Back on topic: I've been plugging Papertank a bit on
Yahoo! Answers. It seems like a weird place to advertise, but it wasn't very hard to find a few people who were literally
asking for writing communities and other places to post their writing for free. That's exactly what we are, so I kindly redirected them to Papertank.
Any more ideas? I haven't actually tried promoting the site in real life, as I've spent most of the past two months working and hanging out with my girlfriend rather than volunteering to spread the word about this wonderful organization, but it's not a bad idea. Maybe someone with Photoshop skills can make a nice flyer that the rest of us can print out and hang up in our high schools and colleges, and anywhere else that literate people tend to hang out. (What we really need is a street team.)
To the administration: I think it would also be a good idea, once the redesign is finished, to organize some kind of contest or event that would draw new writers to Papertank. This is something that we should definitely have flyers for, in addition to a round of advertisement to other writing communities and anyone else who might want to participate. We just have to make sure that we give people enough time to write or prepare their submissions.
The contests at The Shadow Sun never seemed to get a whole lot of submissions, but if we make it as easy as possible for non-members to join and enter the contest, they're probably more likely to do so. For example, instead of telling people that they need to register
before participating in a contest, we should just include the registration page as the first step in the contest submission form. (Obviously, members who are already signed in can skip that step.) Most importantly, the contest submission form itself needs to be easy to find once a guest is already on the site.
