What avenues of site promotion do we have available?

Question

Judging from our Area 51 report page, this site isn't doing as well as it should be. I realize admissions have to be made for the youth of the site, but if we aren't proactive about publicizing it, we might in time meet the same doom as Literature.SE just did. We have excellent answering habits (99% answered, 2.2 answer:question ratio), but we get only about 3 questions per day (we're shooting for about 15 at the end of 90 days), we're on pace for only 54 users with 200+ rep at the end of 90 days (we're shooting for 150), and we have an average of 114 visits per day, instead of the recommended 1500.

As I said, the site is new, so there's no immediate emergency, but if we find some ways of publicizing it, we could catalyze our progress, and not have to fear closure. So I pose this question to anyone who reads this:

What are our resources?

Answer 1

Few things you can do (some stuff taken from my post here):

• Create a community promotion ad and post on a graduated site. Maybe on Math Mathematica.SE and chem.SE have done so on Physics.
• Create an A4(or whatever) poster for your users to print out and stick somewhere. We did that on chem
• Write an awesome blog post, like this one by a TW mod
• Encourage colleagues/classmates/friends(who have a background in chess) to join. Tell them how awesome we are!
• Try to get more experts engaged. Remember, the more experts you have, the better the site is (we don't want to degrade into Yahoo! Answers)
• Retweet the upvoted questions posted by @StackChess

Answer 2

Unfortunately, the Q&A metrics are not good enough as an indicator of a chess site's quality. At the moment, the site also has very little (of importance) to offer to the chess community. While there's plenty of commentary around trivia on chessgames.com, the viewership would crumble if that was the only thing worth discussing. You could either start offering news and relays of major events or provide some form of statistical function that could be useful to the community, having a real purpose will definitely bring in the traffic.

Answer 3

There are two chess forum sites I can think of which are full of users who would be ideal targets to become new chess.SE users:

• ChessPub, the discussion forum for the opening theory site Chesspublishing.com.
• ChessForums.org.

(And, by the way, the number of threads/posts at those sites seem to indicate that chess.SE should be able to reach a healthy level of activity if it were to just get noticed.) So one way to get some attention for the site would be to mention it at those forums, not with egregious, overt advertising (which I imagine would be unwelcome), but via the mention of particular posts over here that are relevant to topics at hand over there.

Answer 4

These ideas may sound funny but they may attract some users to some extent:

• we can announce an yearly chess tournament where the chess.so users and their friends can play around online

• we can reward them for winners (as other meta sites usually do)but as we are at beta so we can ask community to promote the tournament

• we can ask the chess.se users to join with their friends like team match(similar to matches played between two groups )

• we can start our own chess.se blog

• we can announce the winners at the main site (stackexchange community) so that it can attract visitors. (As many people visit the community site about new sites they may develop interest in our site).

Answer 5

Getting the site mentioned on one of the more heavily-trafficked chess news sites might be one of the most effective ways to get word out to a crowd that would welcome the site. (I certainly don't know any traffic statistics, but I have in mind sites like Chessbase, Chessdom, ChessVibes and The Week in Chess.) Unfortunately, the only way to get a notice on one of those sites would probably be through paid advertising.

I actually emailed Peter Doggers, who runs ChessVibes, last week just to feel him out about the possibility of making a post about chess.SE there. He was lukewarm on the idea, to say the least, since it wouldn't really fit in with his site's focus on major chess events, and he instead floated the idea of purchasing a banner ad there, pretty much as I expected.

So while the sites I listed might be ideal in terms of numbers of eyeballs, they aren't very realistic in terms of "fit." One thing to do is take note of any chess-related sites/blogs/fora you frequent, and think about whether there is any chance of working chess.SE into the conversation there, say by pointing to specific questions/answers from here and asking if others have more input on them.