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.

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.

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 my site has been featured in the WordPress.org showcase. They only pick a handful of sites a month so it’s an honor to be chosen among the huge portfolio of WordPress sites. For a short period of time, I was even the top rated site on WordPress.org. Check out my site on WordPress.org.

Typekit has featured Atlantic Records on their business subscriptions page along with Twitter, The New York Times, Martha Stewart and others. At Atlantic we’ve been using typekit since the private beta was floating around a few years ago, and within a few months were using the service on all of our sites.

View the page here.

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

Read the full article here.

Check out the full post here.

Rather than describe the list for you, here Billboard’s own synopsis:

Billboard’s Twitter 140: It’s not about how many followers. It’s not about the quantity of tweets/retweets. It’s about quality. Personality. Excellent linkage. These people are followed by those who work the smartest. Whether it’s about copyright, “Entourage,” social commerce, the cloud(s), rap radio, Nashville, technology or just techno, these are 140 of the best and brightest music industry characters on Twitter.

You can follow me on twitter here.

Or follow the full list here.

Read the full story on Billboard.biz.