Our site started it's introduction on a Sunday afternoon I made a huge splash on to the scene by posting a press release on every related blog, list, forum, group, community, that I could find online. Then shortly word of mouth was our messenger of choice, but since our community has a 'real life' counterpart we took to the streets. In 1999 we attended our first developer's conference. I had printed up flyers and handed them out to every one I met.
The next year me and my two colleagues dug deep in to our pockets and got enough cash to make some promotional items we had printed t-shirts and business cards 4/4 full color. And handed them to every one we saw at the 2nd developer's conference. We had at that point 1,210 members.
We kind of got hassled by show officials because we were not official exhibitors. But the audience loved us none the less. The following year we dug even deeper and made the transition from ubb.classic to ubb.threads. This was a major improvement our speed was awesome. But we soon out grew our ISP I remember I got charged over $300 in one month because my traffic and my backups. So we switched ISP's, twice. We got hooked up w/ a terrible company. Then we dug once again and co-located our own server (Mac G4 & OS X) We had 4,795 members.
By the next conference the math worked out in our favor that for only $500 more the three of us (admins) pooled our funds together and purchased a booth at the conference. Ok maybe it was a little more with the freebee give-away. But we had a huge success our number one question was... How do you make money. - Our response was from our advertiser/sponsors. - the three of us. But we opened a door for making contacts w/ other developers and solution providers to facilitate banner ads on our site. In 2002, having 7,560 members made it more attractive to potential advertisers.
By the following conference we reached 11,165 and with having a small revenue from banner advertisement. And of course a few donations. Each year people are shocked we are there and can't fathom our business model. I'd admit it is no plan that Donald Trump would approve. But none the less our passion for the product and resource that we provide speaks volumes. By the end of 2003 we started to reach the bandwidth maximum from our DSL provider so I searched here and found VertexHost, and after wonderful reviews and recommendation signed up. The first part of 2004 got off to a rocky start but we pulled thru it with out a problem - just a reminder to everyone HAVE YOU BACKED-UP LATELY? Our patrons are blown away by the speed. With the additional ads I have sold and adding the google ads we generate enough revenue to pay for our hosting costs, plus a few extras such as hiring Josh to make some tweaks to the system, and purchased a few addons the spider hack mod and josh's Search Engine mod. In addition to myPaymentsPal have all helped in getting more revenue.
But our biggest boost in the past month has been a little mod I found here that for unregistered ones they can only see a few hundred words of any post/reply and are given a message that they need to register or log in to read the rest. This has made our membership jump to almost 100 new members a day. I am confident that we will have close to 17,000 members by this developer's conference in August.
Our next efforts will be to do some print advertising, in trade publications if I just can raise enough capital. In addition we are forming our own local users group this too should help our membership and revenues.
So the question was asked: How do you promote your site? With a lot of passion, hard work, and shoe leather, along with some deep pockets. But most of all the value added resources found here on threadsdev the knowledge and camaraderie found here is invaluable asset and truly is what enables me to provide useful and meaningful content vehicle to my members.
Thanks
