Have you ever wondered what kind of traffic is most desirable for a new blog? The answer is both direct traffic and referral traffic are important for any kind of blog.
For old blogs organic and direct traffic are important. In case of old blogs, most of the organic traffic itself acts as referral traffic. Therefore, referral traffic matters less in case of older blogs.
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Referral Traffic vs. Direct Traffic[/caption]Referral traffic
Referral traffic is the traffic landing on your blog due to social shares, your comments, forum activities, etc. In simple words, it is the traffic obtained by referral of any other person or social media.
Benefits:
Referral traffic is important for a new blog, to get direct, loyal readers to your blog. Referral traffic is like an initial fuel for your newborn blog.
- Without any link to your new blog on the web, how can the blog readers discover your blog?
- You know that new blogs get little or no organic traffic from Google and other search engines. Therefore, there is no referral traffic in the form of organic traffic. The main goal of a very new blog should be to drive referral traffic.
- Perfect way to start up a new blog is to gain referral traffic, which in turn results in a vast amount of direct visitors, and traffic.
- Referral traffic is not dependent on algorithmic changes of Google and other search engines.
How to bring referral traffic to your blog? You can get referral traffic by content marketing, networking with others in your niche, linking out and featuring people with big audiences, forum marketing, blog commenting, guest posting, syndication and sharing (Reddit, Kingged, StumbleUpon, Scoop It, Inbound, Inside IM, GrowthHacker etc.), videos, uploading slides to Slideshare or whatever else works.
Direct traffic
Once your blog gets a decent amount of direct traffic you can make sure that your referral traffic strategy has worked. Some of the visitors who visited your blog via referral traffic stick to your blog.
If your blog has high direct traffic you can make sure that, you have quality articles, and is a good sign.
Medium: Direct traffic often comes from your competitors, regular readers who have bookmarked your blog or who have an interest in your blog and has remembered the web address of your blog.
Vast amount of direct traffic is definitely a good thing. Direct traffic means that your blog visitors are sticking to your blog.
Benefits:
- Creates a strong brand.
- Protects you even if search engines disappoint you. In other words, direct traffic is not dependent on shaky factors.
- Increase your affiliate sales; visitors often coming from direct traffic are loyal visitors, who recognize you as authoritative.
- Long-term traffic, visitors stick to your blog until the glue melts down.
- Gets you the motivation to write great content, as there are readers.
How to measure referral and direct traffic
You can easily measure referral and direct traffic with the help of Google Analytics. If you do not have a Google Analytics account, sign up for a Google Analytics account and set up Google Analytics on your blog.
Once Google Analytics has collected enough traffic data of your blog, you will be able to measure referral and direct traffic to your blog.
Direct traffic normally has a low bounce rate and high page views per visit. You can easily say that more number of direct visitors is a good sign and is indirectly helpful for rankings.
Direct visitors should be valued because they are regular visitors; they are filtered visitors from referral visitors.
Consider referral and direct visitors relationship as,
Throwing referral visitors to a sticky wall (your blog), those who stick to the wall becomes direct or permanent visitor of your blog. If your wall is more sticky (has quality content), conversion rate is more.
Final words
I can say that initially without getting referral traffic, there will be no direct traffic. For a new blog referral traffic and direct trafficboth are equally important. More and more referral traffic leads to direct traffic and direct traffic in turn results in referrals.
To gain huge amount of direct traffic for a new blog, referral traffic and quality content is necessary.
I hope this blog post has helped you, if so, do comment or share this blog post.
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