Other than a select few open source projects that are privately funded, most projects lack the marketing punch required to get noticed throughout the web. This lack of marketing often comes from the “underground” personality of many of us open source geeks. Myself included. But this lack of marketing is affecting these open source projects in 2 ways.

• Lack of community base
• Lack of user base

Without a community base, most open source projects wither and die due to a lack of help from other developers. The user base can get too large for the community base. And the few developers who are working on the project get overwhelmed with user feedback.

Without a user base, the application itself suffers. There’s nobody to tell the developers that something is not working or does not make sense. The lack of user feedback hurts the community project and doesn’t give it the nourishment to grow.

Online marketing can help cure these two problems. That doesn’t mean that the developers behind these projects need to become marketing experts by any means. What it does mean though is putting some effort into a few specific things that will help popularize the open source project. They are as follows:

1. A sleek design – too many open source projects have ugly webpages. End-users are attracted to good looking web pages. And they use this as a measuring stick to find out what open source applications are “legit” and “un-legit” (some language from the movie HotRod. Exuse me)

2. An Updated Blog – take some time to write each week in the blog. A blog on the project’s webpage allows end users and potential community members to see what’s going on with the project. I will often times look at the blog to see when the latest project activity is.

3. A Twitter Presence – get a twitter profile up for the project. Allow people to follow you on Twitter so they can get updates on what’s going on. This is huge for marketing and can really help people feel involved.

4. A Demo Available – make a demo available on the homepage. Demo’s are so important to end- users to see what they are dealing with before downloading. They also give other bloggers around the web the ability to quickly try out the application before writing a review.

5. “Socialize” – put up some buttons to have people add your open source project to their social media site of choice. Kindly ask them to “bookmark” or “review” your project so that it can spread to a bigger audience.

These simple tasks will generate a larger user and community base for your open source project. And more of each will help you drive your project to new heights. Just take a look at the striking difference between these two open source projects.

Which one would you be excited about being a part of? Which one would make you want to download and install on your web server today? You can see that effective marketing can really help more open source projects grow. It may take a little more effort. But the effort will produce huge divedends long-term.