Top 18 Social Networking (& Web 2.0) Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog In 2013

Social Media websites can drive insanely great traffic to your blog if you have a good social media marketing strategy. But it can drive fair amount of traffic if you just submit blog posts regularly to your social media profiles.

Social media traffic is as important as organic traffic from search engines as we can’t rely on Google alone. They continue to push algorithmic updates like Panda, Penguin and who knows the next could be Giraffe.

It means that we must diversify the way we get traffic. I’m going to list the top social media and other websites that you shouldn’t ignore or must use as part of your social media marketing strategy. I’m NOT going to list all the stupid social media or the so called web 2.0 sites out there as I’m going to focus only on sites that can drive traffic to our websites in one way or the other and not for building backlinks.

Read: What’s The Best Time To Share Your Content On Social Media?

Though the traffic quality of social media can’t be matched with that of organic traffic, it is still important. It helps us to keep the bounce rate low which is assumed to be one of the many ranking signals used by Google.

Top 18 Social Networking (& Web 2.0) Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

1. Facebook

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 2

Facebook has not only transformed the way people the world over connect, communicate and share ideas, pictures, videos and news, it’s made it possible for businesses to get their products across to a mass audience in a sensational win-win manner.

With over a billion active users it’s the largest social networking website. Leverage your Facebook friends and share your blog posts regularly with your Facebook friends and fan base.

2. Twitter

Google PageRank: 10 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 10

Twitter is the second most popular social network (microblogging platform to be more specific). If our content is viral in nature then it can bring instant massive traffic to our website in no time.

3. LinkedIn

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 13

LinkedIn is web’s favorite professional networking website with over 100 million active users. LinkedIn’s traffic quality is better than that of Facebook and Twitter as it is mostly used by professionals who are looking for job or business opportunities.

4. Pinterest

Google PageRank: 8 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 36

Pinterest is the biggest thing that happened to social media after Twitter. According to a TechCrunch article Pinterest drives more traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. If your blog posts have quality images then you shouldn’t ignore Pinterest. Just pin those images to Pinterest under the right category and it can send quality traffic to you as Pinterest users are known to spend more money than Facebook or Twitter.

5. Google+

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 1

Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook. Though they call it a social network I wouldn’t call it a social networking website. But that said, it is important to share your blog posts on Google+ as social signals are now used to rank web pages. And that’s not all! As you probably know Google now gives importance to authors (dubbed as AuthorRank). For that they use data from your Google+ profiles. It means that if you’re popular on Google+ then your blog posts are more likely to be on top.

6. Reddit

Google PageRank: 8 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 134

Reddit succeeded where Digg failed. It’s not the Facebook or a Twitter that killed Digg, Reddit killed Digg. If you write content that’s viral in nature then Reddit can send you instant massive traffic. Just make sure that you use social media timing signals to share the right content at the right time.

7. StumbleUpon

Google PageRank: 8 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 158

StumbleUpon is more or less a social bookmarking platform. It used to send good traffic during my initial days of blogging. I’m not sure about how many active users are there on StumbleUpon but according to Wikipedia they have over 20 million users. It won’t take more than 5 minutes to share your web page on StumbleUpon and hence it is worth the try. You definitely don’t want to miss even a single opportunity that can send traffic.

8. MySpace

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 211

MySpace. I’m not sure why this site still exists but I decided to include the same in this list as it was once the most popular social networking site in the world. It even surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States in 2006.

9. Inbound.org

Google PageRank: 5 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 16,000

Inbound.org is not a social networking website but it can send high quality traffic to your website if you got interesting blog posts that are original. Inbound.org is a great community of bloggers, marketers and other professionals who love to read and share interesting content.

10. Delicious

Google PageRank: 8 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 552

Delicious is the top social bookmarking website and has around 10 million active users. Though it rarely sends traffic, you can still tag your articles there as the submission is super quick and easy. Delicious.com allows its users to group link with the identical topics that can be gathered from the “stack”.

11. Squidoo

Google PageRank: 7 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 185

Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create content (called lenses) for subjects of interest. You can write and submit interesting content to Squidoo with backlinks to your blog or website.

12. HubPages

Google PageRank: 6 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 467

HubPages is yet another user generated content, and revenue-sharing website where you can share  your advice, reviews, useful tips, opinions and insights with hundreds of other authors. Quality HubPages articles are ranked high on Google so it can send you traffic if you write and submit good articles to HubPages with links to your website.

13. YouTube

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 3

YouTube is the web’s largest and most favorite video sharing website. You can share your videos with over 800 million YouTube users a month. You can host your how-to videos on YouTube with a backlink to your website so that people would visit your website for additional insights whenever they watch your video.

14. Wikipedia

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 6

Who doesn’t know about Wikipedia? A platform that shares over 24 million articles, Wikipedia is by now the largest place from where you can get references. Wikipedia can drive quality referral traffic to your website. Just sign up as a contributor at Wikipedia and improve the current Wiki pages by editing the existing pages with reference to your website. Just make sure that your web page is absolutely relevant to the topic or it will be marked as spam by the moderators at Wikipedia.

15. Yahoo! Answers

Google PageRank: 7 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 4

Yahoo! Answers is one of the most popular Q&A site on the web. Thanks to the millions of loyal Yahoo! users. There is a category for each subject on Yahoo! Answers. Just write blog posts on common issues and answer the questions asked by users with a reference to your website. It will send you good referral traffic.

16. Flickr

Google PageRank: 9 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 63

Flickr is the largest photo sharing website on the Internet. You can leverage Flickr by uploading interesting photos or videos with a Creative Commons Attribution License. So that people will link to your Flickr profile and may click on your links. Don’t want to upload photos? Then why not use those awesome photos on your blog and still get referral traffic. Just use the photos or videos with a Creative Commons Attribution License in your next blog post with proper credits to the original author. Then go to their Flickr profile and comment that you have used the same on your blog post and include the link to the blog post.

17. Technorati

Google PageRank: 8 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 1, 659

Technorati is a search engine for blogs. It looks at tags that authors have placed on their blog posts and it helps to categorize the search results, with recent results on top. You can check the Technorati Tag Index to get the most popular tags used on Technorati over the past one month and can use those tags while writing the next blog post. Make sure that your blog is claimed at Technorati and you use the relevant tags.

You can also write for Technorati as they publish user submitted content on a variety of topics after manual review by their editorial team.

18. Slashdot

Google PageRank: 8 | Alexa Traffic Rank: 2,006

Slashdot is the “news for nerds” website that beeps us about all technology news. It includes all user-submitted news and current affairs about tech and science. So if you’re tech-savvy then you shouldn’t be missing out this site.

Have I missed your favorite social media or a community website that can drive traffic to our blog? If so feel free to mention the same as a comment below.

Image Credit: Free Digital Photos