how to find referrals

if you want to deliver really targeted trafficto your website and you want to look outside traditional means of seo,then you should focus your attentions on referral traffic. this videois going to take a look at 15 ways to do that. what we've done is raidedthe koozai analytics account and some of our clients to find which 15 are thebest, which 15 work frequently from account to account to account. and theseare all sites that you can rely on to deliver a good amount of referraltraffic to your website. first of all, we're going to look at socialnetworks. so we've got twitter, facebook, linkedin, and google+. these arethe core four to look at. and if

you don't do anything else based on this list,please register an account on all of those profiles. once you've registeredan account, you can grow that account by sharing content with people,by having discussions on these social networks, and by being a good samaritanin your community. if that doesn't work, you can advertise onthese networks, such as linkedin and facebook actually have ads on them thatcan drive people to your page to become a fan. once they've done that, youcan then post regular content on there which people can share with theirnetworks or can view at their leisure as a referral traffic source.

the second way is to find people who've gotstrong profiles already on these sites and to encourage them to shareyour content. you can also make it really easy for them by putting socialsharing buttons on your website, all of these four sites have buttons thattake two minutes to install. and with one click, people can share yourcontent with their friends. next we've got pinterest, which is technicallya social network, but i've included it separately because it requiresa different treatment. if you've got visually interesting content, then pinterestis perfect. if you don't have visually interesting content, well, youreally should be asking

yourself why. why don't you have visual contenton your site? it takes minutes just to grab a pen and a whiteboard,to sketch something interesting out, to take a picture and putit on your blog. in fact, they say a picture is worth a thousandwords. you can often do content quicker by drawing it and taking aphoto than you can by writing a long blog post. so, try that out. if you wantto give pinterest a go and you say that you've got no visual content,well i challenge you to take a piece of paper and draw something interestingand see what you can get out of it. if you've got more time and money,then create infographics or

really more complex diagrams that people willwant to share. and, in fact, our pinterest account was thehighest referring source that we'd had that day on the first day we openedit. and we're talking hundreds of people in that day came from pinterestwith a brand new account just because we shared lots of interesting contentin one go. and also, it's one of the few sites where a brand new accountcan do that. it takes a lot longer to build a high profile account onany other site, whereas pinterest you can go and hit the ground running straightaway. so just because everyone is saying you should use pinterest,that doesn't mean that you

should not use pinterest. give it a go. youtube, taking a step up from pinterest.if you can create useful image content, then you should also be able to createvideo content. again, just grab a camera off anyone or use your iphone,set up a board, and record yourself talking about interesting thingsin your industry. that's how we got started, and now we do them every weekbecause we find they're a great way to share content. the good thing aboutputting content on youtube is that at the top of your page, if you've gota high profile account, then you get links to any content you want andthey're followed links.

at the bottom of every post, even if you don'thave a high profile account, you can add a link to any piece of contentyou want. so if people read your content and they want to learn more, you canactually put in the description, "to read more about this contentclick here," and direct them off to your site on a blog post that explainsit in more detail. it's very effective. next, we've got social bookmarking sites,which ollie did a fantastic video on last week, so i won't cover these in toomuch depth. but you've got delicious, stumbleupon, and reddit. they'rethe top three that work for us.

and you can submit your content to these ina matter of seconds, really, once you've made an account. and you can alsoadd buttons to your website so people can share content. we don't do that with every piece of contentwe have. but if content's really interesting and has taken a lot ofour time or it's very visual, we will add these buttons on and they can bevery effective. again, we're talking hundreds of people. in fact, we'vehad thousands of people from reddit over the last few months. if you canmake the front page of reddit by having quite a lot of shares in a shortamount of time, then you'll be

very impressed with the amount of visitorsit brings you. next, we've got paper.li and there's alsoscoop.it which are both newspapers that get made online with the varioustweets people have made that day of interesting content. so, if wego back to twitter and when we're saying to get high profile people toshare you content, well you should actually seek out high profile peoplethat have got these type of accounts, paper.li and scoop.it on the basisthat if they share your content, it also appears on these sites andgenerates more referral traffic for you there. and we are talking a good amount.this is in our top 15

referrers in the last year, which is verysurprising. i was surprised when i saw it, and it made me take it a lot moreseriously. so there's a good chance that those people, when they shareyour content, it will appear on this page. we've got outbrain next, which if you've everread a news site and you've seen at the bottom it's got recommended storieson other websites, outbrain is probably how they get that content. they'reeverywhere. people pay to appear there for a short time and they payper click. it's a very effective way of driving referral traffic. it's workingat about 20p a click for us.

from an seo perspective, it's not seen asa paid link in a good or bad way because google can't index the content atall. so don't use outbrain for your seo strategy because it won't have aneffect, good or bad. but if you want to drive referral traffic, that's whatoutbrain is perfect for. google news. if you're publishing regularnews content and it is news focused and not opinion focused, you can getincluded on google news. however, if you don't publish regularly andyou do have opinions, then google news won't include you. so it's a verysmall area of sites that it applies to. but if it does apply to you orif you can take the time to set

up a news part of your website that publishestwo or three times a day, then you will get included, and that's whereyou can get a lot of traffic. and we're talking hundreds a day from googlenews if you are in a very competitive niche. also google news has theadvantage of appearing in the search results as an independent entity. soit could appear very high in the results one day, allowing you to rankfor a competitive term that you may not be able to touch organically. prweb. if you have news, but it's not everytwo days or frequent enough for google news, submit a press release on prwebor another free press release

website. and in that press release, make surethat you tell the story but that there's an extra piece of informationthat people will want to read on your site. then include a link to read morein the press release that directs people over here and then you getreferral traffic. you want to take them away from prweb and get them toyour site as quick as possible because that's where they'll convert. technorati. although it sounds techy, technoratiwill convert any blog that's online. you give them an rss feed andthen they post all your content on their site with links to read more.it's a very, very effective

site and relevant to almost any niche outthere. and finally, we've got meetup. meetup letspeople create meetings and events for free. you can either sponsor anevent and get a link that way, or you can talk at an event and be listedas a speaker. or you can host your own event. either way, which route yougo down, make sure that your link is on there so people can read more.we've actually held a meetup event ourselves and, again, it did reallygood traffic for our website with people who wanted to know who had organisedthis event. and it was free for us to do. so try it out.

if you only do one or two, as i say, startat the top. there's benefits to be had in all of these sites. and at the veryleast, you should register a profile on all of them because you never knowwhen you might need it, and you want to, obviously, protect your brandname on these sites as well. you don't want someone else to register a koozaiaccount on one of these profiles, and the same with your brand name. i hope you found this guide useful. be sureto leave a comment to let us know how you get on. i'm sure there's a tonmore really good referral sites that we'd like to know. so please share themwith everyone. and for more

information on what we do, visit koozai.comor any of the social profiles below. and best of luck getting some reallygreat referral traffic to your site. thank you.