How do you promote/advertise/evangelize your open source project?

Question

How do you promote/advertise/evangelize your open source project?

I know about sourceforge and freshmeat, and they gave me some initial traffic, but I'd like to push for a greater audience. Once a critical mass is reached, I won't have to push anymore, but what methods can I use to draw eyeballs.

Of course holding those eyeballs depends upon the quality of the project, but that is another issue.

Answer 1

You already named the two biggest ones I know of.

Another possibility would be a slashdot submission.

Also, maintaining a developer's blog of the project is helpful. If the blog is part of the website for the project, that's even better.

Get on local LUG mailing lists - not only might you be able to promote your project, you can probably solicit assistance. Most LUGgers I know are very interested in helping the community and getting into projects they're also interested in.

Answer 2

Some pointers form my experience:

• Package for fedora and debian. Look into 'mock' for building rpms, pbuilder for debs.
• Launchpad provides apt-repository hosting, use it even if you're not hosting anything else there.
• Push to get included in the 'official' repositories.
• The ease of installation is 10 times more important than if the software even works. If its hard to install, at all, ever, you will lose out to something that's broken but installs and runs every time.
• Blog about your software, show screenshots. People love screenshots.
• Hire a designer to make a distintive trac stylesheet (you're using trac, right?)
• Pay lots of attention to the web design of your site. Be Stylish, it really helps.

All the best with your open source endeavours.

Answer 3

The answer depends a lot on who the target users of your software is. Can you provide more details? I could give some advice but it is very different if, for example, it is a game versus a developer tool.

The normal marketing techniques apply the same for open source projects as they would for anything.

Answer 4

Evangelise to your friends. If they like it, get them to blog about it. If they don't like it, ask them how to improve it (and get them to blog about it anyway).

Answer 5

I have a very similar issue: I've written a screen capture/upload tool VVCap, which, to my mind is written pretty well and is also useful. It's on sourceforge, which is pretty much as good as launchpad could be. The folks I'm showing this tool to are getting excited, but only after I explain to them what it is doing. Somehow people don't stumble upon this project on their own.

Basically, average people just won't find it!

There got to be some way to promote the project... I really hate an idea that all the work I've put into the code is only used by a handful of people. I'm even considering now to pay money for advertisement. Anyone has any more ideas?

Answer 6

Read Tribes by Seth Godin. He's a genius with this stuff, and the book is all about uniting people for a cause. It won't give you an answer, but it will definitely spawn about a thousand ideas for you. You can listen to it for free.

Idea from the book: celebrate the accomplishments made on the project and recognize those that contributed as heroes.

Answer 7

You could also submit it to OpenShare