About fourteen months ago, our company website started popping up on design sites. As I remember it, Jonathan Snook posted a screen shot of the new ep somewhere, and it quickly made its way through webcreme and then the css galleries.
Two things happened. First, we started getting great outside feedback on design and client side code (not all of it positive, but all of it good.) Second, our traffic baseline immediately doubled. And then it tripled.
As excited as we were just to be included in the galleries, my gut instinct was that the newfound attention wouldn’t gain us any business – the typical visitors to these sites were other designers / developers.
I was wrong.
The number of leads we were getting began to increase. We’d get five site inquiries in a day – none of them from the same state. We added clients in LA and NYC in the same week – both found us on csselite.
Not every day is so noteworthy. And we certainly don’t experience a high rate of conversion from all referral sources. But over the course of the year, we’ve seen very tangible gain.
This was a case where I dramatically underestimated the value of traffic segments based on the average population characteristics. My guess is that prejudices against digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, and reddit traffic are similarly offbase.
Unique visitor counts and average demographics aren’t always key indicators of site performance.