Concept for monetizing a vb site

[DCX000]

I have a concept for monetizing a new vb site and would like to know if anyone here has comments on this. Tried and failed, tried and works, great, sucks, etc. I have been kicking the idea around for a long time and have a vb4 suite license looking for a purpose.

My idea is this - Start a community on a regional topic that interests a specific group. A close example would be "Dallas Horse Owners Community". Lots of horse owners in/around Dallas, no online community currently on this topic, people enjoy chatting about, sharing pics of, asking questions about, horses.

How to monetize - Try to get local small business owners to advertise directly. No AdSense or other ad networks. This is not a high value keyword topic. There are literally thousands of small businesses, many mom and pop, serving horse owners with related products and services. Very few use online ads. Mostly word of mouth maybe some yellow pages.

If an active community can be established then offer local on-topic business advertising at a low rate, say $10-$30 month. Advertising is managed through the native vb subscription system allowing people to join the Dallas Horse Business Advertisers group. This group can advertise their business in signatures (Others cannot) and post messages in a Dallas Horse Products and Services forum. Maybe allow them to post promotions in a specific calendar, maybe use banner ads, maybe promotional articles and blogs.

To work this model would require a substantial number of local small business participants and a pretty active community. This happens to be subject and place I am personally enthusiastic about which might be clouding my reasoning. I would really like to see it work but am fully prepared to go to a general audience AdSense and ad network site that has served me well before. My websites pay the bills so it can't be all fun and no profit.

I'm on the fence right now. Opinions?

[Caddyman]

I have this setup on TalkDelaware and in my experience it has not worked out that great. I have an active community for sure...we were at 400+ posts per day at one point and has slowed a little. Advertising was offered to all local companies, i had some success but nothing to write home about.

[BSMedia]

You'd be better off combining advertising methods. Throw some adsense, affiliate programs, and then the local banner advertising all together.

Get a mod that rotates them so members aren't seeing the same thing over and over again.

Running a forum to make money usually doesn't work out real well, they tend to have low click rates.

[DCX000]

So Caddyman - You had 400 posts/day on a local site with nothing to write home about? That's more activity than I anticipate by a long shot. Not the vote of confidence I wanted.

And yes BSMedia, I could throw a mix of AdSense, banners, affiliates into a community but as you say, evidence suggests that would not be a wise investment of my time if making money is the goal. Or at least I can say that the same number of hours invested elsewhere would probably pay more.

I am still looking at member sites with kind-of-similar models and thinking of ways to make it work.

Thanks for the comments.

[Princeton]

moved to vB3 General Discussions