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I often ask niche or difficult questions, and I often get tumbleweed badges.

Part of the formula is low views, so I find them quite useful as a notification that very few people are looking at my question and that I might therefore need to do more to get it seen.

Ways in which I've responded to Tumbleweed before:

  • Migrating questions to a different site. For example, I asked a "Microsoft on Mac" question on this site, which went tumbleweed, so I asked for it to be migrated to Apple.SE, where it got a better response (and actually got a gold badge for over 10,000 views eventually!)
  • Re-wording the title to make it more interesting or more obvious what the question is about
  • Putting up a bounty
  • Looking on other sites such as specialist forums - particularly if it's a very niche piece of software. Maybe there just aren't any regulars here who know that software.
  • Sometimes, if you feel like you've done everything you can, you can put up a Support question on Meta linking to it along the lines of "What can I do to get this tumbleweed question seen?", and that itself might be enough to get an expert to notice the question (or, suggest a way to improve it)
  • Sometimes you just need to be patient. For example, this very niche question got almost no response from the regulars, but got a great answer months later from someone else who was researching the topic, and is now up to 3,000 views because it's a rare source of info on a niche topic