How can content distribution methods drive referrals?

Building your brand and increasing sales and profitability can be difficult if you’re new to marketing and internet technologies. There are a number of ways to drive referrals and traffic to your website and utilising proven content distribution methods is one solution that can be far more effective than simply optimising your site for search (SEO). You should consider adopting a wide range of marketing strategies and devices to drive referrals to your site and some proven content distribution channels and methodologies are discussed below.

Ways content distribution methods can drive referrals to your website

Well written and informative content is key to increasing site visitors, but simply posting your content on your site blog isn’t really enough as it should be promoted more widely. Adding your valuable content to internet distribution channels can increase referrals to your site phenomenally. If you purely rely on SEO and your business blog to attract visitors to your site, you’re potentially missing out on hundreds, thousands, even millions of visitors to your site. Posting your content to some of the relevant communities on social media platforms could increase your referral traffic considerably.

Five great content distribution channels to drive referrals

Some of the content distribution methods you could try out for increasing referrals to your site include:

1. Repurposing some of your content into video or infographic format for sharing on social media. Infographics are increasingly popular with marketing professionals and their use has skyrocketed in the past few years. It’s important to realise that 93% of all human communications are visual, with words making up just 7% of communication. Some of the channels you could use for submitting your infographic include reddit.com, infographiclove.com and infographicsarchive.com. Video content marketing is also on the up, particularly with users of mobile devices. Repurposing some of your content into short video clips and adding a short call to action (CTA) at the end can be an extremely successful method of driving referrals to your site.

2. Sending your valuable content on to all the consumers on your email list is another useful content distribution method which will enhance traffic to your site. What’s more, you are highly likely to attract even more traffic using this method, as your email contacts will share your content with others in their social networks.

3. SlideShare attracts more than 50mn visitors each month, so this LinkedIn site is well worth your time when it comes to sharing presentations summarising your content.

4. If you’re looking to attract younger visitors to your site BuzzFeed can offer great exposure and around 50% of the channel’s visitors are in the 18 – 34 age bracket. The site provides a community section which publishes crowd sourced stories from its users, so it’s easy to get your content featured and the excellent promotion the site provides on social media channels means even more referrals will be driven to your site.

5. Reddit is an extremely popular online forum with a high Alexa ranking of 30, so promoting your goods and services on the site can be a very successful way of increasing your visitors. It’s important that content is not too promotional, as the site’s users don’t appreciate this type of content very much. The kind of content that does prove successful on Reddit includes competitions and contests, guides and detailed instructions, and interviews with professionals and experts within their field.

Before embarking on any major content distribution push it’s vital that you understand the audience and consumers you are targeting, as this will inform your decision about the best channels for your content.