How to promote our site?
This is the seventh of the Essential Meta Questions.
In my opinion, it is high time to talk about promotion. We are not getting many new questions, almost no questions come from new users, and there haven't been (m)any new visitors in several days.
It is especially surprising given that we came up with some great questions and answers (for example, here are some of the most upvoted: про vs. o, adjective forms, different ways to say but), collected many interesting resources, and have a core of active users who are ready to invest time and effort in this site.
The way I see it is that people just don't know about our site. If they knew, they would have all be here already =) So let's talk about how can we make this site more popular.
Some advice can already be found in A Recipe to Promote your Site. What I gather from there is that we need:
- Share most interesting questions and answers in our blogs.
- Do small things and propose small ideas and don't expect to come up with the ultimate solution immediately.
Also, I should mention that we cannot use reciprocal links, since it is against the policy of SE sites (I don't know the exact reason).
Blogging is up to people. As for the ideas, here are some of mine:
This site is aimed at those who learn Russian. We then need to find a community of people who are interested in learning, but don't have access to a professional teaching stuff who could answer their questions. My first idea is to contact language-learning communities like Polyglot.
We also want to attract more people who are willing to answer the questions and to teach Russian, basically. So, I was thinking, we can try to address teachers of Russian as foreign language (mostly because linguists didn't seem very interested in coming here, at least not many of my friends).
I also think we should try to make small "offline interventions", like come up with a nice logo and print flyers that carry a question and don't carry an answer, but instead give a link to our site. We could distribute these flyers in local universities at Slavistic departments and hope that people will get interested.
And please-please-please don't be afraid to answer! And let's not stick to the discussion of one or two ideas, let's do some brainstorming, too. I think that we all could really use any advice at all, no matter how tiny it may seem.
