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(I'm asking one of the The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta.)

How do we promote this  Personal Finance & Money  Q & A site to the world?

One of the strategies I believe in is in developing quality content: Well-titled, well-described questions with high quality answers. Good content helps the site succeed in search results, and being found and noticed for quality content encourages people to bookmark, visit again, ask a question, etc.

But, good content aside, how else can we reach out to experts in personal finance, or people with questions on the subject, and get them to participate at the site?

A Recipe to Promote your Site

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I'm always drawn back to your site by provocative tweets that Chris Rea posts with links to individual questions. Is there anyone else who frequents the site with a reasonably large following on twitter?

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It may be an unreasonably high goal, but it seems most people get their personal finance advice from people like Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard. I think a shout out from Clark, or a link on his site would go a long way toward helping us make it big.

A related (and more feasible) option would be to mention the site (or better yet link to questions) on one of the popular money forums.

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There are hundreds (if not thousands) of personal finance bloggers. I think it would be good to start an outreach to them. Provide them an easy way to link to questions on our site. Maybe a widget like the "related" widget at the side of this page. Can that be given out as a wordpress widget?

At the very least though, write and send a letter to personal finance bloggers letting them know about the site.

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  • what about trying to get them to migrate to the site? Is there a way they could get the same "reimbursement"?
    – Lucas B
    Commented Sep 17, 2010 at 16:18
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As suggested on rpg meta stumble and digg can be great ways to get attention for the site. I've started to stumble some of my favorite questions. Stumbling the main page doesn't usually have much value though ...

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Chris' tweets help to keep the activity up front. I often notice a question he's tweeted and I'll sign in to respond.

For fellow bloggers who are active - peek at how I use the RSS feed at JoeTaxpayer.com. It's a way of promoting my own responses same as I promote my guest posts elsewhere. If there's interest, I can show how to use Yahoo Pipes to have the feed look the way it does. Of course, you then need to be active enough so that feed-box looks like it's busy, same question just sitting there won't get much interest.

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Blogs like Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar have masses of very active commenters. Contacting those writers or posting in the forums associated with those sites could help with visibility.

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Do the search engines index the site contents? I suspect not, because I don't get google hits even when I query using verbatim content. PhpBB somehow allows crawlers so it's definitely possible. This enhancement would be usable across the whole of stack exchange.

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  • It's in Google. Search on "site:money.stackexchange.com" .. you'll see what's there. It will improve with time, especially as people link to the site. When the site was running as basicallymoney.com there was plenty of traffic from Google.
    – Chris W. Rea
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 15:04
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    @ChrisWRea What were our views/days numbers like before SE2.0?
    – Alex B
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 15:23
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    @Alex B: From July 3rd, to August 3rd (the last day for which I have full analytics for basicallymoney.com) average page views per day was ~1650 and average visits per day was ~810. Overall, 88% of visits were from search engines, and 96% of all search traffic was from Google.
    – Chris W. Rea
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 18:52
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    @Alex B: Since then, the site may have been penalized in rankings either because basicallymoney.com is no longer the main domain name (which had the PageRank), or else because of the 7-day private beta which restricted access to content temporarily. In any case, I expect we'll work up in the rankings again soon. Content from money.stackexchange.com is getting indexed.
    – Chris W. Rea
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 18:54
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    @Alex B: That being said, we are getting a lot more direct visits to the site under SE2.0 and many more people contributing to the Q&A. I'm happy with the move, even if Google search traffic hasn't caught up, yet.
    – Chris W. Rea
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 18:55

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