I have a mailbox full of reader praise that gives me a good feeling. This testimonial, recently received, stands out and is worth sharing:
Going From 100/visits a day to over 22,000 in a Day
When I first started Free Military Photos, I submitted to Cool Site of the Day as a free submission. The site was really new at that time. There wasn’t a lot of content, it wasn’t displayed that well, etc. I got a lot of feedback and went to work making the site better. After a few months, I decided to give Cool Site of the Day another chance. When thinking about whether or not to pay the fee for an express site review, I decided to pony up the cash. I’m very impatient at times, and the way I looked at it, the money would be worth it.
I submitted on a Thursday, I believe, and waited anxiously all weekend to hear back. I didn’t hear back for another few days and started to think I hadn’t been good enough. Then there was a traffic spike when I was picked as Cool Site of the Day. To be honest, the spike wasn’t that high. It was well worth the fee, though. What I was really interested in was the so-called ‘Echo Effect’. I put it out of my mind and went back to work on my sites.
The Cool Site of the Day mention continued sending traffic to my site on a daily basis. Then, one Thursday evening I got an email saying Kim Komando had picked Free Military Photos as their Cool Site of the Day. They said they frequently brought webservers down with their traffic, so I jumped into action, not knowing what to expect.
Starting around midnight, the traffic started pouring in. It was quite a day – good in many ways. By the end of the day, traffic had spiked at 22,000 visitors. (Looking at stats now, around 2% to 4% of that traffic has “stuck.” Now, there’s no way to prove that Kim Komando found my site via Cool Site of the Day, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
I’m interested to see if the latest mention will get me noticed by another website or television program. Whether that happens or not, I think the money I spent on an express submission was very much worth it. You’re going to hate me for saying this, but I would be charging at least triple that. Yahoo charges $299/year to be listed in their directory.
Again, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to win a spot even if you pay, but if you have a good site, the chances are good. Paying the fee is really just a way to say that you stand out from the crowd and are serious about your web efforts.
What happens next? Who knows. Thanks to Cool Site of the Day, however, traffic continues to steadily rise at Free Military Photos.
Long live the Echo Effect!
K. Paul Mallasch – Publisher, KPaulMedia
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