I am not sure how many users are on Gardening & Landscape but I see that some questions get 1000's of views and others are in the low 10's or 100's at best. Where do these 1000's of views come from?
3 Answers
There is a way to get your questions to have that kind of attention
You have to get the question into the HNQ (Hot Network Questions). All of the sites in Stack Exchange have an HNQ feed along the right side of the questions for the base URL. The Gardening & Landscaping HNQ feed can be seen here below the site stats.
You need collaborates. In Mechanics we tee up 4 resources. One with a good general question that has multiple answers. Once that resource asks the other three answer in quick concession and it's in the HNQ.
One there, you question is getting exposure to everyone in stack exchange, perhaps even people that have no idea that the gardening site even exists. Some of these people will come back and answer more questions as well as pile on to the question you got into the HNQ.
Currently Motor Vehicle has three questions in the HNQ and we are always trying to have one. Some are ridiculous.
This question has been in the HNQ since yesterday morning. 4600 views advertising our site.
This one entered today and just sub 1000 views.
I can go on and on regarding our questions that have entered the HNQ and done very well. I received 5 badges yesterday for questions in the HNQ.
The key is to find a good general question have three people ready to post answers quickly. Once it's in, it soars. You can extend the life of the question in the HNQ by adding answers to it every couple of hours and getting everyone to vote on it. It draws attention to the site and some of the users stay or at least come back and ask questions. FYI, We did check with an SE employee who assists beta sites and received a green light to run our initial experiments. So long as the question was legitimate and fell within the site scope.
It looks like our HNQ activity has over 4000 rep and 3800 Rep in 2 and a half days this week.
It's been great exposure for us and it's how you get the questions to have the insance amount of views they get. Good luck. Hope this is a good tip for you all. It's been working great for us. Feel free to come to chat and ask quesions. We can break down the math and show you effective methods to getting and keeping your question in the HNQ.
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Simply put, this site has been around for almost five years. Some questions were posted almost five years ago, and have been accruing views all that time, while some were posted today and haven't had the opportunity yet.
As I write this, the front page has a few questions with over 10,000 views and all were asked in 2011:
- How do you safely and effectively stop a cat from pooping in your yard?
- How to fill low spots over existing grass in my yard?
- What kinds of gloves are best for handling thorny rose bushes?
The remaining questions with over 1,000 views were asked in 2012 or 2013.
So give it time; those other questions will eventually get more views.
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1Does the value of the questions deteriorate after time? If someone answers my question after 2 months, I most likely already have the answer or have moved on. Not really worth a response and I am not sure why people view older questions– JStorageApr 27, 2016 at 22:33
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1I'm not intending to be contentious, but I love old questions. You're right that some authors get the answers they need, or don't but give up and go elsewhere. One value of old questions is what other people learn when they stumble across them, causing the views to increase over time. Sometimes I do a tag search looking for information, and some old questions that come up have the most thorough answers and pictures. Also, it's a good way to make sure I don't ask a duplicate. That's just me though, I do see your point! Jun 5, 2016 at 16:02
I'm going to go in a different direction. My guess is the questions that have high view counts also do well in search engines.
Gardening and landscape content has gotten to be a pretty competitive subject and there are a few content mills in the space. sfgate and gardenguides I think are two of the ones I see all the time. I'm not a big fan of content mills as it seems like they don't necessarily have the most authoritative documents and they tend to flood the web with similar content. sfgate seems to be the worst where they'll have multiple pages that should really just be one page but they just change the wording of the title slightly and some of the article content.
If you're answering a question and providing a reference, do the whole internet a favor and avoid linking to these sites. Look for more authoritative sources or more independent sources. For G&L university cooperative extensions are a great choice as are some smaller sites like blogs who are more interested in the actual subject than filling pages fill of keywords... Someone like say me :)
Don't link to those sites, if you want a better answer don't click the links and spend time reading it as they usually get their information from other sources and don't usually contribute much else on top of it in my opinion.
