We're getting to the point in the beta where we should start trying to actively promote ourselves. Most of this is not so much a question as an informational post to let people know what methods other sites have found effective, but the last couple bullets are much more open-ended and feedback/ideas would be great. If you're uninterested in the general SE beta background stuff, skip down to that list
Each SE site is evaluated at the end of the beta -- for us, that's in 65 days. So far no sites have gotten to the end of the beta yet, so we're not sure exactly what that will entail, but it's important for us to get as many active users as we can, posting as many high quality questions/answers as possible.
Here are the current question/answer stats for all the SE sites in public beta:
Naturally the older sites have a bit of an advantage; accounting for number of days in beta it looks like this:
The average is 17 questions and 53 answers per day; we're just under that at 15 questions and 47 answers per day, which isn't bad at all. We're also doing well on users (total, normalized), all without having put much effort into promotion yet, so that's fairly encouraging
A post on the SO blog, A Recipe to Promote your Site, has a couple good ideas:
Let people know the site exists. There's a handy social networking box on the right side of the site:
Post great questions and answers. We don't need to bribe people to stay on the site; if it's a great site they'll want to stay automatically. Great posts are also automatically featured on the trilogy sites (SO, SU, SF), in ads like this:
Take the great questions and especially answers you find and share them. Telling people "There's a Unix/Linux Q&A site" isn't nearly as effective as "There's a Unix/Linux Q&A site, and here are some of the awesome posts on it". There are buttons next to each question to share them on Facebook and Twitter:
Don't forget to share great answers as well; they're probably more useful than questions when it comes to getting people interested in the site.
Think about events we can sponsor, conferences we can promote at, well-known names in the *nix community that are likely to be interested in the site and share it, etc. This one is much more open-ended and site-specific than the others, so feel free to post answers if you have specific ideas
Show your flair. There's a link on your profile to your "flair", which shows your current reputation on the site:
My flair http://mrozekma.com/so-flair.php?site=unix
I think tech-people are more susceptible than anyone when it comes to the need to amass large quantities of points, experience, reputation, etc.
???. Are there any methods specific to a Unix/Linux site that would work well? Post them as answers here so we can discuss them
