Promoting the "Musical Practice & Performance" site

Question

After only a few days of public Beta, 85% of the committers have signed up, 50% of followers have signed up and 9% of commitments have been fulfilled. These are good signs but there are less good signs:

• numbers of new questions is a bit slow

• questions are leaning a lot toward basic questions that a single wikipedia or google search could solve almost instantly

• 30% of committers only committed to this proposal so you would expect more dedication and more activity from them.

• 85% of committers + 50% of followers account for almost 100% of our current about 300 users.

So it is time to discuss ways of promoting the site and make it grow and more dynamic.

Answer 1

Don't lose sight of the obvious — provide high-quality content and draw people into your site by becoming the preeminent music Q&A destination. Google and social networking are your friend.

We find that the best way to attract new users to the site is by highlighting your most intriguing questions. People love answering questions, and a particularly interesting and intriguing question is irresistible. It's the quickest, most definitive way to help someone realize "Yeah, this site is for me!"

Use those social bookmarks!

Answer 2

One of the major problems Stackexchange sites have(after the initial population, it is of course a huge advantage to begin with) is that the major pool of users for each site comes from the stackexchange network namely the big IT related three SO SU SF.

Obviously not all of these users are musicians, nor do all of them have time to be on bicycles.se, skeptics.se, homebrew.se, music.se stackoverflow, etcetera and still have enough time to pursue the real life interests/hobbies they are asking questions about.

You need to get users from outside the stackexchange network. The problem with getting users from outside the stackexchange network is that they are not schooled in the stackexchange mode of operation. Also for topics such as music/the arts, musically creative people tend to be less rigid and if they don't have the IT/SO background overly-zealous moderation may be an off putter to them.

I think moderation of SE sites like music.se should take this into consideration with new users, and at least try and edit new users questions or guide them before just blankly closing them. We want users to feel like they can interact when they get here, so they should be handled with kid gloves initially, until they learn the ropes.

I believe that this will help the site grow and be more accessible to any new users that come here.

I also think that designing and applying a style to music.se (al la gaming.se - photography.se), will give the site more of an individual character, which may make a difference.

Just opinions.

Answer 3

There are the social networking means provided on the home page of this website. I didn't do too well trying to get people to commit to the proposal during the commitment phase, but it's worth trying again, so we should encourage everyone who has an account on those sites to advertise (can we have a banner on the main site, like the one that's currently displayed about the 7 essential questions on meta?). I found StumbleUpon to be quite effective at that.

Among those interesting websites that are missing from that list, Youtube, Myspace and Last.fm seem like relevant places to spread the word, although I'm not sure exactly how (merely send a message to all your "friends"/followers?).

I know of a few other more specialised places (e.g. the Modern blues harp forum, or the one on HarpTabs), but the promotion on such places should come from someone who is already a member, so that it's not perceived as spam or as a tentative to "steal" their user base.

I'm also trying to spread the word offline. Time will tell whether or not that works.

Maybe this should be a different question, but I don't see how we can attract real experts over here. I expect most of them to be too advanced to need this place, or too busy to spend time on the net helping less advanced people... but I'm eager to be proven wrong (and by no means do I intend to offend those who are already here and whose presence I'm unaware of).

Answer 4

Now that our friends from guitars.SE have joined us, it could be helpful if they advertised for this website in the on- and off-line guitar community ;-)

Answer 5

Ogregard made a suggestion in a side question: To promote the site, follow the Music Tweeter?

We really need to promote the site more, we should be worrying given the low statistics.

Please help to cover more topics more in-depth. :)

Answer 6

AFAIU, SE expects most of the traffic to come from search engines, so working on bringing the site up in the list of search engine for relevant terms is important. (That would increase the traffic).

A simple thing you can do is linking from your professional sites or homepages to the site. Spreading the word is also important. Share some of the questions you find interesting on social media like Facebook, talk about the site with you colleagues, friends, ...

But in general, I think it is too early to worry about these numbers. Wait for a month to see how things are going. For now what is needed is more questions and more answers.

Try to write good questions and answers that will not only be helpful for yourself or the OP but will be helpful for anyone searching for a similar question.

ps: and be more welcoming to new users. Don't trash their question but help them to improve it to a questions suitable for the site, the kind of question you would ask if you were in the place of the new comer, and during this process teach them how to write better questions.

Answer 7

I've been thinking further as to what would get the message out there.

After playing at a few festivals and thinking about the ubiquitous nature of stickers on flight cases, instruments, trucks etc, I think music.SE stickers could be a valuable addition.

This suggestion might have to wait until the branding and logo is designed, but I think will have some visual impact that could help drive new users to the site.

Additionally, a useful target might be music schools or music courses at colleges and universities - flyers showing students where they could go to for some answers they may not get in a course could be very helpful.

Answer 8

I was discouraged from participation by the title which does not give the right impression although after my recent question on area51 I realize that I am absolutely in the target group of this site.

You should really consider changing the title to something that conveys "music site for musicians".