What can we do to help Mythology Stack Exchange grow?

Question

Today, I took a look at the site analytics for Mythology Stack Exchange.¹ Here is a graph of the number of posts per day, from our launch in late April to the present, mid-September:

Here is the same graph with a spline trendline I added:

The continual decrease in total posts should be apparent - and yes, to anyone who is wondering, the same trend exists for individual questions and answers. The graphs are going a poor job of representing the graph I borrowed here, even accounting for the fact that the x-axis denotes a long period of time, in general.

Here are some more statistics:

• We're tied with Mathematics Educators and Coffee for the third-lowest number of questions per day at 0.5, ahead of Martial Arts and Community Building.
• We're at third-lowest for traffic, ahead of Open Source and Community Building.
• We're at third-lowest for number of users, ahead of Computer Graphic and Portuguese Language (yes, now Community Building beats us at something important).
• We're at "Needs Work" for three out of the five Area 51 statistics.²

Mythology Stack Exchange is slowly - ever so slowly - shrinking.³

This is not a good thing, because unlike certain other quantities - national debts, mortality rates, and the number of Hercules' labors - traffic and posts-per-day are quantities that we do not want to shrink. We want them to rise, if at all possible, while retaining the high standards of quality you've come to expect from the community at Mythology Stack Exchange.

There exist today few problems with no solutions, and I rather think that this situation is not one of those problems. So I'm asking you, the users of Mythology Stack Exchange, to answer me this: How can we increase activity here? What can we do to help Mythology Stack Exchange grow?

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EDIT: Our stats have gotten slightly better. In particular, our visit is per day is up to ~280, which is pretty good. Obviously there is a lot we could and should do to improve, but at the same time we have been making some progress.

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¹ See Proposed micro-privilege: site analytics for more information about site analytics, which are available to users on beta sites at 5k rep. They are not the same as the moderator analytics, which I will not use here.
² Many of us know that the stats are misleading, and Robert Cartaino has been the biggest proponent of getting them changed/modified/buried-in-any-unmarked-grave. Still, they have some non-negligible merit here.
³ I am not implying that the site is in any danger of closing. This is, to the best of my knowledge, not the case.

Answer 1

I suppose this is a good place to talk about why I left Mythology.SE.

There are two main reasons I left:

1. I began to feel like the majority of questions were either asked by me, or answered by me.
   • We must have a core community of people invested in producing content, otherwise it's just a waste of everyone's time. With just half a question per day, that means that not even one person is even trying anymore.
2. I felt that we made some poor decisions narrowing site scope.
   • Are questions about urban legends / unsolved mysteries on topic?
   • Are fictional mythologies on topic?
   • What should be the defining cutoff for when something is mythology?

We put a lot of energy into making various things off topic, and we set the bar really, really high for answers early on. As a result, we made it extremely difficult to ask a question, and going into the old first sources of myths to find answers is really hard, trust me, I know.

I was one of the strictest proponents of high site standards early on, and I think it's quite clear that I've been proven wrong. Participating in a site like this one, or SF&F, or Movies & TV, etc. must be fun, or no one is going to do it. We set rules that made it not be fun, and now no one comes.

So, my $.02:

1. We need to broaden site scope, try things out and see if they actually make the site crappy before banning them
2. We need to make this site more fun for the people who want to be here already, so they continue to participate / ask / answer questions
3. We need to reach out / advertise to other sources and possibly rebrand the site somehow.

Answer 2

Yay! Someone else seems to care about this.

School started, so I have a lot less time to contribute to the site. I can't write/answer questions every week. However, I have experience starting/promoting websites, and I have a lot of suggestions as to how we can promote our website. It would be wonderful if someone with more time than me could put these suggestions into action.

Sources of Traffic

We have two problems: people in the Stack Exchange network don't seem to be interested in mythology (so we can't recruit from within the network -- our community promotion ads haven't been that effective), and people outside the network don't know we exist. We need to promote our site outside the network, and I have a few suggestions for doing this:

Google

I would like to invite you to take a look at the question "Symbolism of Ixion's Punishment". It's a good question because it has really good answers, but it's also good for our site for a different reason. If you google a phrase like "ixion punishment meaning," our question is the only result that actually explains the meaning behind the punishment. If you are studying greek mythology and want to learn more about ixion, you will probably find our website, and feel really grateful that we answered your question.

Unfortunately, we don't get that much traffic from google because we only have ~320 questions. If we could get more questions about topics that don't have a lot of coverage on the web, I bet we would get a lot of traffic from people researching mythology (whether casually or seriously). Unfortunately, this means that we need high-rep users to ask questions -- questions from low-rep users are much more likely to already be answered online.

Other websites/blogs

It would be great if we could convince blogs/website owners to link to us.

Voting

A few days ago, I asked the question Symbolism of the "Temple of the Rose Cross". It only got two upvotes, and HDE 226868's answer only got one. It may not be the best question I've ever asked, but I still think it's interesting and helpful to anyone reasearching the topic in question.

I'm mentioning this because voting like that (or rather a lack of voting) might discourage people who care about reputation from coming back. We should make sure to reward good questions/answers with bounties and votes.

Answer 3

Simple answer.

Define the word Mythology and present it on an easy to find page. This would avoid every other post from being put on hold because someone doesn't like someone elses definition of the bloody word Mythology.

For the love of Cthulhu...