Running Weblogs with Slash

Promoting the Site

A Slash site may have insightful Stories. The Authors may be highly motivated and excellent writers. The design may be clean and attractive. Without visitors to submit and comment upon Stories, the power of the Slash engine will go unused. While standard Internet advertising techniques may apply,^[27] Slash sites have several unique promotional features.

The easiest way to attract visitors is to rely on word of mouth. Happy, provoked, challenged, and interested readers will often pass along links to their friends and colleagues. This is relatively painless. It requires only that the site provide compelling content worth passing along often enough to retain new visitors who perpetuate the cycle. The measure of how long a user will stay within a particular web site is called stickiness.

The Slash engine provides a lot of help. Few, if any, other site management programs have comment systems with comparable power or sophistication. It’s easy to post and read comments. It’s easy to filter and sort comments. It’s easy to receive feedback on comments in the form of moderation scores or replies. It’s convenient for a user to share her thoughts with the rest of the world, and thousands do just that every day on hundreds of sites around the world.

Of course, only good content leading to good discussion will attract and maintain the kind of userbase most sites desire. The other guidelines in this chapter will help. A site still struggling to find one new story per ...