Automotive forum advertising / sponsorship business model advice needed

I recently started a car forum and im trying to plan and prepare for how i am going to deal with sponsorships and vendors.

Ive been researching for a while now looking at other automotive sites and their advertising kit usually includes a rotating 468 banner for a certain fee per month. In my opinion those ads are really useless nowadays since there are at least another 3 advertising banners from other sites on the same page. I wanted to do something unique for my site and better converting so everyone is happy. Ive been really going out of my way to just be different and so far the community is liking it.

A couple ideas i have for monetizing the forum

1. Create a vendors forum for dealers/manufacturers to list groupbuys and sales. This would require a monthly subscription in order to post in this forum.
2. Sponsorship that are forum based like for example sitepointforums

I also dont have any idea how i am going to deal with vendors/manufacturers who give me car parts ? How should i reward them ? what perks should i offer them ? Most of these car parts sponsorships involve some sorta exchange and i dont want to give them lifetime advertising on my site for a product is only a couple hundred.

Thanks in advance, any help would be appreciated.

Here is what I'd do.

-- Total site/forum reskins. This means the company's logo, products, and color cover the board. No one misses it. This should be the biggest cost for advertisers.

-- Advertising in a monthly or weekly newsletter

-- Vendor sub sections are a good idea. Perhaps reserve these for premium advertisers.

Here is what I would do if I was in your position:

- Sell direct banner advertising. This would be header placement on every page. You could sell them by subsections. For example, someone looking at car audio would not be seeing an ad for a tire company.

- put Adsense in the footers of every page. This will give even more specific targetted advertising and gives you a very wide inventory of advertisers which you simply won't get trying to sell advertising on your own.

- Also, look into the other ideas I've given above such as skinning.

Bottom line, if your forum has plenty of traffic none of this should be a problem making money from. If you have 100 members and 5 are active, I would just stick with Adsense until you have 50,000 posts and 5,000 members or so.

I run an automotive forum for a very new make do u think its a good idea to charge car dealerships to be listed on the site ? i am thinking a one time fee

Hi,
This is steven. I am new member to this site. The site given tips are really very interesting to all the peoples. And at the same time forum advertising is the best way to advertising. The forum given suggestions are very nice.


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steven7
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