When you Google ‘best traffic sources for a website’ you will generally see tens and tens of articles all saying the same thing: search engines and social media. As much as this is true, it is not the most helpful for those that already spend effort, in terms of SEO and social media. Pretty much every website already focuses on search engine optimization and social media marketing – what are the other good traffic sources we can concentrate our spare efforts on? With this, here are four sources of web traffic that we should all spend some time into, since they have the potential to bring some serious traffic when done right.
 

Quora/Yahoo Answers

Quora and Yahoo answers are a gold mine for websites to generate traffic for them. They enable anyone to ask questions and anyone to answer them. Because of this, the question posts tend to get good SEO on Google, enabling for lots of impressions potentially seeing your answer.
Look into answering genuine questions from people, where visiting your website would benefit the answer. For example, for my poetry analysis website, PoemAnalysis.com, it would be a good idea to link to the article of the specific poem being analysed, for which somebody is asking a question about. If your answer is good it will get up votes, giving the answer more exposure – this provides the incentive for people to answer to the best of their abilities.
 

Email Marketing

Many people steer well clear of email marketing, since they are scared of the amount of effort and time it will take to get an audience to email, to begin with. Saying this, once you have the audience, they genuinely are there for a very long time. This means email marketing is an extremely effective way to get repetitive traffic to your website, helping yourself to build a relationship and audience too.
 

Commenting

Similar to Quora and Yahoo Answers, it can be beneficial to comment on like-minded websites, similar to yours, to provide your opinion and share information (for which web users can find out more by visiting your website). This is effective since the audience will generally be targeted already from viewing the content, and enables you to have conversations with potential new audiences.
 

Forums

Continuing the theme of conversations, forums are really good. They tend to get good SEO and can provide lots of traffic when you add messages to forums that contribute to the forum they are in. With this, it makes clear that with these traffic sources comes responsibility. They do not work if you spam any of them with lots of content – any time you post any information, it needs to be informative, to the point and have a valid reason to link to your website from the content you are writing about.