@scottalanmiller said:
I wonder (honestly wonder) how much people come and read existing content versus only reading the current content (top 20 topics or whatever.) Searching turns up old ones, but I think that people visiting the site will mostly look at current discussions.
Very tough road, agreed. A community like PowerShell.org is not a vendor based platform (they don't sell anything) but centered around a new technology. Of course, when that technology is replaced the need for the community will go away then too. It's also had some powerful personalities behind it that helped establish it.
ML doesn't have that, and by staying agnostic there's no reason a Google search would ever pull anything up. The lack of any content doesn't help (if you have nothing to trigger a successful search... well... you get it). Content is a fickle thing, and sometimes it just drives a reason to visit and it's a one time thing. I get over 600+ visits a day on my blog (which I think is pretty good considering I do very little self promotion) and almost all of it is Google hits on 4 or 5 articles that people are interested in.
So how do you get people to visit in the first place? Content. Even if it's fleeting the hope is that SOME of that traffic might create an account and stick around, until you hit that amazing turnover point. Might want to consider adding a blogging component and letting a few of the community SME's post an article or two to try and drive up hits and maybe begin to build the perception that this is a place to seek answers.
Just thoughts....