Advertising on TAY: your ideas wanted

Why not. Nothing is free and if TAY can offset its costs it may become an even better asset to the back country community. This site is a valuable asset to myself and many others. Keep up the good work TAY.

Thanks to everyone for comments and ideas, and also to the eight people who recently donated. I'm working on a plan to implement many of these ideas which will avoid most in-your-face advertising. It seems that some people wouldn't be bothered if we had this kind of advertising, but there is another group (including myself) that would like to retain the current look-and-feel of TAY as much as possible. If these various fundraising ideas work to produce the income TAY needs, then TAY can remain largely as we've known it. If these ideas don't work well enough, that may have to change.

Here's a quick list of the ideas I will be working on implementing:

• Spring donation drive:
  I will use the membership database to let registered members know about this, and some forum announcements to alert the rest. This would use the existing donation page , PayPal or check. With the recent donations we're up to 20 for this season. Would something like 50 (that is, 30 new) by May 15 be a reasonable goal, or is that too optimistic?
• Event donations:
  Unless someone wants to step forward and volunteer to organize and run some kind of formal fundraiser, these would probably be limited to a sign and bucket at loosely organized events such as C..... Fest and Slush Cup.
• Yard Sale donations related to successful sales:
  This would be optional with the suggestion that anyone who successfully sells their gear donate 5-10% of the sales price to TAY.
• View-optional advertising:
  This would be pay-for-performance ads from various online retailers kept in a new Hot Air board. Once set up this will require a little promoting to make sure visitors know about it and understand that purchases made through the ads will return a portion of the purchase price to TAY. I've signed up with two affiliate networks that give access to about eight major gear sellers, plus Amazon for books and Zazzle for shirts.
• Forum-wide advertising:
  The only reason for this now would be if local shops wanted to have a presence here but were not set up to do pay-per-performance advertising. The only reason to do this in the future would be if these fundraising ideas don't produce the needed income.
• Non-forum advertising:
  When I have time, I will probably try adding some advertising to pages on this site that get views largely from non-forum users (such as those entering from web searches).
• CD sales:
  I will be working on more promotion as I have time.

Additional comments and suggestions are welcome.

Love the new store forum Charles -- ordered some skin glue a few minutes ago. I assume you get the proceeds for it as long as I click through from TAY, right?

nicely done. i think you have delicately and gracefully moved from fence-sitting, to a middle way that will offend the least number of people! i hope it works! as an aside, i wonder if i will actually use TAY MORE often now, since I'll be inclined to shop for gear through TAY, even when i might not otherwise be using the site.... and check trip reports while i'm at it...

Marcus, if your purchase was around 19.75 then the right credit did go to TAY. I'm curious about what link you used - was it one of the "search for gear" links?

Graham, yes, overall this is a middle of the road approach that will hopefully achieve the twin goals of providing the revenue TAY needs but keeping most of the current look and feel of the site.

There is still the unresolved question of a presence for local stores, and in fact I just received an unsigned message (via contact page) that says in part:
"my concern is this: why would you not reach out to the local shops first, your core small locally owned shops (ie: Pro Ski Service, OMC, etc) rather than a big dot.com entity? it seems to go against the grain of TAY, and frankly, it will drive consumer traffic towards a website like that than a small local treasure like these shops."

It's a good question, and I share the concern. Because I cannot reply to the message sender directly, I will have to reply here. The first answer to the "why" is that until about two weeks ago, I knew virtually nothing about the nuts and bolts of online advertising. To start learning, I looked at other sites that carry ads and researched advertising and ad programs (such as google and affiliates). It is not necessarily easy to figure out what kind of advertising arrangements a particular web site has; now that I know a bit more, it looks to me like cascadeclimbers has a mix of local shop ads (as "sponsors") and larger, non-local, advertisers (as pay-per-performance).

I signed up for some of the affiliate-type programs so that I could experiment with ads, trying out placement, functionality, and look-and-feel. As I mentioned earlier, the good and bad thing about these programs is the ease of getting their ads running. I'm ignorant of the online advertising business (why learn about something like that before I need to?) and I don't even know which of these advertisers are "big dot.com entities" vs. small ones, and "local" vs. not. For example, OMC is part of an affiliate program, as e-omc.com; are they "local" and "not-big"? How about REI?

A second answer is that local shops don't participate in these easy to implement programs, so I haven't had an easy way to learn how they could be represented here. What kind of presence would local shops be looking for, and what kind of rates should I be considering? To answer the latter question, I should probably have a more detailed understanding of TAY's traffic than I do: how many unique visitors per month, how many page views per month (again, why spend my time on this before it matters)?

As it happens, I spent time yesterday talking to managers at three local shops. Our discussions were very informative and helpful to me in starting to get an idea of what kind of arrangement might be able to give such shops a presence on TAY, as well as what their main concerns are regarding online competition. There's still a lot to be figured out, and this takes time, which I have only in scattered chunks.

So the bottom line is that I don't want to make changes here that will result in a significant negative impact for local shops, but I have to balance that goal with the important one of making sure that TAY gets the revenue it needs, as well as the limitation that I have a finite amount of time to devote to achieving these goals.

Good info Charles, thanks. FYI, this is the link I clicked on (and that 19.75 sounds about right):

search.backcountry.com/exec/?AID=1615057...mark&x=0&id=R5K8AXLH

It's the "telemark" hyperlink from the post you have in the shops forum.