful it will be to have a top seller in your niche endorse your website. Or how word-of-mouth can increase traffic once customers start raving to each other about you and your site.
Increase Your Website Traffic #4—Referral Traffic
If you do not know what referral traffic is, you better get familiar with it once and for all!
It is almost the opposite of search engine traffic, which is exactly what you want if you plan NOT to rely on Google. It is simply traffic from other sites, usually from your white hat link building or links others have built for you.
Check out the screenshot below. I have been working hard on increasing my referral traffic to all of my sites.
29% of my traffic is referral website traffic which is amazing! Very low traffic sites could also boast about this but my site is not in any way a low traffic site.
I must admit that going for this traffic can mean you get less traffic overall, but the it is targeted website traffic and very valuable for my business.
You can all guess how I got this referral traffic. It is from guest posting, social media, and posting videos on Youtube. You may receive 50% of your traffic from Google—but you may also discover that 90% of you customers come from blog referrals.
Stop worrying about Google. Google doesn’t care whether you succeed or fail—but the people who know and like you will actively help you increase your website traffic.
Watch Ms. Ileane's video to Find Out Who Is Tweeting About Your Content!
Hi Mitz,
People say a lot of things about getting traffic but I sincerely think these 3 are more important. Yes, the more you publish engaging articles, the more you get visitors. One simple reason for this is that visitors who came to your site yesterday will surely not be there today to read and share the same content the read and shared yesterday. If fresh content is published frequently, you also get frequent action from visitors – shares, tweets, likes, Google+, comments, mentions, etc.
Thanks for yet another meaty post and do have a great weekend
Nice article! Referral Traffic is probably the best for any site because they are targeted traffic to a great extent and the user already gets an idea what kind of data or services they can expect from the destination site.
Yes referral traffic is golden. 🙂 I love it.
Refferal traffic is always the source of traffic which make a great difference to you web rankings and SERPS too…because referral traffic is something which clearly shows how much interested audience are there for your product….i.e. something shows the health of your website if you have a good refferal traffic your website is healthy….
Thanks for sharing such articles
Keep posting
I am not sure about the referral traffic helping your rankings in the search engines unless the links are counted for SEO? I am trying to test what works after the last algorithms but have no clear results yet.
I definitely agree that if you have a steady amount of referral traffic to your site it is healthy.
Some people might thing that you post a lot content will only get you so far and annoying but about me, I just publish 1 post, get around 5 to 10 comments and social proof then just move on publish another post, get the same result. At the of end of the day, all you do it’s really just to put them all up as a tutorial and that will even get you more traffic and help a lot more people without slowing down your work.
That sounds like a good strategy. 🙂
After a very long interval, I have come to your site @ Referral traffic is the best way to maintain the traffic growth of any website or blog. Normally, only a few bloggers are enjoying direct love of Big G and rest are depending on referral traffic, those are really target oriented.
Whether you are launching a SEO campaign or not, fresh and usable content on your website is essential. Time and again, Google has said that relevant content earns plus points. Social media sharing does help increase traffic as well as improve ranks. If you have a video, pictures or infographics that can engage users, you can do well to share them in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and other websites like Pinterest and YouTube.
hi mitz
nice article. referral traffic is good for new website because new website are get some time for indexing in search engine that time you can get good website referral traffic.thank for sharing.
Having a multi-author blog is the key to producing more and more content for your blog. That’s why it’s important to make connections with people who are good writers in your niche. They help to keep the content flowing.
Yes that is one way to keep up with content. 🙂
Very informative article you have shared.
While going through the article, the best part I liked is the “Increase Your Website Traffic #3—Find Partners”.
Thanks for the share mate.
I appreciate your efforts.
Blog comment and Stumble upon seems to be the best way of getting some referral traffic for my site. Facebook and twitter is not working for me. I think I need to work something out for these two.
For those of us that rely on our sites to drive business, it’s imperative to both backup and protect our information and the database too.
Traffic from related forums is also very important. The conversion rate is higher for forum traffic and they are likely to return the website from time to time.
Yep, totally agree with all your points here, especially writing quality content and building relationships. While I am always happy to help others, I hadn’t thought of that as a traffic building strategy. Thanks for the suggestion.
Hi Mitz,
SEO is such a moving target any more that I’ve stopped paying attention to it. Outside of the basic good practice optimization strategies, I focus more on connecting socially with my market.
But that’s also something I think the search engines are looking more at as well. It doesn’t make sense that Google wants to deliver information that THEY want you to see, they want to deliver information that their viewers find of value, and that comes from noticing content that gets social likes, tweets, mentions, etc.
I find it’s a bit more work to socially promote, certainly not as easy as search engine optimizing your web pages and having them rank well for their key phrases, but that strategy is getting harder and harder.
So connecting socially is my main mode of increasing traffic these days. I spend a lot of time at it but I also like it 🙂
Blessings,
Liz
Hi Liz
You are right. Who knows about SEO today? All I know is that you still need awesome content that is written so the search engines and the humans can tell what it is about. (I guess that is what you mean by basics anyway)
As for social, I do this but the conversion rate is not good for some sites. I use different methods for different niches. My best traffic comes directly from Youtube, Forums, Yahoo Answers, Other blogs. I guess this is before they get to share anything and get distracted by social media. 🙂
I never rely on Google for traffic. The niche I’m in is too crowded anyway and it would just be a waste of time to try to get to the first page…although I’ve gotten there just out of pure content several times on a complete accident!
I think people would prefer getting more traffic from search engines like Google as most of the advertisers (like media.net and adsense) have a key requirement of getting traffic from search engines ..Anyways these tips can be used by bloggers to get additional traffic..And i think ,These tips are good for people who do not get much traffic from search engines and relying on affiliate marketing to earn money online .
Regards,
Pramod
I get quite a lot of referral traffic from Triberr and I’d recommend it because not only do I get traffic from there but I also get additional traffic from Twitter.
I agree that posting more content equals more traffic and I wish I had the time. When I tried an experiment for a month to post three times a week instead of once it showed quite a big increase in traffic.
Hi Tim, Thanks for sharing a great website. At the first day of sign up I actually got referral traffic, its awesome and I also recommend to use Triberr. Can you tell more of these types of networks?
Hi Mitz,
Good points – I especially like your #2 about helping more people – that’s probably going to boost #4, because people are more likely to refer others to your site if they’ve reason to thank you.
Sue
Hi Susan
Yes you are right there. It is a chain reaction. Everything you do contributes to building a snowball that will eventually turn into an avalanche. 🙂
I am currently using a lot of the social media such as Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Like one of the other comments – they are not really working out for me. I see these social sites splattered with, “come and visit my blog/site’ posts. So, I am continually looking for better alternatives to increase my traffic.
I personally think social is too easy and also can be bought and paid for. Even when I got thousands of visitor from Stumbleupon, the traffic was crap for me and lowered my conversion rates. I can get traffic from other sources and see amazing results. You need to not follow what people say and find the traffic that YOU need.
I do use Twitter, Facebook and G+ but I would not solely rely on them. There is just too much spam involved.
Hi there,
Nice post and completely agree with you on all the points.
I am a lazy guy so posting more content is just not the right option for me. However I have had some nice results with referral traffic and it is one of my biggest traffic sources currently.
Though I can’t help more people as I am not an expert in any thing but I try to help where ever I can. 🙂
As you learn something there will always be someone else that wants to know what you have just learned. Thats how it works. 🙂
Hi Mitz,
Excellent tips as usual to attract traffic from other sources ! Pretty inspired reading the points #1 and #2
Awesome points your for there and I love your very last sentences that reads:
“Stop worrying about Google. Google doesn’t care whether you succeed or fail—but the people who know and like you will actively help you increase your website traffic.”
That’s really true. I hate it when people write for bot, not for human. I just sound unnatural.
As for me. Writing posts is the best way to garner more traffic. More importantly we have to write posts that are of high quality and helpful for others. Then those posts will be recommended to more people. So the key has always been about writing good content. 🙂
Wow, amazing tips of increasing traffic, thanks for sharing
Well, most of my traffic usually comes from facebook only. And that can happen because of the content only.
So yeah, as the saying goes: Content is King.
I am really agreed with your first step on getting an extra traffic on our blog. Maybe i am apply this for my blog, this is because i have no idea and zero experience about google. I dont have any idea how to make my post rank in google. Thanks for the above guide!
yes, you are right that we should not depend upon only Google. We should write articles for readers also, creating backlinks, social media promotion, guest blogging are sources to get huge traffic.
Very well done job
Lovely article. I too feel there is a need for change of perspective in regard to relying on just google for traffic. Referral traffic is important and for it the points mentioned here are great.
I love the first choice. Posting more content means more traffic. It can drive traffic from SEs with thousands of long tail keywords. Also, more content is like a shop with lots of shoes. When a visitors enters , he/she spends much time there. Thanks for the great post, Mitz
Hi Milica.
First of all thanks for sharing such an amazing article with us. Well helping others can really bring huge traffic back to your site. I am currently focusing on more content, guest posting, forum posting and commenting.
Keep up the good work and keep posting more related content. Would love to hear more from you.
Regards 🙂
Hi Mitz,
Great article. Couldn’t agree with you more. Content is King! Thanks for the tips.
Looking forward to your next post.
Relying on google now a days is full of risk. we should try this one.
There’s also a good tip about writing a free information paper on any given topic without selling anything/ your product in it apart from one link to your site at the end in the bio. That way you can provide it to a relevant blog owner in your niche and ask them to give it to their readership for free. That will get you good traffic
Hey Mitz,
You’ve written amazing post but you didn’t mentioned anything about content promotion. I’m spending a lot of time bookmarking my content. Is content promotion working for you or I should focus my attention in another deriction?
I like the way of posting frequency,the more you post the more you have visitors and the second permanent source as you have described is the referral traffic.
Hi Mitz,
really a great refferal traffic that you receive. every single tip out of the four is of great value and us drive good traffic. But I must say that traffic from search engines should always be the priority of any blogger. there are some algorithms that have never changed such as keyword research. so why to ignore such algorithms and waste a lot of traffic???
But I loved to read your post. Your name reminds me one of my best friends Ritz.
I am actually getting frustrated with Google. Traffic has been going downhill and as a result, I’m looking for alternate ways to get more referral traffic
It is good in a way that it means I’m focusing more on steady and loyal traffic than a once-off search engine traffic most of the time
Hi Michael
I know what you mean..
Also more sales should come from the right referral traffic. That will make your site very valuable.
Hey Mitz,
So true….!! Its very important to rely on your readers interest more than the google. Because google works like a dependent variable in a mathematical equation that readers depend on our content and way of maintaining the relationships and similarly google follows and is dependent on the people. So ultimatum is the CATHCY HEADING for this article of yours.
Thanks a lot for removing so many misconceptions.
Regards
Charmie
I just publish 1 post, get around 5 to 10 comments and social proof then just move on publish another post, get the same result. At the of end of the day, all you do it’s really just to put them all up as a tutorial and that will even get you more traffic and help a lot more people without slowing down your work.
You are right. Sometimes, Google can frustrate a person. I keep trying everything to do the right thing as far as they are concerned. Sometimes I fee like I am rambling in the dark. I want to learn more about referral traffic.
Mitz
Excellent article! Seriously! I have been warning people for some time to break there dependence on Google. I was one of them! But I was smart enough to work on the points you just mentioned as I was hit by Penguin pretty hard.
Then after doing a thorough audit of my blog? I realized that I need to work on getting ‘real’ content that is helpful and informative.
If your aren’t following what Mitz is talking about? You too will get hit.
I agree, these days no one should rely on Google for traffic because it is totally unreliable for the great majority of websites. Also following Google’s rules would make a blogger going crazy since they change them every other day. Think about ads above the fold. Or paid traffic which is allowed only if coming from AdWords.
And let’s forget about relevant results, if someone is still able to find results within all those Google ads. How many spots there are now on the first page of search results if we take away ads and YouTube? Three? Four?
That’s simply too much competition. Especially for someone not using AdWords. Because all changes Google makes are aimed at pushing AdWords and Google+, imho.
So I just don’t care anymore about Google and go on my way getting traffic from other sources. Given that many bloggers are doing the same this in the future will send Google out of business and it will be a blessing for the net. Imho. 🙂
First of all I like the title of this article; “increasing traffic without relying on Google” this sentence is impressive and shocking as well. First point of this article is only target in my life. I refer many internet marketing blogs especially i read updates form matt cutts blog, many time matt cuts says improve content quality.
From my point of view quality content no need SEO or link building for top ranking in Google.
Solid content Mitz. Building relationships is absolutely crucial. It’s a big piece of the success puzzle. Being great at what you do isn’t enough. Like you said it’s more about who you know than what you know.
Great article. I think this is very valuable for someone like myself who is new to blogging, as SEO / Google seems like a mountain to climb, but getting traffic using alternative methods is what I’ve thought of as the best way to get my blog off the ground.
Nice article. I’ve seen a lot of people on the Internet struggling to get more traffic to their websites, but they forget about the basics. Sometimes the simplest things work the best.
Hi Mitz,
Really a nice post. Yes we should not set Google only for bad traffic results on our blog as i have also seen the same thing on my blog and then realized that if i keep going posting new posts then the mates of our blogging world will surely pull us upwards and help us to increase our blog`s traffic.
In addition , your referral traffic is quite nice……….
I realize this blog is aging but the last 3 tips are Awesome.
Instead of just exchanging social shares and chasing after the same BIG influencers -we should be helping more people, forming partnerships with peers and focusing on referral sources.
Ever consider going retro with our blog promotion, Ileane?
~Keri
Absolutely Keri! As you pointed out, this blog post has been around for a long time but the concepts are evergreen!