A watched kettle never boils

I just published an article about the Virtual Workshops and my goals in terms of number of participants and number of members in the Code Mavens group. I expect to have 200 new members every month which means an average of 6 new members every day.

And here is the problem, or at least my problem.

If there are 6 new members a day it can be hardly noticed. It is like watching the kettle if it boils. You won't really notice any difference in any given minute. Likewise in any given hour there will be 0 additional members. So it seems nothing happens. Worse than that, sometimes people unsubsribe, a natural process, but it can be disheartening to see the number of members decline while the goal is to increase them.

Both in the case of the kettle and in the case of the membership the feeling is that there is no progress being made.

This makes me anxious and makes me want to do something.

One thing that I can do to stimulate more registrations is the scheduling of more events. However I can't do that too frequently as I won't be able to really run all those events. Besides, I probably should not promote events too freequently on channels that are not my own followers. (e.g. public Rust/Python/Perl groups).

The other thing is trying to promote the already published events in other channels. That would require the mapping of potential channels to promote the events and then finding a way to get the events included.

What I should probably really do is invest my "free time", that is the time I am waiting for the next event in working on my open source projects; upgrading my server; updating my applications; preparing content for more events. There are a lot of things I can and should do that are unrelated to the direct promotion of the events, but that eventually will help them.

At the same time I should have a regular - probabbly daily schedule to mention the events on my own channels and on some of the public channels.

People need constant reminders of the workshops as it takes a lot of "exposure" till people take action. Even if the actions is only a few clicks and even if it is free of charge.