Advice for Websites Combating Net.Obscurity?

waveclaw asks: "A Catch-22: how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point and your being drowned in information sea that the web has become? Many people take the popularity of Slashdot and other 'people concentrators' for granted. Whole communities are developing, as they have done for thousands of years, on web logs and news sites via reader feedback. Unfortunately, not all sites are well traveled. (Side note: a lot of reseach has apperantly gone into this.) For instance, the special interst publication Dragon Spirit Magazine is closing their doors due to a lack rather than surfiet of viewers. Belfy Comics lists an entire section of online-only comics which are (for lack of a better term) abandoned by both viewer and creator. Porbably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalist nor jack-booted: it's obscurity."

"While network outages are easy to diagnose by comparison, what does a site do when it's dying? Sites like Keenspace and Webring and wiki try to build self-referential collections of sites and pages that sometimes work and sometimes don't Has anyone out had their back to this wall a lot and come out winning? Short of a listing on Slashdot, how?"

Common Problem

[squaretorus]

I have worked on many projects which have failed due to a shortfall in uptake. The sites themselves were excellent, and beloved by their userbase - but the userbase just wasn't big enough.

Running the risk of a granny egg sucking session, here are some observations of things which HELP a site.

Novel Material / Early News
If your site can be first with the news, or provide good novel content which is interesting / useful enough for people to print / bookmark you have a good chance of being referenced. This is a key FREE way to spread the word.

Forums
Wether /. style, live CHAT style, or some hideous mix as we did recently these are the key to any site working. Even one that is not there specifically to allow interchange - enable it and you give the site a sense of place - of commonality - of community. It's fluffy - but it works!

Hard Copies
It sounds stupid - but the sites we built early on, which had a paper newsletter (usually quarterly) asociated with them have done well. People seem to repond to the paper mail and visit the site. Coincide the paper issue with a new feature / big story and you multiply the effect.

Email
Give people a reminder email every couple of weeks - its not spam - they signed up for it. Say something in the email - not just 'visit us'.

Recommend a Friend
Give people an easy way to forward links to the site, and to every individual item within the site straight from the page. We know they can do this easily without a 'recommend a friend' button - but they really do work. Up to 50% of new members are coming from this on some sites.

Stats
Show people how many people are using the site - make people visible, through forums or other mechanisms. If you see a site thats obviously been updated TODAY and has a bunch of visitors your more likely to take it seriously.

And some stuff you would THINK would work but in my experience doesn't.

Directories
Niche directories sound great. Operate a definitive list of great sources of information for people to access. Hope they start using you as their own bookmarks for this topic.
On the whole our feedback shows most people are happy with google, AV, etc... for 90% of links, so don't need this kind of thing. These are costly to maintain well, and of little benefit.

Too many options
A mature site can cope with tonnes of options to switch this off, that on, remove images, add a reminder service etc... But again, we find that this stuff just puts people off if its there before an established community.

Client confidentiality, DPA, etc.. stops me citing the examples - sorry.

Having this discussion in other places as well.

[Dram]

On Quorum.org [quorum.org] [quorum.org] we were having this discussion [quorum.org] [quorum.org] just yesterday. Part of the discussion talked about how to get casual viewers involved and participating in a community site. There were some other things discussed, go and take a look.