The report doesn’t show all referral sources – there are hundreds of thousands – but it does shed some light on where some of the most talked about websites stand.

Key Takeaways:

• Pinterest grew from 2.5% of referral traffic in December to 3.6% of the referrals in January. That’s impressive growth from just owning .17% of the traffic back in July.
• Referral traffic from Google+ dropped slightly in January, although Google’s product set (Google news, Google images, Gmail) continues to be a top referral source. Google continues to integrate Google+ into its offering more and more, so it will be an interesting trend to watch.
• Eyeing its IPO this week, Facebook continues to dominate referral traffic, with mobile traffic alone accounting for 4.3% of overall referrals. Referral traffic grew by about 1% in January, making it the second fastest-growing site for referral traffic after Pinterest.
• Although Pinterest did beat out YouTube in referral traffic, YouTube’s referrals grew by .07% in January. It’s got to be the Sh*t Girls Say meme. Definitely.
• It’s important to note StumbleUpon’s position as the number two referral source. It seems like most people don’t talk or think about it nearly as much as top-of-mind Pinterest and Google+, but it continues its stronghold owning 5.07% of referrals in January. Similar bookmarking site Reddit also ranked as a top source of referral traffic, with both Stumbleupon and Reddit significantly beating out Delicious and Digg.
• Lastly, it’s always interesting to check in with the once-powerful MySpace. It continues to linger as a small source of referral traffic with no sign of growth this month.

It’s the end of the month and the perfect time to dig into your analytics and measure the effectiveness of your content efforts so far this year. You may notice new trends in keywords or traffic sources, or get validation on a current content strategy you have to drive traffic. Learn about where your content gets shared the most with your Shareaholic website profile, and find out which of those sources drives referrals under Traffic Sources/Sources/Referrals in Google Analytics. These are great general findings, but it is most important to learn about your audience and your website. Figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and alter your approach accordingly so you make your content even more successful as the year progresses.

Are you seeing referral traffic from Pinterest? Learn how to leverage that audience for content marketing with our free guide.

1. Approach each social media platform individually.

To grow your brand’s reach, you want your target audience to follow you on different social media platforms. But if you offer the same old content (or not content at all!) on every single platform, what’s the point? You’ve got to offer a different value prop for each social network.

Read more: A Peek Under the Hood: How We Manage the SEOmoz Community

2. A content creation schedule must be a part of your overall marketing plan.

To grow an audience that shares your content, you have to create a sense of reliability with consistent content. Planning out daily, monthly and annual content is a great way to re-ignite your commitment to content marketing.

Read more: Creating Consistent Content – A Content Marketing Plan

3. Use Pinterest for content marketing.

The visual nature of Pinterest lends itself to the fashion brand’s content strategy. Their Pinterest content strategy means curating content from other fashion sites and mixing it in with features of their own products.

Read more: Thematic Curation: A Look at Kate Spade’s Content Strategy

4. Optimize your blog posts with a call to action.

If you optimize your blog posts for SEO, your post could be the first touchpoint for a potential customer searching on that keyword. Take a tip from Birchbox – keep that person involved in your content with a call-to-action to read a related blog post or check out a product relevant to your content.

Read more: 7 Startups Who Do Blogging Right

5. Make sure your blog posts are “anatomically correct.”

Remember each area of your blog post that can be improved from an SEO perspective – your in-text links, page titles and more.

Read more: 26 Tips for Writing Great Blog Posts

6. Hey students: Blog even if you haven’t graduated yet.

Blogging is a great way to demonstrate your interest in a topic, establish your online presence and collect your portfolio of accomplishments in one place online.

Read more: 8 Reasons Why Students Should Blog

7. Before you hit publish, think to yourself: Would I share this blog post?

Give your readers something to react to! Take a stand, share your findings or share your opinion. Give them a reason to share.

Read more: 6 Ways to Make Your Content More Shareable

8. Improve the click-through rate on your social shares with a great meta description.

Make your meta description a keyword-rich portrayal of what your blog post offers. When it’s shared on Facebook or turns up in Google results, these few sentences show up to potential readers. Make it count.

Read more: Meta Description Magic: Think Less about SEO & More about Click-Throughs

9. Get readers to spend more time on your site by inter-linking to old blog posts.

Keep your audience engaged with your content by linking keywords to your previous content on a subject or keyword.

Read more: 7 Simple Ways to Get Your Readers to Spend More Time on Your Blog

10. Drive more blog traffic by targeting topics your readers want to share.

Measure what blog posts get the most shares to uncover what attracts your most engaged readers. You can do this for your blog by checking out your website profile with Shareaholic. Here’s an example for popular cooking blog Smitten Kitchen.

Apparently people loved the Buckwheat Baby with caramel recipe. And can you blame them?

Read more: 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

What were some of your favorite lessons from the blog posts you read this week? Let us know in the comments.

Want to get a free roundup of posts like these delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Shareaholic to get our community newsletter.

For more blogging tips and musings, follow Shareaholic on Pinterest!

In the world of blogging, a lot of recent attention has been paid to Google + and Search Plus – Google’s effort to integrate Google + into search results. But with all the hoopla over Google +, content marketers can’t forget about Pinterest, a new kid in town that’s driving traffic and taking names. In fact, Experian’s Hitwise report  just listed Pinterest as the #7 social network, beating out Google+ for share of visits.

Pinterest is a site where you can organize and share images that you find interesting. Images shared on Pinterest are known as pins. Users arrange their pins on boards, customized collections of the pins that often have themes. From wedding inspiration ideas to favorite recipes, you can create a board to collect ideas and images for just about anything.

Pinterest is still invite-only, but if you know any Pinners (chances are you do!) you can snag an invite from them.

You can now add Pinterest as a sharing option on your Shareaholic social media toolset. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll want to edit your settings on the Shareaholic Bookmarks plugin in your WordPress dashboard. We also recently launched Shareaholic’s Pinterest Extension for Chrome. This means that with a simple Chrome extension, you can collect your favorite findings into a Pinterest Board. If you’re not a Chrome user, you can login to your Shareaholic account and add Pinterest as a service for your current Shareaholic plugin.

The Basics of “Pinning”

To get started with Pinterest, created an account on Pinterest.com. Next, add Shareaholic’s Pinterest Extension for Chrome or add it as a service to your Shareaholic browser plugin. Next time to see a photo you love, click on your Pinterest icon in your browser.

Next, select the image you want to Pin, create a new board, and pin the image to your board.

Continue collecting your favorite images to your board until your digital collage is complete. You can use photos you find from individual websites. Or, you can follow other users with similar interests and “re-pin” the images they post. Doing the later is a great way to create relationships with your blog’s target audience.

How to Use Pinterest for Content Marketing

Like just about any social network, your involvement will come off as much more genuine if you participate first. It may seem like fluffy advice to promote others before you promote yourself. However, few brands have such strong positioning that they will generate a following just by showing up to a new social network. Participating first is how you establish your presence. 

So, if you run a recipe blog, participate by pinning photos of delicious meals shared by others. If your blog is about interior design, show off your taste and curate photos of great design by collecting those shared by others first. Admittedly, because of the visual nature of Pinterest, it naturally lends itself to lifestyle blogs. However, B2B companies or business-oriented personal blogs can drive traffic to their content if their willing to get creative.

• Curate infographics relevant to your industry.
• Collect charts to share statistics for your industry.
• Create more visual content for your followers to share: Don’t list your tips – put them on a visually-appealing slide with a short phrase.
• Include a photo with each blog post – give your readers something to pin.

We may be biased, so we certainly agree that social sharing buttons are key. Recommending related posts at the bottom of your post and including a comments plugin like Livefyre are also quite important. One tip I’d add is to include a call to action to subscribe to your posts, either by email or RSS. However, the infographic creator may have left that out as you can include that in your sidebar and not below each post.

Top 3 Blogging Tips

These were my favorite blogging tips and takeaways from the infographic.

1. Blog post title: It should be creative and include your main keyword or phrase

The blog post headline is one of the most important parts of your post. It’s what potential readers see as a preview to your content when it’s shared on social media, and it plays a huge part in their decision of whether to click that link or not. So make it count.

2. Body copy and opening paragraph: State your purpose and objectives. Include keywords and variations of those phrases.

There’s so much content for your readers to consume these days. If you want them to share your content, you’ve got to have a hook to keep their attention so they read your piece and pass it along – versus quickly closing the page and moving on to the next intriguing link in their newsfeeds. Stating your purpose is a great way to hook them because it’s setting the value proposition right in the beginning. Answer these questions: What will your readers learn from your post? Why are you talking about the trend, research, or tools that you are talking about?

3. Include a list.

Breaking up your content into a list format makes it easy for your audience to digest. It shows off the teachings of your post in a simpler way than long paragraphs. Bold text, headings, H2 text and bullet points also serve this purpose. Give it a try.

What blogging tips did you glean from the infographic? Let us know in the comments!

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Get Shareaholic for Your Blog!

Have you tried any of these viral content tips? Let us know in the comments.

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Want to make your content easier to share? Try Shareaholic on your blog.

Get Shareaholic for Your Blog!

Use the Share API to make adding any sharing service that is not supported by WordPress.com (or Jetpack) really easy!

What You Need to Know

If you would like to add a sharing service to your blog that is not available in the standard set that WordPress.com/Jetpack provides, you can add it using the “Add a new service” link in the “Available Services” section.

The three things you need to define a sharing service are:

• Service name – used for the text label. It will appear in the link to the service in the share bar and in the blog sharing stats. ex. Google Buzz
• Sharing URL – is the URL address to the sharing service submission page. No need to go hunting for the correct URL. All you have to do here is use the Shareaholic URL below, and replace the “service=” value with the one for the service you’d like to add. A complete list of 250+ available service codes are listed here.

  For example:

  http://www.shareaholic.com/api/share/?v=1&apitype=1&apikey=8943b7fd64cd8b1770ff5affa9a9437b&service=257
&title=%post_title%&link=%post_url%&notes=%post_excerpt%
&shortener=google&source=Shareaholic

  If you’d like to get fancy by specifying your own bit.ly url shortener keys, etc – you can. Read up on documentation of lots more advanced settings for the Share API.

• Icon URL – URL of a 16×16 icon that can be used for the service. ex. http://www.someserver.com/images/buzz.png

  An easy/fast way to get the service icon for the service you’d like to add is to use the following favicon API:

  http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=evernote.com
  (just replace evernote.com with the domain of your choice)

Save the service and the new service will appear in the Available Services section. And you’re done! Fast, easy, safe.

Useful Resources:

• http://en.support.wordpress.com/sharing/
• http://www.shareapi.com
• http://www.shareaholic.com/api/data/

1. Make sure you complete your profile (bio, website link, location). Of the 7 million twitter accounts we’ve looked at, 76% of users fail to include their bio/description.

2. Optimize for the “retweet” (i.e. tweeting things that will likely be forwarded). Tips for that: i) Don’t use up all 140 characters or it forces user to “edit” your tweet when they retweet it. ii) Don’t “self reference” (say “I”, “me”, etc.) — those tweets tend to get retweeted less. iii) Include a link in your tweets. Tweets that include links tend to get retweeted more.

3. Make it easy for people to find you and follow you. If you have a website, put a “Follow Me On Twitter” button. Include it in your newsletter. Add it to your blog.

(via Read Scott’s E-Mail)

In the article they also give some tips on how businesses of any size can deal with negative feedback, which I thought the readers of this blog may find handy. Most of it distills down to using common sense and dealing with the situation calmly, with a positive and constructive attitude. Paraphrased and with my own views added:

1. Embrace the medium. Register for an account at the places your customers are talking about you. In most cases registering for an account is free. An account will generally allow you to receive alerts and give you a chance to respond to reviews and engage your customers.

2. Breathe. Just because you can respond doesn’t mean you should right away. Try to collect your thoughts calmly, and respond in a thoughtful constructive way. Also remember – anything you say, even in a private message, can end up on the internet.

3. Be Gracious. Remember, the customer is always right. Apologize for whatever they didn’t like, and offer to correct it. Better still, correct it quickly if you can, and pleasantly surprise them! Small proactive gestures go a long long way in converting your critics to your best customers and most vocal advocates.

4. Learn and Correct. All said and done, just remember that at the end of the day, you can’t fight the future, and online reviews & feedback only help us get better — faster. Talking to and engaging customers in a meaningful way is a very good thing :)

Your power and influence are directly proportional to the amount you or your business contribute to your audience. When you look at the essence of relationship and group formation dynamics, contribution is the key element that unites and brings people together. It is a simple yet powerful concept that if understood and properly implemented can mean the difference between being truly great and just being noise.

The message is simple, if you want to be a rockstar, stop trying to add more people to your first circle or cram them into your branding funnel and start contributing content, products, and services that are so incredible that they are worth linking to and talking about.

Ivan, thanks for sharing!