As I’ve already mentioned, Clarkesworld Magazine was the SciFi.com Site of the Week recently. I was very curious what this would mean in terms of hits to the site.
The Site of the Week review went up on August 29th. Unfortunately, the new issue of SciFi Weekly went up earlier that week and home page was never updated, which meant the only way people knew about us was if they visited the Site of the Week page, which it doesn’t appear that many people do. It probably didn’t help that it was Labor Day Weekend.
End Result: Fewer than 50 visitors, some of which may have actually been guided to that review through our own promotion of it.
Sometime between September 4th and 5th, the weekly home page was updated and we were place in the featured slot. This slot is the one that gets the picture for the category. However, September 5th was also when the new Site of the Week was posted. This time, the home page was updated within 24 hours and we were dropped down into the links list beneath the featured site.
End Result: An additional 250-300 visitors while featured with photo, roughly 30 per day since being dropped to the links list.
Of course, it can go very well for you. For example, take Ray Gun Revival. They were the featured Site of the Week on June 13th. I found the following statement by Johne Cook on their message board:
“Our Visits surged 244% in June, from 7,871 to 19,223. I thought that might be an anomaly of some sort, but July was even better at 20,779.”
It’s hard to say without access to their logs how much of that is directly or indirectly related to being Site of the Week. It would have been interesting to see what happened August / September as well, but given their unfortunate exposure in the recent SFWA DMCA nonsense, they now have a new source of PR driving people to their site which would cloud the results. (Returning visitors wouldn’t be coming in via the SciFi.com site.)
Not very entertaining, but I know some people were interested.