When you build your blog or forum, you can get traffic through various ways. Any traffic that comes from search engine is called organic traffic. And any traffic that you can get from the other sources is either referral traffic and the paid ads. For example my blog has sources such as - diaspora, facebook, pinterest, google and few forums. I have managed to diversify the traffic sources of my blog.
So that being said, what are your traffic sources to your blog or forum?
Most of my traffic is organic. The majority of my traffic comes from search engines like Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go. The top referrer is Google though. I'm really surprised at how many of my pages are indexed and the things people search for the most. lol
The majority of my sources for 2 of my projects are organic. One is a fan forum and the other is a resource library. The third one is a niche community and currently isn't indexed by Google, but I'm hoping organic with that as well.
Most of my website hits comes from search engines. My top referrer is Google, surprisingly. My second and final source of website traffic is through social media and promotional forums like, Forum Promotion for example.
Paid/Free Facebook traffic is powering my drum lesson site. However, ForumPromotion.net is powering my web development one (but not as much - as it's a free thing). Anyway, as for my other projects - and also the web development one, I hope to utilize Facebook to get some for them, but no money at the moment!
Organic search traffic. Mostly from Google. US is of course the top country of people who hit the site from search engines, followed by UK, Canada and then Australia.
For this one site I own, the referral traffic is extremely poor, however, can't say the same about organic searches.
Most of my traffic has come through organic search and a couple back links that we managed to get a long while ago from some larger sites where we got mentioned in their articles. Got to love those big ones though haha. I'm slowly managing to make social traffic come 'up' in the rankings as I'd like that area to grow and we're tinkering here and there with low-budget ads (due to the nature of things) and seeing if that makes a difference. Got to experiment all the time!