Rob. Hi. My name is David and I live in Phoenix, AZ. I'm very new to CS and have downloaded the express edition to begin working with it and look at the possibilities.
Regarding revenue generation. YES that's the big question because we all, I assume, need to generate revenue for all of our hard work. I'm working on a concept site right now that would serve a community of about 400K and there's no way I want to compromise the integrity of the site and want it to be basically ad free and professionally geared toward the needs of my community which is served by the baseline offering of blogs, forums, photos and file capabilities. I want my main page to be virtually 'clean' of any kind of advertising, but then the question arises again - how do I support this site? What about all of the hard work that I'll put into it? To tell you the truth: I am personally sick of Google Adsense ads. I don't think they look good, they aren't targeted enough, and you see them everywhere. There's no way I want my CS site to have Google Adsense ads on the main page!
One idea I've had would be to have a link on the top menu to: MarketPlace. You can also have information in your 'featured items' section pointing the way to the MarkePlace. My concept so far would be to offer a marketplace for the community that would, for all intents and purposes, match the interface of the rest of the CS community look-and-feel and would include 3 sections: the top section on both sides would be highly targeted esthetically placed professional banner advertisements, the middle section would be products and services reviews by the community with a product and services rating in stars like the blog, forum ratings. The community would rate cool items that it would recommend to the rest of the community. The lower portion would contain personal ads for products/services from the community members themselves, e.g. selling a car, motorcycle, books, consulting, tax preparation etc.
The idea is that the commercial products and services section would generate revenue through click-through and affiliate programs such as Amazon. The community personal product/services ads would be paid ads based a flat rating criteria decided by the Admin payable through Paypal and the ads would run indefinitely until either removed by the user or with some sort of expiration criteria. The main mission of my CS site would be to serve my community, but it's also a reality that revenue generation is mandatory to continue to provide the content that user's want. Also, we all need 'stuff' and we're constantly buying stuff that we need and we're always looking for cool products. If the community itself provided product content that was monitored by the Admin and regarded as relevant to the overall community mission, then it's a win-win situation for both the site owner and the community served. If you can provide me with some additional information about how to implement this initial idea and provide feedback, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, David
ollie:Email marketing. I need to be able to send out regular emails to all the users of my community, however under British Law (and for the few American users, the CAN-SPAM Act) I am unable to use the mass email facility in CS because users need the ability to opt-out, and that doesn't seem to be included yet. For solid branding, I also need the emails to be HTML emails, with the content fully under my control. There are loads of companies out there who will send mass emails on your behalf from a CSV file (could CS provide integration with Vertical Response, Constant Contact, etc? I suggest avoiding Got Marketing),
Ollie - Why do you suggest avoiding Got Marketing?
Thanks
An easy, small step toward helping us generate revenue would be an expiration date on roles for a user. I know this sounds simple and even a little silly, but here's how it might work:
This would allow us to have content (forums, blogs, even downloads!) that are only available to users who are currently in a premium role. It would be easy and quick to maintain....just generate a new list every week or month or quarter and upload it. No worries about users getting the benefits of a premium role beyond the expiration date...they would just be dropped.
If you like this idea, I would really recommend a way to automatically notify the user that their membership in a role is about to expire. This could take the form of an email with a link to a renewal page. Obviously, integration with PayPal would be a huge help too.
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