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In the early days of this site there were many discussions on site promotion.

I was wondering, now that the site is almost a year and a half old, whether people had any new ideas for site promotion. Alternatively, this post might act as an impetus to implement some new site promotion ideas.

Thus, I was hoping this question could prompt some concrete suggestions for site promotion. Or people could share any new promotion initiatives they have tried and their relative success.

Historically effective strategies

  • Posting particularly interesting questions to various subreddits on Reddit like psychology, cogsci, math psych
  • Getting a blogger with a reasonable following to provide a review of the site

Other useful strategies:

  • Sharing links to questions or talking about the site on social networks like Google+ and Twitter
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    I like the idea of getting a blogger to promote us. I wonder if we could have someone at psychologytoday.com cover us. Many (most?) of their many authors are psychology professors, who clearly like to write. Likewise, they have a large base of readers that enjoys reading about psychology. Seems like just the type of audience we would want.
    – Jeff
    Mar 30, 2013 at 3:47
  • @jeff Great idea. I wonder what the best way to approach one would be. I know I get sent requests to feature an article on my blog, and such requests are usually just spam requests from people with urls like "freecollegedegrees.com" . I guess the challenges would be to communicate that this is a great site that might interest them or their readers.
    – Jeromy Anglim
    Mar 30, 2013 at 4:04
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    Having read through some of the backlog of these discussions, it is clear the discussion reaches an impasse every time it becomes obvious that the site does not have the necessary core of experts to maintain a stable influx of interesting research questions, and that it therefore cannot attract more experts, thus the chicken and the egg. The first step to growing this site is to accept that it is not within our power, given what we currently have at our disposal in terms of time, effort, activity and membership, to make targeted efforts at attracting experts.
    – Christian Hummeluhr
    Mar 30, 2013 at 9:04
  • I gave a suggestion towards attracting users generally, rather than an expert-targeted effort, here.
    – Christian Hummeluhr
    Mar 30, 2013 at 9:06

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Promoting questions and answers

With respect to promotion, it would be helpful if we had a collectively curated list of promotion avenues. At what subreddits can we reach our target audience? Which blogs are sympathetic to our site? What areas of cogsci do those bloggers write about (so we can link them the relevant questions, either directly or in comments)? These are questions such a list would give a better birds-eye view of. When we see a good question, knowing where to promote it to a broader audience should be readily available common knowledge. Every new question is an opportunity to reach potential members, provided we know where those potential members are and why they might be interested in this SE, and every unpromoted question is a missed opportunity.

I don't know what the appropriate technical format for such a list is on SE, so hopefully someone can contribute with that, but I would be happy to add the avenues I know of to it (e.g. the Google Plus Psychology community). Here is an example of me promoting my recent question about mindfulness in a way I think interests both experts, who want to contribute their views, and laymen, who want to know those views:

Promoting questions

In the end, I think at this stage it's about establishing a stable influx of members by consistently giving people reasons to become members, not one-off events like getting a popular blogger to give us a shout-out. These one-off events can be helpful, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for creating a vibrant community, and should not be our main focus.

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    Probably best to just start a meta post which lists all the resources which everyone can edit to add resources. Might indeed be a useful resource to refer to when a good question pops up!
    – Steven Jeuris Mod
    Mar 30, 2013 at 15:30

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