How should we promote Answers to the world?

A couple of things come to mind:

• Promote where entrepreneurs get information: Places like the SBA, SCORE, Business Week, etc.
• Reach out to Non-Software Entrepreneurs: Most of the people on this site are starting or running micro-ISV's. There are a ton of other businesses that can benefit from this forum. Most of the questions and answers apply to any business. Look at places like Startup Nation or the like.
• Organize Resource Pages: Take all the great questions and answers and put together a common startup guide or something like that. This will reduce the barrier to entry for finding useful information.
• Guest Post on Other Blogs: This is pretty effective for bloggers and can be effective for this site as well. Heck, I found this site because of a blog.
• Contributors can Target Forums: Assign some of the community members to comment on other forums where entrepreneurs hang out like The Personal MBA, Venture Hacks, etc. That way, the word gets out and people can see the value.

One of the best possible sources of new members for a community like this is the existing members.

You have a good group of passionate and knowledgeable members. To best leverage this great group, I'd start with one simple step and use addthis.com to add "share this" buttons by each question and answer. This links to everything from basic e-mail to Facebook to Twitter to Digg to . Simple, easy, and free.

This will let OnStartups members share specific content with people they know who will be genuinely interested in that content - and then who are most likely to sign up as members. We're using this on our user generated content site and have been researching it - it turns out that even WhiteHouse.gov uses this now.

Good luck!!!!

I think one way to do this is to find blogs that write on topics of interest to your target audience, and get them to write a review of the site. I did this a while ago (here's my first mention of this site on my blog, and I've since mentioned the site several times when questions here have prompted articles on my site).

You could also write guest posts and publish them on various sites for startups. Perhaps offer a journal system where entrepreneurs can write about their journey in exchange for some customized advice, and a mention on this site (in exchange, they would get a mention here for their contributions, and they would provide thanks to this site on their own site).

I'm really interested in seeing what other people come up with!

To use our own info:

1) Target these sites:

• what-are-the-top-10-startup-blogs
• what-are-the-top-10-vc-blogs

Try to get mentions on them. If applicable, place ads. joelonsoftware should be amenable to this, right?

Run an Adwords campaign

do some quick research - startup questions & startup help seem to be good ones.

target other "stackexchange" sites. IF they already bought into this type of q&a model, then they will feel familiar and come over here if they are so inclined. I'd definitely put an ad on stackoverflow - esp. for those microisvs.

[edit: added another]

Why not add twitter capability so that new questions are automatically tweeted? That works pretty good for other interest sites...

You may want to contact Jason Calacanis at his ThisWeekInstartups.com and he might mention this site in his podcast. His podcast is all about startups. Although this site might compete with his podcast segment where he answers questions from callers.

I found this site because I follow Dharmesh's blog. I think Dharmesh needs to blog more often or find a couple regular bloggers for OnStartups (heck I'd do one or two guest posts if he asked). You don't see Arrington doing all the blogging on TechCrunch. Most of the community here came form his blog.

Another idea is to do what Guy Kawasaki does on Twitter and post the most relevant questions on this site on Twitter. He tweets about 10-20 of the best and most compelling aticles per day from his AllTop site on Twitter. I find some of them fascinating and as a result find myself on AllTop more often.

My first question would be defining your target audience. Who are the primary users of this site? Can you give a little more description of what you consider "quality" users?

My first gut reaction was guerrilla marketing. Go after the top similar type forums and post questions as well as answers for visibility. So for example, Linkedin Answers or Yahoo Answers. Answer startup related questions related to some of the best posts here and end with a simple signature/link at the end and little plug that "From our Answers Users" or something like that. Each forum (like Linkedin Answers) has lots of crazy active, crazy smart people who contribute and lots of people who look. Go after the big ones. Some may chop your posts but do it in a mostly neutral way and give it a go.

At the same time, post really interesting questions that start off with a lot of valuable content that you're giving to that particular community with a request for more answers from the users. Like I did with my "productivity" post - I had about 10 things I do then asked others to jump in. And again, you brand this as "Answers" driven. Soft sell.

And per your question, you could create some type of incentive to get people to check the site out. That might get you blasted off but you can test the waters and try.

That's just one idea. I know it takes a lot of time but it's cheap and I think it's going to hit a highly qualified audience.

I'll search the brain for some more ideas.

Best of luck.

Hi Jason, Such a great idea to ask the community for help and ideas. Here are a few of mine:

Badges/Buttons-The badges here are used internally to this site (which is fine) but you could implement a public badge creator that enables people to embed an OnStartups Answers badge/button on their blog or website that links to this site. This would be similar to the many Twitter button creators, etc.

Email Newsletter- Although many people use RSS feeds, some people prefer to subscribe to forums via email and receive a weekly or monthly round-up of top questions and answers. This is a great way for people to opt-in to receive information (even if they don't register with the Answers site), and emails are often forwarded to others. To increase email subscriptions, or just offer on its own without registration form if you want to take a more viral approach, offer a relevant, useful eBook, video, or other type of content that they immediately receive. This content should be optimized to be shared via social media, furthering its reach.

Video Campaign- Create a series (start with one video, test it, analyze results, create second video, and so on) of short videos and post to YouTube and the OnStartups blog. Include a strong call-to-action, for example the "Google inbound marketing" CTA that HubSpot used in You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing" video.

SEO Press Release-Simple, short press release announcing two successful software entrepreneurs started free community to help other startups. Do some keyword research and be sure to include keywords in release and provide link to Answers site. PRLog is my preferred free or low-cost release distribution site.

Contest- The person that submits a question that gets the most community votes during a specific month, and the person that has the top answer during that specific month, each receive a free 1 hour conference call with you and Dharmesh to receive valuable advice on their most challenging problems. Since only active community users with high enough internal badges can vote, this would prevent cheating.

I highly recommend Dharmesh's book for ideas :)

I have seen in various forums that most of the start-ups are struggling to get financed. More often than not, they are gracefully/diplomatically shooed away by the financiers (angels/VC's/banks etc). This happens for one of many reasons which are not conveyed directly to the poor chaps.

How about getting in touch with angel networks / VC's who can guide these chaps to this forum?

These guys would be able to get tremendous help here.

Piquing the interest of a journalist who writes for a large paper (NY Times, etc).

The Stackexchange way of promoting desired behavior is to award badges. Since many of the Stackexchange-sites will have the same problem:

Is it possible to have the dev-team add badges for traffic?

1. The user adds a link to answers.onstartups.com/incoming/user-id
2. A bronze badge is awarded after 5 incoming unique visitors
3. A silver badge is awarded after 500 incoming unique visitors
4. A gold badge is awarded after 10000 incoming unique visitors

No reputation points are awarded (it would be too easy to game the system and the reputation should probably reflect the activity on the site).

What about reaching out to college professors teaching courses in relevant areas (i.e. innovation, small business, technical ventures, technical management, accounting, etc)? They might be willing to share the site with their students as a resource for them. I would guess that the students would post good questions. And the professors may be willing to answer questions as well.

I know of one professor I'll ask.

As Chris suggested, guerrilla marketing could be very powerful, but I'd stay away from spammy tactics, like posting on forums or other Q&A sites. But doing something outrageous and controversial that will make an impact in the community might be just the thing we need, if executed properly.

Also a bunch of my friends share my entrepreneurial passion, so there should be "Tweet this" and "Share on FB" links to every answer and question. Could be done with some custom javascript without tampering with the inner workings of Stack Exchange. Or full Facebook Connect integration if possible. For example each time I answer or ask a question a prompt appears to let my facebook friends and twitter followers know about it, "luring" them back here to register and benefit themselves and the community.

I would come up with some type of reward system that encourages the existing members to refer and invite new contributing members who post thoughtful and relevant questions and answers. Maybe a badge for referring x new members who acquired x number of votes would work. That way members who are here for the long run will think about potential new referrals who will make this a bigger and better community and invite them in.

A couple of thoughts I didn't see mentioned:

1. Allow users to post their question on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc. - Basically, make it easy to share your link is a great way to raise awareness. Also, what better reason to join than help out your friend by answering a question of theirs. Integrating with Facebook connect is a quick way. OpenID/Twitter/etc login is another great way.
2. Encourage users to turn their Q&A's into blog posts. I blog regularly and these posts are great for when I have writer's block and can't think of a new topic to write about. They must add a link back of course.
3. Finally, see if there's a way to work with Aardvark. This site reminds me a lot of it. Maybe there's a way to harness the power of the community they've already built.

I just started using this today and I'm really impressed by the caliber of the answers I've received. In fact, I posted the same question on Twitter and Aardvark too and this forum was the most helpful.

Best of luck!

-Yasmine

Have you thought about speaking at a conference that targets start ups?

The 19th annual Software Industry Conference will be held this year in Dallas, Texas at the Hyatt Regency DFW, July 15-17, 2010. It is intended for software start ups, SaaS, Micro ISVs, and internet marketers.

If you are interested in speaking at the conference to an audience of hundreds of Micro ISVs, here is your chance. Use the link below to build and submit an abstract on the topic you want to speak about. Feel free to pass the PDF on to anyone you think might be interested in speaking at the conference.

http://sic.org/files/SIC-2010-Call_for_Papers.pdf

For more information on the conference in general visit:

http://sic.org

Why not approach entrepreneur meetup groups to spread the word or create affiliations?

Most large metros have a few like the ones we have in the Bay Area: such as SF New Tech, http://sfnewtech.com/, Silicon Valley Assoc of Software Entrepreneurs, svase.org and TiE.org, http://startup2startup.com/ etc.

Everybody is doing a FB page, maybe Onstartups should have one too?

I suggest that you reach out to entrepreneurs involved with early stage seed accelerators like TechStars and YCombinator. They are prefiltered as very knowledgable/experienced people interested in giving back, and they may encourage involvement from those startup communities and their own.

The number one reason I come here and recommend others is because of the people who contribute. There's something special about being able to ask questions that get read and answered by a quality community.

Since many users are in the IT industry, you could sponsor a tag(s) on Stackoverflow like Redgate does for SQL Server. SO has many questions about pricing, sales, licensing etc. Pool them together in a 'Business' tag. Users of both sites could help with the tagging if you just ask.

These sites have no way for current members to get credit for referrals or a referral mechanism. At least a badge for 5, 25, 50, 100 referrals.

Sorry, but Joel Spolsky was right (most recent podcast), both sites need to merge. There isn't enough to go around.

I launched a new StackExchange site last Sunday and have followed many of the suggestions in the answers to this question as part of our launch efforts.

I had suggested using the "share this" button from AddThis for AnswersOnStartups. Since it worked here, I put this on our new site. It turns out that this has not only helped by making it easy for new members to share the content - it has also had an immediate impact on how we are showing up in Google. For example, we have had members share content via Digg and StumbleUpon and now Google shows this which I think has to help with our SEO ranking.