Let's put our heads together

[komodo]

UB has stabalized and we need to focus on getting our name out there again. We need to attract more more new members and get deeper into search engines.

I know this is kind of generic, but does anyone have any ideas?

[c1apton]

Yea, have current members hit as many search engines they know of searching for UB. It'll show as ALOT of hits and there's thousands of folks that search BMW info (owners and non's) that'll check it out.

Harry, you might want to send out an "new & improved appearance" letter to all the people who registered but haven't been on in months - might remind them or regenerate some interest.

[xsperf]

clapton, you should definetly put a big UB banner on your tour bus!! haha jk

[c1apton]

I told Harry on my last gig I needed 13 large stickers for the buses...lol. Right now I'ld need one for the train we take everyday to the Olympic Village. (It'ld be funny on our Benz rental ride...) Maybe we could slip a couple bucks to one of the bobsled teams eh? Some of them have some really hot BMW helmets, I'm trying to score one of those for some free tickets - it's like black market dealing...lol Check out my boy Sonnie, trying to qualify...

[Hoppy]

i think we need to draw in knowledgeable members from other forums. we have a great community, but i feel we lack the indepth knowledge. we have a few members that are tasked with all our questions.

the fact that some one may ask a question on here, and the same question on bimmer forums. but only recieve an answer on bimmer forums. that person is alot more likely to go there in the future.

my idea is to first draw in other bimmer heads. to build up our technical know how. and bring them in with the attraction of our stron friendly community.

[c1apton]

Good point Hoppy... really good point.

Hey Harry - on "All Search" they have an Ebay United Bimmer ad...

-> Find United Bimmer at eBay
Looking for United Bimmer? eBay has great deals on new and used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods and more. If you can’t find it on eBay, it probably doesn’t exist.

Have we've been that bad that you're putting us up for auction

[komodo]

Haha, great idea.

However the ONE thing that we can only build up with time is our tech information base... threads like the 5-speed swap one in e36, we need to fill it out with as much info as possible.

And I agree about bringing in knowledgable people, however with a smaller active userbase, it'd be more difficult to lure in higher knowledge users. I think those would come with the flow.

However a very complete technical knowledge base in our forums doesn't help at all unless we're in the search engines for people to reach us. =/

[komodo]

However, just as I bring this thread up, we have had a higher number of guests on recently. There's been over 20 guests almost all day... mostly from Google.

And we have had 7 new join in the past 3 days, most putting google as their "How did you find us" field.

[komodo]

Haha, I just had an idea... and it worked.

Last night I posted this Blonde Joke:
http://www.unitedbimmer.com/forums/thread6035.html

Now if you guys have seen it, you know it works through links, right?

I decided to go to about 15 different forums I frequent (on topics of everything from cars to trance), and start a new thread that looks like this:

Originally Posted by komodo9

Title: Greatest Blonde Joke Ever

http://www.unitedbimmer.com/forums/thread6035.html
Enjoy.

That simple. Now it does two things, first of all it gets a large burst of traffic to our server for stress testing. At the peak of the wave, we broke 200 users online concurrently.

Screen shot:
http://files.unitedbimmer.com/ub.c/k...blondejoke.png

And another thing it does, is if any of their lounges are crawled by a search engine, voila, there's now a new backlink to our site. AND no one in those forums will complain because linking is part of the joke, so it's not like we're advertising our site to get the backlinks.

I also noticed probably 1/10th of the people who came were browsing other subforums too, not just the Comedy Collection, so who knows, maybe some might like BMWs and will decide to join, however that wasn't the purpose of this.

[Rooz]

Get some money and put an add on tv that would say:

"THE LEFT LANE IS FOR FAST TRAFFIC, MOVE OVER B*^#S"
- Provided to you by UnitedBimmer.com

[Storamin]

more users who know something about these cars...

when i look at this forum i say "self, this forum is full of teenagers who don't know jack about their car"

[Spieluhr]

^^^
I would actually contribute to get that commercial out there. God that's a great idea. Our member count would double in a day.

[Rooz]

Originally Posted by Spieluhr

^^^
I would actually contribute to get that commercial out there. God that's a great idea. Our member count would double in a day.

I though of that as I was driving to work, lol, and I was going to make a post about it, but this seemed like the perfect place for it.

IN all seriousness if we can do this I'll throw a good bit of money towards it

[komodo]

Originally Posted by Rooz

I though of that as I was driving to work, lol, and I was going to make a post about it, but this seemed like the perfect place for it.

IN all seriousness if we can do this I'll throw a good bit of money towards it

Commercials would not be realistic.

However you know what would be.... *grin*

That same advertisement, in a magazine like Roundel. We could save up, and buy a full page ad in some big BMW magazine with the move over thing...

THAT would be awesome.

[c1apton]

Are you wild? Do you know what it costs just to produce an ad? Yet alone the cost to air it? I hope you have AT LEAST $30k just to produce it, that is low also. I have friends who work in advertising production and it's BIG BUCKS.