As we continue down the path of our blogging journey, we will have the chance to meet many other bloggers that share similar interests. Whether it’s a blogger asking for a link exchange, someone emailing you to blog about his/her killer article or a commentator leaving you an interesting and insightful comment, these are opportunities for us to interact with them.

Most people tend to ignore many of the comments and emails that come through as they convince themselves that there is no time to respond, but not taking advantage of these events is a big mistake!

The reason is simple - referral traffic! When you start chatting with other bloggers, they will slowly become familiar to your blog and brand. This reminds them to come visit your blog and sooner or later, they will start visiting your blog on a regular basis and link to your articles. These links are the best ways of obtaining traffic because:

1. They are targeted
2. They are permanent
3. They are free

The power of referral traffic can best be explained with an example so take a look at the Google Analytics screen shot of MoneyNing.com during the last month.

If you look closely, I received a little over 10,000 visitors during the last 30 days from other sites around the world.  This is a decent number but what’s more important is the statistics of these visitors.

1. Average Time on Site - A quick look shows us that each visitor from referral traffic on average spends 1 minute and 44 seconds on my site.  This is 28 seconds more than the site average!  When a visitor spends more time reading, they are more likely to subscribe to the blog, comment on the article and become a long term reader!
2. Bounce Rate - Out of everyone that comes to my site from other pages, only 57.24% (compared with 73.16% for all traffic) leaves without going to another page.  If a visitor clicks on another page, it probably means that they find your site interesting!
3. Pages per Visit - We know that the more pages a person visitrs, the more engaged they are with our site.  Referral traffic during the last month was 1.82 pages per visitor vs 1.58 pages per visitor on average!

As it clearly shows in the example above, referral traffic is one of the better traffic source for our blogs!  So if increasing traffic is one of your priorities, I suggest taking every chance you have to network with fellow bloggers.  As you get to know people, they will help promote your brand for you!

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