
+9 votes
in Q2A Core by
What is the best approach to seeding a site with content?

What have you tried?

What worked, what didn't?

Best approaches to gathering an audience?
Q2A version: 1.5.3
What about you? any tips, suggestions? Thanks
I'll answer instead of reply. I see that the UA might need a little work.

6 Answers

+1 vote
Absolutely new to this...

As far as current situation, I am writing few questions and answers as sample. Some boot users, and accounts manually.

Looking forward to hear from other users.
+4 votes
It all depends upon the niche of the site you're creating. You'll certainly need to have your own questions and answers to start or get others such as friends/colleagues to start to seed the site with INTELLIGENT content. I can tell you that hiring outsourced people at a low rate per post will be completely worthless or even less than zero. :D
+1 for not outsourcing. It's all about quality, not quantity :)
+9 votes

Well, here are some of my thoughts.  

I tried building a traditional forum-type community before.  I used all of the right software and spent a ton of time making it look great and customizing form and function.  One problem still remained:  How to get it started?

At first I resorted to creating a bunch of users and, effectively, having conversations with myself.  I think there is no avoiding that unless you happen to have a large group of trusted and subject-matter-knowledgeable friends and family who can help.  The trust and subject-matter knowledge part are critical.  It is easy to make a mess out of a community with dumb posts.  And, of course, if you are creating a forum about chemical engineering it probably will not help to have your friend the plumber try to help you seed the community with posts.

So, in the case of the community I tried to build I spent a ton of time talking to myself as different users.  I loaded-it up with dozens and dozens of posts.  I also created other types of content that was easier to ingest and produce, such as topic-relevant quotes and the like.

Generating traffic and eyeballs visiting the site was still an ellusive task.  I resorted to spending some money in the form of a small AdWords campaign.  I think I spent $10 a day for 30 days.  This succeeded in getting more eyeballs to the site.  However, I learned very quickly the value of that saying:  "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink".  How true it is.

Conversions to registered users were very slow.  I think that a sustained campaign lasting perhaps a whole year might have delivered results as the size and variety of the membership would have expanded.  The problem is one of participation. If you've been involved in forums for any length of time you'll know that only a small percentage of members actually participate and post.  Most just visit and read.  And so, you have a situation where you can actually gain a lot of members and visitors but precious few thread starters.  The other side of that are people who are interested enough to spend a little time posting replies.

And that's really the key to the problem of starting a community:  Gaining enough members so that the small percentage of members who are willing to post and reply becomes a reasonable size.  Here the "90-9-1" rule rings very true to me:


And, so, I don't really have a magic bullet for this.  I think one has to understand that --if you are on your own-- you will spend a lot of time creating content.  You will be that 1% for a long time.  As someone already mentioned, outsourcing content creation can be a very bad idea.  If you are going to go with something like Mechanical Turk or the like to create content you will probably end-up with a very shallow pool of content that will not interest the 90% who just want to browse.



+1 vote
I am also starting a q2a based community,  yes its difficult in the start, but its not specific to q2a based sites, its a  general problem, whether its is blog or forum its really hard to get it started, you have to work hard and wait at least 6 months to get some good results.

So what I am gona do is to make at least 30-50 fake users, and will try to post at least 1000 popular questions in a month, and hope for the best. At the same time use facebook/twitter to drive traffic. Thats all I can think of. If i get 100 visitors a day at the end of 6 months then i will consider it job done.

From my experience starting a website is always hard, you have to put a lot of effort and rewards seems to be too low.

P.S: Make sure your website has a appealing look, customize it to your niche.
Can I ask what is your method of creating users? are you creating manually one by one or using some code or admin feature?
idk if there is a script for that, i am going to create them manually.
I'll try to give some incentives to my main website's subscribers.
I think that an aftershave for posting 3 to 5 questions in different categories and answering to 1 or 2 should be a good start.
Is it better to have users registered with an account than authenticating with a Facebook account ?
@mihai I don't think it matters if the users are FB users or your site users because if you view the users list it's all same info.
+1 vote
The content of the site depends on what website you are creating.The most important thing is to add testimonials,frequently asked questions and answers should be mentioned to clarify  the doubts of visitors.
+2 votes

Based on my experience

I created a tutorial site

This site is dedicated to students, and I announced on Facebook that I need teachers to answer questions.

Of course, these teachers will be given money for each set of points they collect (less than the cost of advertising).

This method has prompted the educators themselves to bring more students to increase the questions to increase the answers and thus increase their points.

Today's daily traffic is quite a good amount of hits via Google.

The site was created five months ago

I am running a site with monthly rewards for the top 4 users. Because I am afraid that spam answers explode if everyone gets money on the points received. What are your rules set up? Can you show your site as an example? I'd like to see the quality of the answers.