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After reading the suggestion about conferences, I came up with a loose brainstorming idea... What draws engineers to fairs/conferences (apart from free lunch)? Most definitely technical speeches/slide shows about a certain technical topic. This is well-known: try to host some embedded systems fair without technical speakers and it will soon die out in a couple of years.

So how about trying something similar to bait the right people here? Some communities here have monthly challenges. How about a monthly electronics topic? A theme of the month?

Example:

- Theme of the month/monthly topic (call it as you like it) is picked by voting on suggestions from a meta thread. Good suggestions that finished 2nd place etc can be used next month.
- The theme could be anything. PCB layout, MOSFET design, switch regulators, soldering, analog comparators, microcontrollers, FPGA - whatever people fancy. (Ideally not too narrow a topic though, I think.)

- During the month, everyone is especially encouraged to ask questions post high quality technical content related to the theme. Essentially get real nerdy. 

- Optionally, maybe allow some article/blog style posts in a certain category, if someone wish to share some open product design, evaluation board adventure, source code etc.

- Optionally some Hall of Fame meta post where the best post(s) of the mouth (in terms of score) regarding the monthly topic get mentioned.

What I'm aiming for here is to increase the amount of good content, but also to draw attention to the site by people interested in a certain topic telling their friends. I know that we have lots of knowledge and expertise within the existing user base - we just need to create an incentive for those people to ask and write about whatever topic they are most interested in.