Articles - Written by Gino on Thursday, March 6, 2008 3:35 - 26 Comments
30 Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Increase Website Traffic by Flaunting Your Stuff
A great way to increase website traffic to your portfolio is to submit your website to design galleries. There are many very popular website design galleries that you can submit to where users are allowed to vote on site designs.
So make sure your design is up to par and better then the ones on the site you are submitting to if you are interested in maximum exposure.
If your site design is highly rated, many of these sites will feature your website on the home page for a while, which could really boost the traffic to your site.
Top 15 Website Design Galleries
2. http://www.css-website.com/
3. http://www.cssclip.com/
8. http://cssmania.com/
9. http://cssremix.com/
10. http://www.designmeltdown.com/
11. http://www.designshack.co.uk/
12. http://www.mostinspired.com/
13. http://www.professionalontheweb.com/
14. http://www.dailyslurp.com/
Increase Website Traffic by Showing Your Generosity
Creating artwork to give away as a free download on a website or blog can be a great way to increase traffic to your website for free. You can also submit your artwork to download sites, a few of which are listed below and can get you additional exposure!
16. Create Free Photoshop Brushes – Here’s a great guide on how to create your own brushes in Photoshop
17. Create Free Icon Sets – General icons sets ( such as blog icons and computer related icons) usually do best and are more useful then niche icon sets
18. Create Free Wallpapers – Large widescreen monitors are becoming more popular so if your artwork is not all vector, be sure to start high in resolution!
19. Create Free Vector Artwork – Make sure your illustrations are clean, well crafted and colored nicely. Don’t just live trace stuff and offer it as a download, people want quality vector artwork
20. Create Free Patterns – Seamless patterns are most sought after. Here is a guide on how to create a seamless pattern in illustrator
21. Create Free Fonts – fonts are another great option, here is an example of 3 free fonts created by a studio to gain exposure and below are some of the best font sites to submit your free fonts too.
Increase Website Traffic by Exposing Yourself!
Make sure your work is up on as many portfolio hosting sites as possible. A lot of companies and studios are on these websites and search for hot new talent on them. It’s a great way to gain free exposure and network with other designers and potential employers.
Below are a few of the largest design portfolio hosting websites:
22. Coroflot
23. Behance
24. Design Related
25. Deviant Art
And yes, even link to your work on your Myspace, Facebook and other social networking websites, you never know who will see it!
Increase Website Traffic by Joining Communities!
Joining forums is a great way to meet other designs and to network. If you become an active member in forums you can use your reputation to promote your website. Many forums receive large amounts of traffic and people pay attention to well respected members with high post counts. Below is a list of some of the best graphic design forums:
26. Your Design Forums – A new and active graphic design forums
27. www.designerstalk.com/forums
28. graphicdesignforum.com
29. estetica-design-forum.com
We will post more ways to promote your website for free in the future and start to discuss ways to get natural traffic from search engines by performing basic search engine optimization techniques on your website or blog.
It’s important to use all methods available to promote your site and we will help you master these methods, so subscribe to our RSS feed and stay tuned for more!
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26 Comments
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Gino
Thanks, yes those design galleries are extremely useful!
Gino,
This is great that your posting this. I followed a lot of the top blogs on bloggin and found what they recommend to drive traffic. And certainly some methods are universal. You pointed out some methods here that are specific to design blogs, which is great. Thx.
No point submitting if your site dosen’t use the latest CSS and you arent a graphic designer.
Thanks for sharing this. I get update my list of inspirational sites
53rd person to digg the story. w0000t! lol
Gino
Yeah your design needs to be solid and your coding has to be tip top and you could receive a ton of traffic!
Hi, I run the CSS gallery Design Shack which was featured in the first list. As someone who regularly goes through hundreds of design submissions I’d like to make two major suggestions when designing your website.
1. Simple is absolutely key. If a design is simply laid out but everything aligns, looks good and keeps the content as the most important element it is likely to do well.
2. Spend a long time working on your colour scheme - go for complementing colours and make sure text contrasts well from the background.
Often the quality of CSS code and in depth details are not the main reason for being featured ( your website doesn’t even need to validate!). Make it look simple and stand out from the crowd in some way and you’re likely to do well.
Gino
Design Shack - Thanks for the valuable information!
Useful info here Gino. Thanks! You’re doing a great job here.
Thanks for this article, especially the forums.
Good information. I looked at a lot of the sites recommended and plan to look at all of them. We are always researching blog traffic on a broader basis, but this is highly targeted and useful information. Thanks.
Gino
Thanks all I hope you can all benefit from these tips and get more traffic to your portfolio sites!
All Website Design Galleries in one page -> http://zeniltuo.com
Great information, we would like to share with others on our blog, visit http://www.ardis-creative.com/blog
I have been meaning to submit my site to some CSS-galleries. But small parts of it use tables - darn it! Though you don’t often see fully-blown e-commerce sites that are built in valid CSS/XHTML, so I am proud!
Nice article 
Great information!!
There is a Hub Lens that Discusses SEO;
Giving away freebies is a great tip. People LOVE free stuff.
Cheers!
Excellent suggestions. Might I add that a short burst of paid traffic can create residual traffic well into the future. I recently purchased a URL that had absolutely no past traffic. I dropped $20USD for paid traffic over a couple of days. Right after that my daily traffic jumped from 0 before the $20USD to, on an average 40 hits per day and growing.
chasemortgagegroup.com
Good Ideas I will check out these pages.
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This is very helpful, thank you! 
Good job!
Another CSS gallery CSS Design
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i agree you can increase your strategy… but my question to you is do those design sites subcategorize your page design by your sites topic??
otherwise i don’t think that traffic will be targeted enough??
Nice post, thanks a lot for sharing.
Jatin
Great information. Also to make your site more seo friendly check it for broken links, keyword density, meta-tags etc. by using paid or free online webtools like http://www.dnstool.com/ or http://tools.khrido.com/ etc.
design shack, thanks for the info on which sites are good for submission.
it’s nice to know what some of these sites are looking for in advance.
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Excellent article! This is a great help. I found the list of web design galleries really helpful.