Promotion is the art of getting people interested in visiting and staying at your wiki. Learning this art is one of the most important things you must do as a founder (or leading contributor) if you are to create a successful community around your wiki.
Attracting Contributors
At the early stages of building a Wiki community, it is important to get your basic structure, help pages and forums sorted out. After which, attracting contributors is the most important step. We are not all lucky enough to have 10,000,000 fans who might contribute to our Wiki, so we need to consider how to attract those people who might contribute (the Interested and Confident) and how to get people that are interested but who otherwise wouldn't contribute to take part (increasing Passion).
Why promote?
To many people, promotion is a dirty word - just one step away from the dreaded advertising. However, the simple truth is that unless you promote your wiki in some way, it will have far fewer visitors; and will gain far less regular contributors than it otherwise could. While it is indeed possible for one or two dedicated people to construct a wiki by themselves - most founders will have to start with extensive seed posting - the objective of many wikis is to disseminate information, and virtually all are intended to be communities as well. Neither of these objectives can be attained without people.
These people do not magically appear - they are already out there, on other websites and in real life. Your mission is to make sure that they come to your website. To do this, you must identify places where the sort of people your project wishes to attract are common and talk about it there. If you are a member of the target group for your wiki, you are probably already familiar with these places, which makes things a lot easier - all you have to do is figure out what to say! This may take some time, and you should consider the audience and the sort of visitors you want to encourage when composing it.
It is important to note as a founder and official "voice of the project", you will be expected to perform virtually all the promotion for the wiki, especially in the beginning. As time goes on you may find that people talk about it elsewhere, especially if they have contributed something of note, but you will still have to take an active role in packaging together people's contributions into a substantial "press release" which you can then post on forums and submit as news to related websites. This may feel odd to start with, but you will soon get used to "speaking for the community" - just make sure that you really do speak for it!
How to promote your wiki
It is important to remember that there is no one "best way" to promote a wiki. You should choose whatever methods seem appropriate to the topic and the community you wish to build. Having said that, here are a few ways you might want to consider when deciding how to promote your wiki:
General suggestions
- Explain to people who may be interested in the topic area that the wiki is a common effort
- Be welcoming to visitors and encourage them to become part of the wiki
- Encourage significant individual contributors to contribute even more
- Apply for a Wikia Spotlight!
- Advertise for new users on relevant mailing lists, and through your own contacts
- Be careful that your messages do not come across as spam
- For wikis about local areas you can make a press release or just a notice to your local newspapers - similarly, if your chosen topic has "trade magazines" or similar publications, consider letting them know
- Post messages on related web forums and newsgroups announcing your wiki
- Keep posting regular updates describing the general progress and specific advancements
- It is probably best to avoid attributing any of this to yourself; conversely, few people will complain about having their good deeds mentioned by the project founder
- Keep posting regular updates describing the general progress and specific advancements
- Make your wiki graphically attractive to its target audience so that your promotion is not wasted when visitors see a boring page
- Sign up for an account on Squidoo and create a lens relating to your wiki. See the existing wiki lenses for some examples.
- Create a MySpace for your wiki and ask users to add it to their friends' list.
- Create a Facebook page about your wiki and link to it off other groups relating with the topic. Keep them updated on anything interesting on the topic or wiki.
- Make a YouTube account for your wiki. Upload interesting, but relative videos and create an appealing Channel, inviting users to subscribe and visit the wiki.
- You can try contacting people that might be interested in contributing to your wiki in the following places:
- Forums
- Blogs
- Other Websites
- "Real Life" venues such as any place that people who share your interest commonly meet
Personal Email vs. Mass Communication (spam)
People tend to prefer personalized invites rather than things along the lines of:
Hey {{Person Interested in SPAM!!!}}
We are starting a wonderful new SPAM-WIKI and are looking for people to help us contribute!
etc...
Personal invites, including the reasons why you think that person or group of persons might want to contribute to your wiki - based on what they have already written online for example, are a much better way of marketing. It may be slow and take more effort, but in the long run, it will help your community to feel more valued.
Caution: Wikipedia
Although Wikipedia may seem like a good source of contributors, you have to exercise caution when raising awareness of your wiki there. Small, discreet invites in the correct places (discussion pages and user talk: pages) may be acceptable, but be aware that the community is very wary of attempts to spam Wikipedia.
Adding intrusive adverts or spamming many articles, even those related to your wiki, will only earn you the wrath of the Wikipedians, who are not afraid to bite!
When raising awareness of your wiki on Wikimedia projects, explain that your Wiki intends to be different from Wikipedia related articles about the subject in various ways. See also Don't Compete with Wikipedia.
See the attribution templates section of Wikia's copyright policy for additional cautions regarding the use of such templates.
Please be aware that making multiple edits to user talk pages promoting any external site is very likely to lead to you being permanently blocked from Wikipedia.
Links on other wikis
Many wikis have links to related sites, so make sure your wiki is listed there. http://www.wikiindex.org/ allows a listing of all wikis. You can create a page for your wiki there, and even get it mentioned in the site's blog (see Draft weblog article for details).