lavenderkhajiit wrote:I'll see what I can do, but some ideas would help. Don't know if UESP has already pitched in or not...
We're not affiliated in any with the UESP, and when we contacted them over a year ago to look into a partnership of some sort between our two websites, they politely implied that they had no interest in such a partnership (which, personally, I can understand seeing as their site's community is many orders of magnitude larger than ours). It seems to me that any sort of help from the UESP is unlikely, nor should it really be expected. Personally, I believe our two sites complement each other well, seeing as they are not in direct competition with each other in terms of their respective offerings to users.
Getting back to recruitment, as for ideas, the best idea we had for "marketing" The Elder Stats was providing our auto-updating Stat Cards to our members for each character they have on our site, allowing them to share some quick info for their characters in their signatures on other
Elder Scrolls-related forums. Those Stat Cards then link back to their character's profile on our site, and then people who see it may want to create their own, and thus they sign-up for The Elder Stats. This method has no doubt procured the most traffic for us, however we need something more than this now to make our site as active as it should be.
As an example of things that have won us some extra traffic in the past, we recently noticed that the site experienced an exponential increase in page views over a two-day period following someone's posting of a link to their character's Elder Stats profile on Reddit. I think this goes to show that The Elder Stats still hasn't been spread around the web very well yet, and that as more fans discover the site for the first time, they seem interested in joining and using it for their characters. Positive exposure of the site is really the best way to spread the word about it, and I believe that simply linking to your character's Elder Stats profile on places (like forums) around the web is an excellent way to pique the interest of other
Elder Scrolls fans as to what our site has to offer to the fans. We obviously don't want to seem like we're trying to spam anyone, but I personally believe that most fans who haven't seen this site yet would be interested in using it for their own characters if they were to discover it while browsing a forum or website one day.
As for advertising, we'd be more than happy to purchase ads for The Elder Stats if we had the funds to adequately do so. Facebook ads are cheap and more effective in comparison to other venues, but we barely make any money from operating The Elder Stats, and therefore we have virtually no money other than personal funds to work with. I would personally be willing to put more of my own personal money into advertising the site, but I already put quite a bit of it into the operation and maintenance of the site, so I can't quite justify spending any more unless the site shows sincere promise of making good returns on such personal investments.
Well, I appreciate your help and interest in promoting the site! It is much appreciated and hopefully it works for us.