Have you considered selling premium classifieds?
The sort of thing I'm thinking of is for a moderate donation a couple of member's ads could appear on the home page. Even at say $2 for it to be there a week and say a max of two ads on the home page at any time, that could bring in a couple of hundred bucks a year. That would pay for the server for a month. It all adds up.
Of course the logical extension of that is selling advertising (banner? sponsored by?) to commercial operations. If state groups grow (or in the case of Vic-right now), you might be able to have sponsored banners at the lead of state group pages. Of course I have no idea if this is a direction the team wants to take, or even one to be avoided. I'm just throwing them out there.
I will say this, these days business needs to spend its marketing dollar very wisely. I've managed a national franchise here, for a multinational company, I've owned 4 businesses and even worked in an aquarium in the days of the dinosaur. If I owned or managed an aquarium in Vic these days, I would be happy to pay a moderate fee to directly reach my potential customers (ie Vic) or if I also operated online, then other areas of the forum would interest me.
Of course price & value are the key and this is not the biggest of the forums (best maybe) but there will be many LFS, distributors, etc looking for a cheapish niche for themselves I would think.
(This isn't the idea I mentioned I'm working on @reefuge)
The sort of thing I'm thinking of is for a moderate donation a couple of member's ads could appear on the home page. Even at say $2 for it to be there a week and say a max of two ads on the home page at any time, that could bring in a couple of hundred bucks a year. That would pay for the server for a month. It all adds up.
Of course the logical extension of that is selling advertising (banner? sponsored by?) to commercial operations. If state groups grow (or in the case of Vic-right now), you might be able to have sponsored banners at the lead of state group pages. Of course I have no idea if this is a direction the team wants to take, or even one to be avoided. I'm just throwing them out there.
I will say this, these days business needs to spend its marketing dollar very wisely. I've managed a national franchise here, for a multinational company, I've owned 4 businesses and even worked in an aquarium in the days of the dinosaur. If I owned or managed an aquarium in Vic these days, I would be happy to pay a moderate fee to directly reach my potential customers (ie Vic) or if I also operated online, then other areas of the forum would interest me.
Of course price & value are the key and this is not the biggest of the forums (best maybe) but there will be many LFS, distributors, etc looking for a cheapish niche for themselves I would think.
(This isn't the idea I mentioned I'm working on @reefuge)
