Alex... Yes!!!! If you want to lower your personal outlay of cost, then you need to increase your membership so that you can sell advertising, The best way to do this is word of mouth, but another idea could be leave a bunch of cards with atlanta area subaru dealers. Make friends with the salesmen, say, when you sell a wrx, give the customer a card... something like that, Also its a great idea to have a local version of NASIOC or I-Club. Also how much is this costing you? and how are you hosting it? (possibly host it at GAtech or another local university, free bandwidth... ect) Just some ideas. I think youve got a great idea with the site, but forums are usually not a money making proposition, and when lucky they break even and make a small profit. Good luck with whatever you deside, Adam
Both Faysal and I want to keep the site alive, of course its costing him nothing but 8.99/yr. I run a small hosting company, ascelondotnet, and the site isn’t costing money as much as it is a resource that could be put somewhere else. We do have cards, and I create some sort of a mediocre template that users could print out to hand out themselves till whenever we can arrange the get to gether. UNFORTUNATELY, my car is in the body shop after some pretty hefty dmg from a suburban (not it isnt my fault)...in other words, my front end is gone. So far, I've been estimated 4500, but I'm sure that is going to increase. I would however, like to set up a gether together and I see many possibilities arising as more free time becomes available. Ultimately, my goal was to get a few sets of window decals (small, but still aesthetically pleasing and complimenting). The reason why we agreed to ask the question was just the lack of traffic the site has come to draw, its been an exponential drop. Not this time, but whenever I get some higher quality cards run off, I will drop them off at the dealership I go to (even though I dislike it substantially). So I guess the main point was that it isn’t the costs which concern me, more or less just keeping a dead site active and sitting there just collecting dust. We didn’t set out to create the site with the idea of generating revenue, to prove just that, one of my plans in the next major expansion was to offer local vendors free advertising. Also, one more thing which someone I'm sure has noticed is the length of time the splash page (temporary page when you access www.wrxatlanta.com) has been active. It has been a big debate between the two of us whether I should even continue work on the design I had created for the easier v2 of the site. Of course, this decision depended heavily, if not 100% on the projected traffic flow to the site. Due to its abrupt drop, we scratched the new version of the site off the list of current things to do, and put it somewhere way at the bottom of things to accomplish. While I feel that a main website is remotely necessary, I'd much rather have an active set of forums as nearly all club necessities within the top navigation. With all that said, I hope to start getting the site rolling again come the warm fun summer months.
I am not sure of the reason for the downturn, however hopefully the summer months will bring more traffic... I see what your saying about maintaining a dead site, but i think this place has a TON of potential, just need to get the word out... good luck and Ill let people know about it. Adam
one way to get the word out would be for a group of us to participate (or at least park our cars together) in the local autocross meets. it's not very expensive and is a lot of fun. there's always tons of wrx's and sti's at these meets. if we could get a lot of our members at these meets with wrxatlanta decals on, we may be able to attract nex members
^^ Speaking of decals, I was supposed to get a color sample from the guy who was doing some work for us, but his supplier ran out of stock, so I'm still waiting on them...its alright we'll be doing all the testing with Faysals car (with my gift to him, STi fog light covers off a genuine STi )
any idea how much magnetic decals cost? im thinking of getting magnetic autocross numbers made and i might make a set of WRXAtlanta decals to slap on my doors when i autocross.