What can we do to advertise Latin.SE?

Question

One of the main sources of this site's traffic over the last few weeks has been other sites on the Stack Exchange network, thanks to the Hot Network Questions bar. When one of our questions is answered within a few hours, and both question and answer(s) receive several upvotes, a link to the question appears across the network.

This is a great way to get exposure for our site, but I know there's more that we can do. What ideas could we implement that would lead to more visitors and users on our site?

Answer 1

I have three ideas:

1. One thing that I have been planning is to write an article in Melissa, a magazine published in Latin. It reaches a fair amount of people who are enthusiastic about the language. I have once published an article there about my research, and I have read numerous other articles. I therefore think I know that a nice little article about this site would have a good change to get published.

2. At some point I will advertise this site on some Finnish mailing lists. I want to do it properly, so it will take a while to figure out how to do that. I might make a metapost about phrasing such advertisement emails or selecting good example questions for them at some point.

3. My home city hosts an annual event Athenis Finlandiae dedicated to ancient culture. (You are of course all welcome to attend!) I will probably be given the chance to mention and promote this new site if I ask for it. If nothing else, I will mention it in the inaugurating speech I have been invited to give.

I have postponed thinking about promoting our site until we have it in such a shape that I dare show it to outsiders. Now that our help pages and tour and Latin quick help are in place, promotion is a next priority.

Answer 2

Community promotion ads

On graduated sites, a sidebar ad appears on the right side of the screen that points to one of several ads approved by each site's community. On Christianity.SE, the following will be a common sight (note the ad on the right):

There's a fair amount of overlap in interest between Christianity and Latin, thanks to the writings of many of the church fathers and the ongoing use of Latin in Catholicism. Thus, an ad like this reaches an audience that is likely to be more interested in Latin than the general populace. But, there are a few issues:

1. To my knowledge, Christianity.SE is the only site where Latin.SE has been promoted in this way. One other candidate that comes to mind would be English Language & Usage. Other sites, like Linguistics, History, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., couldn't show such an ad because they are still in beta.
2. In order for the ad to appear on these sites, someone needs to design it, post it in the relevant meta post on the target site, and attract six upvotes. Ideally, ads should be visually appealing and simultaneously indicate why members of the target site might also be interested in Latin.SE.

So if you have ideas for new ads, are willing to design them, or are simply interested in upvoting one submitted by someone else, that's great! Hopefully we can leverage this built-in feature to expose our site to more people.