Where To Share Content To Get Traffic In 2019
For digital publishers, growing traffic in a sustainable, ethical, and natural way can often be painstakingly slow. Traditional methods of building organic traffic through SEO, or by gathering social traffic through other platforms, can be a long and time-consuming process. Content creators are always seeking new places where they can share content to get traffic quickly.
Unfortunately, finding good places to get quality website traffic can be hard. Sharing content is the best way to ensure the visitors coming to your site are good quality, but few places on the web offer the reach needed to make content sharing efforts worth it.
Below, I’ll highlight some content sharing strategies — and emerging outlets — that you can use to grow your visitors quickly. I’ll dive into how to approach these platforms and how to increase your chances of garnering a quick source of good quality traffic through content sharing.
What do you mean by “sharing content”?
I should probably clarify part of the idea behind these strategies to grow traffic and website visitors.
I’m a big believer in developing good, quality web traffic. This is done by creating great content that people want to read.
Who wants a bunch of junk web traffic to their website that isn’t going to generate any quality revenue or improve the long-term potential of your website?
…No one.
Analogy: A successful website traffic growth strategy is like serving good food in a restaurant. Eventually, people will find out and begin to come back regularly. Unfortunately, this can often take a lot of time. It would be nice if word could travel quickly to speed this process up.
To get your great content in front of people interested in reading it faster, you need to find some places where people are already hanging out to share that content.
Below are 4 different places that are on the rise in 2019 as successful traffic sources. Many blogs and popular websites are starting to see these referral sources as some of their top contributors to overall website traffic.
I’ll outline how to use them to your advantage and how to avoid spamming these channels.
1.) Quora is a limitless referral channel
For those unfamiliar with Quora, it has quickly risen to become one of the top 8 providers of referral traffic to digital publishers.
For many subject verticals, Quora ranks ahead of places like Reddit, LinkedIn, and even Twitter for visitor referrals. Now boasting over 500M visitors per month, Quora is a democratic forum to spread and share content freely without the fear of algorithms penalizing certain types of content or posts.
Much in the same way that Yahoo Answers operates, Quora is a platform that allows users to ask any number of questions about just about any topic on the planet. Then, other users can supply answers to these questions using a fairly open set of tools (including links, images, text, and more).
Quora questions are commonly featured as the number one results in Google search. Therefore, certain Quora threads see tens of thousands of visitors per month. Many publishers are able to generate thousands of visitors per month from single answers on popular Quora threads.
To be featured as a top answer to these questions, all you have to do is provide one of the best answers to the question. Other users can vote up your answer, or Quora will track user behavior, to ultimately push popular answers to the top.
Tips for being a top answer on Quora:
- Fill out your Quora profile with multiple credentials (Make a credential that establishes you as an authority for all the types of questions you answer)
- Answer lots of questions to build a following and increase your chances of getting in on popular questions early
- Follow subjects pertaining to your content so you can be one of the first to answer
- Include images and proper headings in bold text in your answers
- Avoid big blocks of text (break each paragraph into 1-2 sentences)
Tips for hacking your way to the top of Quora:
- Being one of the first to answer a question greatly increases your chances of being a top answer
- Search for questions relevant to good content on your website that have lots of views and very few existing answers
- Use the “Answer” tab at the top to identify questions that are new and without any answers
Tips for writing Quora posts that send traffic to your site:
- Use headings (bold them) and write actual answers, but make sure you link back to your original content on your site
- Take full excerpts from your content and post them to Quora, then link to your article to allow people to “keep reading”
- Provide answers but ensure that people understand that there is MORE IN-DEPTH content on your website
- Add your site as a part of your credential (including the .com part)
- Answer lots of questions (this is why using existing content is helpful), this will increase your chances of having popular posts
Example of a popular post that I had that ranked as a top answer. It sends lots of traffic to this particular blog post.
2.) Reddit is a massive opportunity with a few risks
For those that may not be aware, Reddit is officially one of the largest websites on the web; rivaling Facebook and Google in many instances.
It also has far less regulation and oversite than most of the larger social platforms on the web. This means it’s a tremendous source of potential referral traffic.
Unfortunately, simply posting your content in sub/Reddits (places inside Reddit dedicated to particular topics or subjects) will get you shunned by users (and banned from their forum). The last thing you want to do is associate your website with spam and to get banned from sub/Reddits related to your website’s topic.
The best way to strike a successful balance here is to actually become an active Reddit user. Join sub/Reddits on topics related to your website’s content — that also allow link-sharing. Many sub/Reddits do not allow link-sharing.
Participate in discussions within those sub/Reddits and only share your best content here on occasion. When done properly, this can result in huge booms of traffic.
Try to browse the sub/Reddit and understand what communities each like to read about most. This will help you understand which pieces of content you create (or already have) that will be the most popular in these channels.
Join multiple sub/Reddits that have a large number of members. Participate in all of them and measure which posts and sub/Reddits give you the best stats when you do share content there.
Understanding how your content performs will help you avoid angering other users. You want to make sure your content is always appreciated.
3.) Flipboard is an easy place to share all of your content
Flipboard was initially made popular when it was featured as the home screen by default on many popular Samsung and other Android mobile devices.
Since then, it has been a popular content aggregation resource for consumers around the globe. While not the most efficient place to share content, sharing content on Flipboard is as easy as a few clicks once it is all set up.
Simply create an account as a publisher and set up several “Magazines” on all the topic verticals that you cover with your website. Then, download the Flipboard Chrome Extension.
Now, simply navigate to all of the content you’d like to share to Flipboard and use the Chrome Extension in your browser window to flip the content into the proper magazines you created. Over time, some of these magazines will accumulate more and more followers that will begin to read new and existing articles.
While not on the same scale as Reddit or Quora, publishers can very easily set up Flipboard magazines and share their content into them without any risks. Over time, many publishers begin to see a lot of referral traffic through this strategy.
4.) LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups give you secret traffic on these platforms
We all know that Facebook and LinkedIn both limit their native reach by governing access to users with algorithms.
This means that reaching an audience and producing traffic from these channels has gotten harder and harder over the years.
This has made it difficult for publishers to use these platforms to consistently generate significant website traffic by working inside these social mediums. However, groups within these platforms are currently exempt from many of the reach-limiting algorithms that exist throughout the rest of the platform.
By joining groups on these platforms that are related to the subjects and topics relevant to your content, you can access large groups of users on these platforms without the fear of having your reach limited.
To find good groups, simply go into the group’s sections of these respective platforms and search for subjects and topics related to the content on your website.
Then, attempt to join the groups that appear to have lots of members. I typically try to find groups with 10k or more members.
Many Facebook and LinkedIn groups will require applications or approvals to join, so don’t just randomly spam all the groups you can find. Try to pick out groups that you could see your content meshing well with.
You’ll have to treat these groups on both LinkedIn and Facebook like how I discussed treating Reddit earlier in this blog.
Spamming groups with content and never participating in discussions is a formula for being blacklisted and removed. No one likes a spammer. Even if you’re only in the group to share your content, take the time to participate in discussions and evaluate the group to learn which content is likely to perform the best inside that particular group.
You’ll want to avoid sharing all of your content that is relevant into these groups. Just share the material you think is likely to be commented on or liked the most. This will ensure your posts stay at the top of the group newsfeed the longest (on both LinkedIn and Facebook).
Both platforms automatically feature the most popular posts at the top by default. If you can understand the audience inside of each group you can tailor posts to ensure that your content remains featured at the top longer.
For example: Try asking a question in the post that features the link to your content. This will encourage clicks and engagement on these threads.
Neither Facebook or LinkedIn have expressed much recent interest in throttling the reach available in their groups, so it should be a prime target for publishers to share content in 2019.
Share content in 2019 and measure your results
Content is king, but only if it is being read by your audience.
Sharing content can help you grow and expand that audience quickly.
Take the time to review new referral traffic sources in Google Analytics or Big Data Analytics each month to see which channels are performing the best.
Have other places you like to share content? Leave them in the comments and help others discover your smart secrets.