Evangelising time

Question

So some people may have realised some of the other beta sites are being shut down. I was shocked too.

The thought of this happening to Travel scared me a little, especially since I've been off it a bit the last few weeks while moving countries.

So anyway, I think it's high time we start to push it socially, because the small amount of effort that would take is nothing compared to the countless hours many of us have spent writing answers and editing and sorting and so on for the many questions we have here.

We're growing slowly, and certainly have a community of such - join the chat room every so often and there's usually some casual banter going on every few hours - just a few more people and it'll practically have someone there all the time ;)

So this post is to ask what we can do to try and promote the site. I've played with submitting some of the more interesting questions (and answers) to digg, tweeted some, put others on reddit - certainly that seems to generate some extra traffic, but it'd be useful to know if anyone else has suggestions or thoughts on how to extend this?

In the meanwhile, if you have a social media account - twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News or anything else, or a travel blog where you could do a post about it, it's time to get the word out that we have a great thing here.

Thoughts welcome.

EDIT

Wow, Astronomy and Theoretical Physics had all their questions migrated to Physics. They've got their work cut out for them in terms of re-tagging :)

I would love to see their traffic stats for the week or two around the migration...

Answer 1

According to our stats at Area51, all we need is not the interesting questions, but simply questions - there are only 4.6 a day, and this stat are only decreasing.

Also we have to answer more often even to answered questions - just to move the "Answers per question" rate.

Visits per day are move up slowly, but constantly, and there wouldn't be any problems with that.

So I think our problem is not with new users, but in content quality. May be we need another flash-mob for answering the questions.

Answer 2

Some sites were closed because of the depletion of the question pool. This was the case of very specific, narrow-field sites such as Atheism, where the community failed to produce new questions.

In my opinion, the topic of the Travel site is very large, so the site will not become saturated with questions. The danger is, however, the lack of the activity of the users. There are thousends of possible questions which could be asked, but the users are not asking them. There are a lot of travel portals, so if users become satisfied by what they found there, they won't ask their question here.

When it comes to the new users, I think the question pool is still too limited to motivate users external to StackExchange to join. And it is our responsibility to create such question pool, that the site will become at minimum some kind of Travel FAQ.

As for the question promotion in portals such as Digg, the digging of already submited links is very easy, but the submitting new one is a bit tricky - you must provide the description, category etc. Isn't it possible to automate that process so that the diggs would be consequest and manual submitting wouldn't be required? It would be also great to have Digg button on the left panel.