Traffic is no doubt one of the most important things to any marketer, so it’s important to understand and use every traffic source available, in order to really make those traffic numbers happen. What’s interesting is that most assume they’ve found the major traffic sources (Google, social media, etc.) and they just need to do something better. While this may be the case, you can’t discount the things you’ve never heard of in the past. In other words, many company owners and Webmasters are surprised to learn that there are many different traffic sources out there, that they have never heard of before.

Moral of the story: get over the surprise as soon as you can and start using these traffic sources to your benefit!

Top 5 Traffic Sources to Pay Attention to This Year

As discussed above, if you’re looking for new and creative ways to drive traffic to your website or blog, it’s not always necessarily about how you’re marketing this content on certain platforms or the specific topic of the content — sometimes it can be as simple as shifting your focus to different, sometimes unheard of, traffic sources.

Below are five top traffic sources you may not have heard about in the past:

1. Scribd.com is a document sharing site that lets you upload your documents for a community of readers.

This sharing center is a PR 8 website that gives users access to over 400,000 books from over 900 publishers, including everything from The New York Times to simple “how to” articles from user-uploaded works (that could be you!). The idea behind this business is simply a personal digital library, compatible for mobile devices and tablets including Kindle Fire.

As a Scribd author, your reading is available for an audience of 80 million monthly readers around the world. In other words, you have a huge potential to gain traffic through this system if they take the time to download your work. eBooks are an even better option to download if your company has been thinking about getting started or has a few eBooks already in the works.

2. Slideshare.net allows you to take your content and convert it into PowerPoint presentations.

This is another site where you can upload your content, except it needs to be in the form of a slideshow (imagine that). This works incredibly well, if you take some of your most popular content and then convert it into a PowerPoint for the site. You don’t have to do too much writing, but you get the opportunity to have this content in front of Slideshare’s over 60 million unique visitors each month. In fact, according to Slideshare, they are the world’s largest community for sharing presentations and other professional contents and are among the 120 most visited websites in the world. Remember to add a link to your blog, and the traffic benefits could be great.

3. Quora.com is a social networking site that allows you to answer and follow different questions, connect with users, and of course reference your own content.

This is one of my favorite websites on the Internet, but unfortunately not too many businesses are taking advantage of the traffic opportunities it can offer. Its main job is a social networking site that allows people to follow other users and questions, but it opens up the floor to all types of subjects and audiences (including yours) to ask questions directly. Not only is it a great way for someone from your company to answer these questions, start conversations, and ultimately improve the visibility of your brand, but Quora also allows you to add links to your answers if they are relevant. If you have written a post detailing someone’s question (or you want to hurry up and publish one), add that link to your answer and try to get traffic to your website this way.

4. Yahoo Answers doesn’t always have the best reputation, but it’s a great place to bring in more traffic, if you’re answering a question correctly.

Yahoo Answers is one of those websites that always seems to rank very highly on Google, so it has remained incredibly popular. It seems to be a less-impressive or advanced version of Quora, but it’s older and therefore still more popular. Yahoo Answers is as simple as asking a question and people responding — no connecting, no profiles, no following questions, etc. Work to give the best answers you can and refer back to your website.

The only reason Yahoo Answers doesn’t always have the best reputation, is because anyone can post answers, and there are oftentimes quite a few answers that offer no value. Nonetheless, the best answers do rise to the top, so if you’re doing everything right, you should get a lot of eyes on your contribution (and hopefully clicking to your site).

5. BizSugar.com is a bookmarking site that uses a voting system to produce relevant results for different audiences.

This site allows business owners and marketers to upload content that will automatically be published on the site. Readers can then vote for the content that they find most relevant or most helpful, which helps to bring that piece of content up to the homepage of the site (which, as you might imagine, increases the CTR of that post). There is always a way to put a link to the original place where the content was published, so you have a good chance to drive traffic this way. The better your content, the more successful you’ll be.

We talked with Scott Langdon, managing partner of SEO Company HigherVisibility, who explained that BizSugar has been working for his company for quite some time, because it is so targeted. He said, “The site includes categories like marketing, finance, management, technology, and startups, all with sub-sections under each tab. In other words, the targeted traffic here is great, because the site is focused on only business-related niches.”

Wrapping Up and Other Options

Believe it or not, there were many more traffic sources I found while researching, that I had never heard of before, but the ones above are those that I found most popular and most beneficial to the majority of people. A few other opportunities include coupon sites, answer sites, and sites like eBay and Craigslist, which you can learn more about here.

What are some of your favorite traffic sources that you think people are missing? What type of traffic have you seen from these different sources, and how did you create a strategy to keep that traffic increasing? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comment section below!