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This is an issue beta sites are facing: attracting users. Unfortunately, our site is not making an exception.

But the good news is that we can all participate to overcome this.

I suggest that we share here our ideas that can make our site reach more people, so that each of us can use them.

Let's make our site famous!

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    I'd advise sticking a Community Ad on Seasoned Advice.
    – Mithical
    Mar 16, 2017 at 14:47
  • @Mithrandir This is a great one! :) I thought about it, but I didn't want to propose many things myself at start. I think you could write an answer with it. :)
    – Niitaku
    Mar 17, 2017 at 8:02

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Stick a Community Promotional Ad on Seasoned Advice (cooking.SE).

They've got [vegan] and [vegetarian] tags, so you've got some Veg*s on there. What you want to do is get them here.

SE has something called 'Community Promotional Ads' for graduated sites. This is, basically, an image, with a link, that shows on the sidebar of the main site. The image has to be a certain size; for now it's

300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.

To get an ad shown, you have to post an answer to a meta question - Seasoned Advice's can be found here. The full requirements for being shown are on that page. (You'll need six votes on the ad. Currently SA has no ads that meet the requirements.)

You'll want to get someone who can design an ad for you that meets the requirements, then have someone post it there, and wait for it to get 6 votes so that it shows on the sidebar.

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I think it would be nice if we could share our great questions and answers on other vegan or vegetarian sites.
It would for sure draw attention to our site.

Just click the share button under a question or an answer to get the link. Getting share link

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I believe that even better thing to do than sharing questions on social media is to try and think about questions that would bring people to this site automatically and in high numbers. I am writing this response primarily as a reaction to a really surprising amount of views I have noticed on this question.

Although being only a couple of hours old, it has already brought 360 people to the site and the number is growing rapidly (~1 view per minute). It is one of the most viewed questions already.

What I believe we should do is to try and think of not only expert questions, but that we should have questions and answers to regularly asked questions people have about vegetarianism. These would serve as an entry point and an introduction to the site for people that would otherwise never hear about it.

While I know that non-expert levels of questions are being frowned at on SE, there are two reasons why I think we should condone these in this case:

  • Even for a basic question that people have about vegetarianism/veganism, there can be a great and expert answer and this site should provide such.
  • As suggested at Area 51 page, most of the traffic should eventually come from search engines. This will happen either really slowly or not at all if we do not allow for our little SEO optimiztion.

EDIT: I felt it necessary to add that, as Erica mentioned in the comments, my answer was based on a mistaken premise that the extraordinary number of views on that particular question was driven by searches from search engines. It seems it was not and that the traffic was due to it being promoted at the Stack Exchange Hot Network Questions. I believe that makes my answer rather less valid, taking into consideration this answer from Robert that Zanna mentioned in the comments. I am not deleting it though, for future reference.

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  • You've made a great point. :) Maybe this question has large amount of views because it was shared? :P Anyway, I think that, in addition to what you've said, this is also important to have other means than the passive one to amplify your idea.
    – Niitaku
    Mar 15, 2017 at 12:47
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    @Niitaku Of course, I did not mean to say that sharing is not an important means of promoting content but I guess it works better for things that have the potential to go viral or to be shared multiple times. Veg*nism is, unfortunately, marginal topic and there is less potential to use social networks as means for sharing it. I also see some trend of homogeneousness of social network circles and that they are rather hard to penetrate with ideas that are different to those they already share. All in all, it is a great way to get people you know to the site, but not so much for attracting masses
    – Alexander Rossa
    Mar 15, 2017 at 12:54
  • I think sharing works in two ways, telling people to look at the great platform we have to share knowledge, and to highlight the already great content we have. So sharing can add more value if we are sharing good content. Conversely there's no point having good content if no-one ever finds out about it :)
    – David S
    Mar 15, 2017 at 13:19
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    My take on this is expressed perfectly here Should we encourage/allow very basic questions which would be beneficial to those just starting out? - by all means welcome and embrace the basic questions, but let them be asked by those who need the answers :)
    – Zanna Mod
    Mar 15, 2017 at 13:41
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    @Zanna Yes, I see the reasoning behind it. You (and Robert) are of course right, I just would not want to see this site slowly die because the people who care get disheartened by the lack of activity and the people who would care did not find out about it. While I agree that it may be a little soon to worry about this, I'd rather start worrying too soon than too late. Also, seeing the bright people around here, I am sure we can find solution to this without breaking the design of the site - I just meant to nudge us in a certain direction with this answer :).
    – Alexander Rossa
    Mar 15, 2017 at 14:02
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    That question got a lot of views because it was featured as a Hot Network Question (HNQ). There's a bot that decides what to designate as an HNQ, but regardless, that's terrific exposure for our site :)
    – Erica
    Mar 15, 2017 at 16:26

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