5 Places to Submit Your Design Links That Actually Give You Traffic

If you run a design-related website then community links are a great way to get traffic to your articles. Community links are links to specific posts, usually placed in the sidebar of a website, that anybody can submit. They’re moderated so don’t just go submitting unrelated posts and spam, but if you have something you feel would help the design community, it’s silly to not post to these. There are lots of sites that accept community links, and I submit to something like 30 of them but a lot of them just don’t get me any traffic.

That’s why I made this list. These are the 5 places that have gotten me the most traffic over the past few months. Unsurprisingly they’re also the best sites to read if you’re looking for some design articles. So if you don’t want to waste your time submitting to hundreds of websites, then just check these ones out and enjoy the quality traffic.

Design Newz

Design-Newz is run by Spyre Studios and exists solely as a community news site. It boasts a very clean layout and quite a bit of traffic. They don’t let just any article in, but the ones they do post are tweeted and shared around quite a bit. A lot of this comes from @designnewz where each new post is tweeted out to over 24,000 followers, and then ReTweeted a bunch. Only thing is your TweetMeme counter won’t go up, theirs will, but quit complaining they’re giving you traffic.

TripWire Magazine

The Tripwire Magazine community news feed is unique because besides a link being placed in the sidebar and tweeted to 4500 followers via @tripwiremag, they also make a post every few days of recent community links. They have a strong following and have contributed quite a bit of traffic to me. They’re quite lax on what they accept as well, so as long as it’s design related and not of tremendously poor quality you should be fine.

Dev Snippets

Dev Snippets is a collection of useful web design articles and code snippets. If you have something very useful for designers then this is a good place to add your link. It gets a lot of traffic and I find that people search it and go deep in the archives a lot, so you get residual traffic for a while instead of lots of traffic one day and none the next.

Color Burned

Colorburned gets a lot of traffic and sends a lot of traffic. Simple as that.

Script and Style

Script and Style is the pickiest of the bunch, I’ve found, but also the most respected. They only approve high-quality articles but like Design-Newz, all this site is is community links. This means once approved you get seen by a lot of eyes, and not just in the bottom of a sidebar.

Abduzeedo

To post a community link on Abduzeedo, you have to register. Once registered however, your link goes up immediately. I don’t get the most traffic from Abduzeedo, but I get a fair bit, and it’s instant. Don’t spam them as they’re a great site, but definitely take advantage of being able to immediately see results from your community link endevour.

Honourable mention: The Web Blend

The Web Blend is a Digg-esque community-based news site where users vote on articles they like. The reason for submitting to The Web Blend over the other sites like this, is that your link will get tweeted out to @thewebblend’s 3900 followers and @iblend’s 4700 followers.

Hope you enjoyed the list, now get to submitting!