How can we increase site traffic?

Question

The biggest problem for this beta is that we have very little outside traffic. This site has been an important resource for me as a Ukrainian learner, but there are not many of my kind. How can we reach the community of native speakers?

Answer 1

I would argue that there is already a solid community of native speakers here. What we really need is attracting two other categories of people:

1. language learners — non-native speakers who study Slavonic languages in general and the Ukrainian in particular;
2. Ukrainian nationals who (like myself) at a certain moment decided to switch to Ukrainian in family and on public.

While I expect that the latter category would be bigger by number, I sincerely think that questions in English can become a powerful driving force that generates the interest. The reason is simple: there are various Russian/Ukrainian-speaking forums/boards about the Ukrainian language, but there is nearly none for questions in English. So an average person can find more or less the answer to their question elsewhere, while there are not that many such places for English speakers.

According to Analytics, people come from two sources:

1. Social networks (primarily, Facebook);
2. Search engines (primarily, Google);

Social networks are straightforward: your friends learn about your interests, find out what you're doing, and may become interested, too.

To make hits from the search engines, there must be already questions on the site, indexed. Only then someone comes to Google, asks до побачення write together or separate, gets a high-rank link to our pre-existing question, clicks, reads an answer, and goes away (90%). Only several percent of people start navigating around, creating an account, etc. But in order to get "real" users, there must be a ten (or hundred?) times more anonymous visitors.

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Now, having the goal and the reasoning, we can tell what to do:

1. Ask and Answer in English; Google will never index a non-existing question! :-)
2. Share to blogs, social networks, and wherever you may expect to find those who would be interested, too;
3. Vote to reward the existing posts;