There are those folks out there who do great work, speak at panels, and have a loyal following of admirers. And then there are those who would like to be doing something similar, yet can’t seem to get the traffic they so desire.

Since the launch, of what James Hall defines as a “bloatfolio” (i believe he has a new one coming any day now), I have been engaged in a few practices that I believe are succesful traffic drivers to this site.

What follows is a list of what I have done to drive traffic. I was toying with the idea of making it a top ten list, but I think I will save my big top ten list for, “Top 10 reasons why I am the most amazing blogger on the internet” post. Ha! Anyhow…

1) Aesthetics - I can’t stress how important this is to a site’s success. Whether this be for one’s own portfolio or for a client’s site. I work in an agency (i’m a xhtml/css junky) and so many times I have seen our designers come up with unbelievable compositions, only to have a client splash a little bit of bad taste onto it. And then I will proceed to watch the designer become jaded. This is not how we want to work! It’s very important from the start to establish the designer’s importance in the success of the site, don’t tread on that. A aesthetically pleasing site will attract people from all over.

2) Solid CSS/XHTML - There are two sides to this; search engines and galleries. Writing good markup and moving away from tables allows the search engines to spider the site quickly and find the relevant content. Placing all of the content in the proper order and assigning relevance is about the best SEO you can do (white hat). CSS galleries are fantastic, they allow good work to be noticed within the community.

3) Submit It! - Here is where you can build your tidal wave of initial traffic. If you have the first two things on this list covered, then you should be able to gain entry into the growing list of CSS galleries out there. Steve James over at epicunion turned me on this. One day I was sputtering along with my measly 15 hits a day for HomeSkilletFest and the next day I had thousands of hits. I looked at my traffic and it was all coming from cssremix.com. Now I search out galleries. They are a great way to boost your traffic and gain recognition from the community.

I was going to list out a few of the sites, but then stumbled on this link. Good luck.

4) Tag It!- I have a feeling when the rest of the world really catches on with del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking service, things will start moving very quickly. Never before have we had this much relevant data delivered to us on a silver platter. So what does tagging yourself mean? For me it means tagging many of my blog posts in del.icio.us with relevant tags. One must have short term hopes of popping up on someone’s RSS reader and long term hopes of being found via del.icio.us search. This isn’t spamming, this is helping people find more information in their topic of interest. Want me to find you? Tag your site with CSS, webdesign, or inspiration. These lists move quickly, but if your site is relevant, perhaps they will tag it. The ball really gets rolling when many users are tagging your site.

5) Digg It! - Ahhh digg, the much loved, much hated, social news network. I wasn’t an early adopter of Digg, it didn’t really show up on my radar until May 2005. However, when it did, I was hooked. Some of that early relationship bliss has faded, yet I still feel Digg is a very cool site and also very useful. Digging yourself means submitting your posts to digg. Yes, it may seem like shameless promotion, but waiting for someone else to do it could take a lifetime. I get about 8% of my traffic from Digg. Not because I have ever come remotely close to the homepage, but because my content is there, and is findable. I am going to Digg this entry as soon as I finish it.

6) Create a top # list - I guess we are all suckers for lists. I see them come through my RSS feeds and I can’t help but clicking on them. So here is my top six list for building a tidal wave of traffic to your website. Yes it is shameless self promotion, yes it’s not as pure as if people just found your site and liked it. The truth is, there are a lot of us out there trying to gain an audience, it’s competitive. It is essential to use the power you have.

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I hope you liked the list. Please comment if you have any other ideas for driving traffic.

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