Keeping up with the Joneses (or Bio.SEs)

Question

As is often lamented on A51 and the metas of science sites, the metric of graduation don't make much sense for science sites. Unfortunately, the current metrics make it hard to see how we are doing, so our best option is to look to an older site for guidance.

Our older cousin, Bio.SE, turned 250 days old today. We will turn 250 in exactly 5 weeks, on September 25th. A good way to make sure we are doing well, is to have the same (or similar) stats to Bio on this milestone. This is how they are doing:

For comparison, here are our stats at 215 days:

As you can see, we are a little behind and have some catching up to do. This is made even more important by the start of the school term (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) and the potential influx of new users we will encounter. Let's be in tip-top shape for that!

From what I can see, our biggest weakness is the number of visits per day. Let us work hard to increase this metric over the next few days. When you ask or answer a question, share it on twitter, G+, or reddit. When you see a good question or answer, do the same! What are some ways we can increase the number of visits?

The questions per day is also lacking, but we are capable of achieving similar numbers as we showed in June. Ask questions and share this site, both offline and on!

What are some other ways we can improve?

Answer 1

Share good posts. Ideally to wide, relevant audiences, though I'm afraid I'm not aware of too many easily accessible social media sites related to the cognitive sciences.

There's two kinds of sharing; deep, personal sharing and broad, impersonal sharing. Hopefully if you know anyone that would be personally interested in the site, you'll give them a direct referral and explain what we're about. More generally however, the broad net is easier to cast and can pick up some good traffic.

There are the following Reddit sites related to our scope (feel free to add more relevant social media locations):

• Psychology (63,385 readers)
• Cognitive Science (53,095 readers)
• Neuroscience (12,233 readers)
• Neurophilosophy (8,035 readers)
• Neruopsychology (5,882 readers)
• Psychopharmacology (4,011 readers)
• Behavioral Economics (3,661 readers)
• Academic Psychology (3,354 readers)
• Cognitive Linguistics (2,008 readers)
• Mathematical Psychology (1,579 readers)

Follow etiquette when sharing (share relevant stuff politely, not too many links in too short a time). Try and engage users who comment on your links.

Speaking as Mod on The Workplace and User Experience I can say we've had a couple huge temporary spikes of traffic due to sharing on reddit/Hacker News. After these spikes there's much smaller, but permanent, traffic increases; after the initial wave of new visitors, a significant amount really did stick around. I'd suggest trying to catch a little of that attention and see how it works out. Moderation-wise it can be a bit of a challenge to keep up, but it's been quite manageable in my experience.

Answer 2

We tried:

We Improved or maintained all of our stats, but the gain was not drastic enough to catch Bio.SE. This is what our traffic looked like (measured by quantcast):

The vertical line separates the last 35 days from the 35 before. The spikes are correlated to popular posts on reddit. I have learnt a few things while advertising there, and will try to make a separate post about that later. However, it seems that most of my shares on the most relevant subreddits did not go through :(.