Board Changes, starting today

[Erik Sine]

After having a brief conversation with another board administrator and then sleeping on it for some time. I came to a conclusion that this board of ours is beginning to get expensive for me with time & operating costs, especially time first and foremost. It was a hobby at first, it's a great passion of mine to be involved with getting out information you probably will never get anywhere else for the electric sign community, but it's requiring a lot of my time. Time that should be spent on what makes me money, my sign business. I find can myself easily spending 20-40 hours a week running this board and it's distracting, and requiring more of my time, as time goes on.

Up until now I've tried to get time and costs covered by advertisers only, I've been getting some help but most all is getting covered by me. I haven't had any member fees and that is the way I would like to keep it.

So I'm offering an incentive open to Manufacturer's, Suppliers & Wholesalers who visit here to advertise their products or services on discounted advertising of banner ads, newsletter ads, web announcement emails to over 5000 electric sign company contacts, by purchasing a yearly or 6 month "Board Vendor" member subscription.

I'm try to find ways to better justify time spent and costs keeping this board going. So maybe by offering a new group "Board Vendors", they can help me and at the same time I can help them....with our ever growing population and traffic.

I will also in the very near future be introducing a special section of the board that will be regularly updated with premium information viewable by a separate paid memberships group for a small fee.

This new member group will be the only ones allowed to solicit products & services around the board, prohibiting topic announcements and private message sales of non Board Vendors.

For more info on Board Vendors CLICK HERE

These are the changes that I will be making to better serve the community as a whole and will look for other ways to create better incentives for the Board Vendors.

[geraldi]

What would premium information be?

[Erik Sine]

Articles & Tutorials

[Erik Sine]

One of the first going that I would personally be doing is the lighting results and periodic updates of the light box composed of white neon & LED sources in brightness and energy readings.

http://www.thesignsyndicate.com/forums/ind...?showtopic=2280

[manuellynch]

Erik - the rage for venture capitalists and companies interested in acquiring other companies are organizations that rely on viral marketing systems in the form of forums and message boards as you have created here.

Me and several others are a huge fan of your site and will support you in any way to keep this moving and growing.

I would also suggest in the Premium section that Department of Energy reports could be available. These are reports that are not to be used by companies for marketing/sales purposes but contain tons of information about certain vendor products. The DOE just completed an analysis of one of AXIOM's product and included in the report is that our product "is the benchmark for others to try and meet"

You could have a section in the Premium section that not only makes people pay for access to the service but furthermore has rules that they can be terminated and banned from the section for sharing information posted there to other boards, etc.

If interesed Erik I can send you extensive information on Viral Marketing systems that eventually do make money and are growing faster than anyone expected.

[Erik Sine]

Speaking of the DOE reports, someone was supposed to get me a copy of that not yet released copy *COUGH*

Thank You Manuel, I'm glad you & others enjoy the forum. I'll be PM'ing you.

[Sign God]

Finally got that tutorial section up? It only took a couple of years!