To grow referral traffic, consider following the steps: 

Part one – Using groups, blogs, and forums 

1: Be active on Quora and in Linkedin Groups 

Many professionals choose Quora and Linkedin Groups as ways to get traffic and leads to their business site. At the same time, though, they are investing in their personal branding.

These two can be used as sources:

• of traffic you can leverage

• of relevant topics you can expand on/explain, discuss, or learn about

• to meet and follow people from your industry

• that give you access to new audiences 

You’ll want to participate in the group by beginning relevant discussions by commenting on existing threads.

Starting discussions and participating in them can be quite time-consuming. But your effort will pay off once members can see you are able to add value and contribute to a culture of worthwhile discussion.

In order for your comments to be effective as sources of traffic, it is vital to contribute to active groups with sizable audience of enthusiastic and responsive readers. 

It is also important that you have a high level of expertise in the subject and that you are able to write content that the readers will find to contain new and useful information. You can build your brand faster, increase the trust readers have, and increase search traffic by writing well-researched and data-driven comments from which readers can take meaningful actions.

A few rules to keep in mind:

• Write content under your own name — ghost-written content has no value. Always get your byline on everything you produce.

• Link to influential writers and sites — when you create content, you want to be interacting with the top players in the field, and linking to the sites of people in positions of power within the niche will put these backlinks on their radar and can make them take note of your presence. 

• Once a comment has been posted, you should actively respond to the engagements it attracts and, in doing so, promote the content as much as possible.

2: Post on industry forums 

Online forums are perceived as a great source of potential leads and customers, but are often overlooked as a marketing tactic for generating traffic. 

You should focus your efforts on forums within your niche and you must ensure that the forum you are looking at is active — don’t waste your time on a forum that hasn’t had a new post for a month.

While registering for the forum, include your brand name. This will ensure people associate your comments with your brand. 

When posting on industry forums, you should look to provide value to readers, create connections and humanise your brand through referencing personal experiences instead of just offering advice. It is also vital not to sound too promotional in your posts.

Sharing your resources by, for example, starting a new thread with a link to resources that might be beneficial for the group, is another way to drive engagement. 

And finally, as I said in the previous section, it’s important to construct a signature that includes a strong call-to-action link.

Part 2 – Social media strategy and multimedia content

3: Leverage social media 

Every time you tweet, share, like, or pin a piece of content, you are creating an opportunity to drive referral traffic to your website. 

Across all social platforms, best-practice guidelines suggest that one should share the same content more than once and include images wherever possible. It is also vital to research and understand the most effective times to post on social platforms.

Making use of hashtags will increase your brand’s reach and maximise exposure.

Interacting with your audience on social media through running giveaways/competitions will serve to boost engagement with your brand, foster a powerful community, and create more leads.

4: Engage with influencers

To reap the maximum benefits for your brand, you will want to collaborate with influencers who have a large reach and those who have sufficient clout in the field that their endorsement of your business bestows credibility upon it.

Effective influencer marketing campaigns also can depend on finding influencers with high post engagements (i.e., shares, likes, and comments). Focusing then on “mid-size influencers” rather than bigger personalities is also a good idea.

While some brands will exchange visibility on influencer pages for free products and/or cash, you can begin to forge relationships with smaller influencers on social media by providing proactive sharing of their content where relevant to your audience. 

Creating a page on your website where the person with whom you are working can send traffic and then regularly customising this page for their audience is also vital to the success of your influencer marketing campaign. 

5: Create Video Marketing Campaigns 

Multimedia content of this nature is more shareable and more engaging than other forms of content, therefore driving more traffic back to its creator.

Effective video content recognises and is made specifically to suit the motive of your marketing campaign (be it new or ongoing), adopts a storytelling approach in order to better connect with the audience, and uses a call-to-action button to drive in more actions.

The way the video is promoted and, within that, the way it looks to the audience is just as important as the content of the video itself: The times and platforms on which the video is shared are hugely important, as is customising its appearance and adding features to increase engagement

There are a number of tools that can help make your video more optimal for this: The first of is YouTube Editor – this tool provides a variety of editing capabilities on site, which allow transcripts and comments to be added.

The second of these tools is Wideo – This offers you a variety of templates from which you can add logos and graphics to enhance the branding of your businesses.

6: Publish infographics and/or animations 

41% of marketers considered visual images as the most important form of content in their business.

Infographics and animations are popular online as they help people understand complex data with simple visuals. 

When the goal is to get your content shared, liked, and pinned on social networks and have others embed it in their articles — thus creating links to your website — the creation of this type of content is an excellent strategy.

Google say mobile-friendliness is now a ranking factor. In other words, if your infographics and other multimedia content isn’t displaying properly on different mobile and handheld devices, your chances of getting organic referral visitors are slim. Therefore, for best results, your content needs to be optimised to fit each platform.

In addition to your own website, social pages and blogs, there are several websites where you can post infographics. Pinterest, for instance, is responsible for around 5% of all referral traffic to websites, second only to Facebook.