Thanks for the comment… egads, pyramid schemes, not quite what I’m wanting to go with. I think what I’m trying to figure out is an authentic way for the project to “be remarkable” See this article: Seth Godin, How To Be Remarkable

At first, I had links on the site like “tell a friend”, etc., and I sent an email out to some friends & associates I thought might be interested. We actually had 0 results from that, and it’s because it was unwanted, typical “spam-like” marketing, which was not at all effective.

So I think in my quest for understanding “viral marketing”, I’m shooting for the authentic kind where I don’t even really ask people to tell others, they just do it because:

a) they want to
b) the site provides interesting value to them and
c) because somehow we’ve crossed over from being just a blog like all the others, to being a blog that makes a difference.

I think that depends heavily on the daily questions and the presentation & functionality of the site. I’ve noticed that when I post questions that are highly technical or specific to one particular niche, the general interest wanes. Also, for whatever reason, days when there are pictures with the post have a higher response rate.

So I think the challenge is to create something that generates continuous quality value to a reader, but, also that has a certain “awesomeness” that gets people to start talking about it…. but how to do that…?