This is only one man’s experience, but I hope there is value for other designers in this information. One clarification – I’m not going to badmouth anyone. Just like the designers reading this post, the value of a site is not measured by traffic alone. I’m not going to mention sites who accepted my work and didn’t generate significant traffic. I want to keep this all positive.

This is what worked for me.

First off, something obvious. Getting “site of the day” will get you exponentially more traffic than just getting accepted. I mention this because the difference for me was a 100x spike in pageviews in one day. I was shocked at how much more traffic it garnered. When submitting your site I would start of looking at sites that have sites of the day/week/month competitions and make sure that you submit to them first. Most sites show so much work with no real focus and the ones who do more obvious curation have the greatest upside. Awwwwards.com has been the highest contributor of traffic to my site since launch and to this day is still my top referrer. The number two referrer has been thebestdesigns.com, where I was also site of the day.

Secondly, look for sites that don’t feature too much work at once. The WordPress.org showcase is a great example of this and is the number three referrer to my site. They sometimes only post one site a day, and have been known not to post for days at a time. Again, it’s harder to get chosen, but if you do there is a lot more focus on your work.

Creattica.com, cssmania.com, webdesignledger.com and csswinner.com round out my top seven referrers. Then something interesting happens – Google. Although this post is about traffic from design websites, never forget how important content and SEO optimization is.

Cssdesignawards.com, cssbased.com and designfridge.co.uk round out my top eleven. Facebook comes in at number twelve, which is interesting because I have almost 4x the number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends (more on this in a later blog post). Designdelight.net and cssawards.net round out my top fourteen sites.

Why top fourteen you ask? After 14 the amount of traffic these sites generate for me drops off drastically and becomes insignificant. These are the sites that contributed material traffic to my website. On an average day my pageviews are up 500% from my previous design with fewer pages.

The remaining question you may have – do mass site submission services work? In my opinion, no. They may carpet bomb your site to dozens or hundreds of design websites but most of those sites only generate only a handful of hits. Again, traffic is only one measure of success, but for me submitting my work to websites that curate by giving awards or by featuring a limited numbers of designs ended up maximizing new traffic to my website.

Yesterday the Atlantic Records digital team launched a mini site to promote the release of the new Shinedown single “Bully”. The page showcases the new music video and allows fans to share specific lyrics from the song by selecting them with their mouse cursor. Selecting a lyric will spawn a popup allowing fans to share the lyric via Facebook or Twitter. The campaign in one day has produced 5x more traffic than the first week the last single was available.

Check out the video and lyric sharing app here.

There is a great recap of the presentation “Data-Driven Bottom Line Results: Making Social Media Actionable A Real World Case Study” that Carmen Sutter and I gave at the Web 2.0 Summit on the Informationweek website. The presentation was about our strategy around social media and how we use analytics and data to convert music fans to customers.

Read the full InformationWeek interview here.

Carmen (Senior Director of Online Analytics at WEA) and I presented a case study from the current Bruno Mars record outlining Warner Music Groups’s strategy for using social media and analytics to track success across our artist’s web properties with an end goal of converting music listeners into customers.

Read more about our presentation here.

How do you answer the question, “What is the business impact of my social media efforts?” How do you connect the conversations happening on your social networks to the systems that measure business performance? In this real-world session you’ll hear from Eric Snowden, VP of Creative & Technology at Atlantic Records and Carmen Sutter, Senior Director of Data Services at Warner Music Group as they share how Warner Music Group is leveraging the power of data to make smart social media strategy decisions and tie their fan aggregation and traffic-driving efforts to bottom line performance.

Today an interview with Carmen Sutter, from WEA, and me is featured on the ClickZ homepage. The interview was a continuation of our keynote speech from the Adobe Online Marketing Symposium last month. In the interview we talk about how marketers at Warner Music Group use social networks, analytics and technology to convert music listeners from anonymous fans, to site members and eventually to consumers.

Check out the full ClickZ article here.

Today we launched our first HTML5 mobile streaming campaign with Portugal. The Man and Soundcloud. Fans can listen to three songs off the new Portugal. The Man record “In the Mountain in the Cloud” on the band’s mobile website. Fans just need to navigate to the page and enter their email address to listen. Built in house by Michelle Lamoureaux.

Click here to listen to Portugal. The Man on your smartphone.

Read more on the official GetGlue blog

We’ve also been running official Cee Lo Green stickers for a few weeks now and the response has been amazing. Check out the announcement on GetGlue’s Blog below.

Cee Lo Green and The Voice launch exclusive GetGlue Stickers

Check out the full post here.

Last Monday, Atlantic Records launched our first campaign with entertainment check-in service Get Glue and Trey Songz. Get Glue helps fans tell their friends what they are watching, listening to, or reading and earn stickers for doing so. Fans who check-in to the Get Glue widget on Trey’s website, or through one of the Get Glue apps, will get one of three Trey Songz stickers: “Love Faces”, “Team Trey” or “Trey’s Angels”. Get Glue lets fans redeem virtual stickers for physical stickers upon collecting 20 stickers across all Get Glue promotions.

Within a few days Trey Songz skyrocketed to the #1 musician on the service, and the #3 entertainment property overall with nearly 10,000 check-ins.

Check out the Trey Songz profile on GetGlue.com.

Check-in to the Get Glue on TreySongz.com.