Official United Bimmer Decision (NEED EVERYONE'S INPUT!!)
 

Since this is your guy's forum (for the community), I thought a decision like this would be best made by everyone.

Recently we've lost MPerformance as a sponsor because his site shut down (he joined the military), but we've aquired two new sponsors, BimmerWorld and GetCoolParts.com. This gives us a little more money to play with every month.

My question is where do you guys think we should go with this for the forums? One option is to move United Bimmer to it's own server (at my costs from Penguin Studios we have enough now) to allow it to grow better, have less issues with speed and slow times, as well as allowing us to get the emailing system up so everyone can have @unitedbimmer.com email addresses.

Our second option is advertising. We could save a few months and buy a banner in the BMW part of CarDomain (I've been talking to them for a while, but they want like $500 for two ads, one banner at the top and one square block in the middle of the bmw pages). This should bring in thousands or tens of thousands of visitors, and my guesses are between 150-300 members, probably 20-50 active ones. Or we can do more targetted advertising. I could raise the limits on our Google Adwords campaign and on Yahoo Search marketing. If we kept the same conversion rate, and put the extra money into google alone that would give us about 50 new members a month, however I've noticed members brought in from google tend not to be very active after their first post requesting help. Or if you guys know any other sites that have banners we could look into sponsoring and investing in, that's another option.

So basically, I'll do whatever you guys think is best for the community. I want everyone's input on this, so speak up! :cheers

:thanks

I choose........ Option #1(seperate server).:)

It really doesn't matter to me though. I just think we want everything to run smooth and stuff before adding a lot of members.

just my input, i dont think we should do the cardomain thing, because when im surfing cardomain and i see a banner, i usually dont click on it #1, and actually in the first place i dont even look there

oh yeah what about the tool renting thing?

and btw back to the cardomain thing, even if someone clicks on it, do you think he will register?

Didn't we decide all the tools were too expensive except maybe the Reset Tool and Code Reader, but if we spend a few hundred dollars on them, will we get enough use out of them to justify that much money? That's my only concern.

And I agree, I almost never click on the banners either, but they claim "between 1,000 to 5,000 clicks per month". If you get that much traffic, there has to be some people who will join (after all, there'll be no new members if you don't have any traffic coming in to the site, that's the first step).

I think that would be a good idea.

i would say separate server before advertising, b/c accessibility is the main concern. I know new members are nice and all, but if they can't navigate the system, do you think they'll stay?

I like the 1st option, if everything is running smoothly thats a big plus. Also, if we have that set up and in place to handle more traffic then we can try to activly get more people here and then you know that there will not be issues with things loading. To restate what a couple of others have said I dont know if you would get a lot of traffic from the cardomain stuff or not, I mean someones gonna click it but how many are going to and then how many are going to take the time to register and post activly. Just my $.02

:agree

yea I agree with choice number 1 uptime and no lag is a good thing especially for users who dont have a fast connection to begin with.

We definitley need our own server. The banner add on Cardomain i dunno, i never listen to banner adds much.

New server

i'm leanin towards the server option as well. i have noticed longer load times lately and i din't know whether its my comp or if everyone is havin the same issue. I think it would be helpful to setup up for the large growth before trying to attract a butload more people

Is the server overloaded? There isn't much of a problem on my end... it seems to load just fine. Are other people experiencing problems?

sometimes this site can be slow for me, we should get more sponsors, so then we can all get United Bimmer license plate frames, and also attract even more members. I think we also need to work on helping new members that have questions a little better.