New Members

I've been thinking up ways to try and attract more new members to the site, but I'd love to hear if you guys have any suggestions on how we could get more members here

One of my ideas so far was to build on the forum referral system, whereby you can mail other people who may be interested in the forum to join up via the user control panel.

I'd love to hear if you guys have any other ideas on how we could help Living Reefs grow and build the member base

Talk to LFS from anywhere and everywhere. People ask a bunch of questions in those stores, I am one of them. Contact owners and negotiate a trade-off of services. You have them recommend this site to their customers (have business cards or something on paper) and in return give them free ad space or similar trade. I'm sure they get tired of answering the same questions over and over and the customers will appreciate the extra effort to help out. Reef books are expensive. A link on this site to a directory with names and addresses of stores in a members area. You can give ratings for the stores using votes from actual customers. If they have pride of ownership this could encourage competition to improve quality and prices. They are in competition with the net stores and they are losing. If you could find an angle of approach stressing the need to change business strategy instead of hiking prices to cover the difference. I'm just spitting out ideas that may spark others imagination. Basically give them all the positives they want to hear and all you require of them is that they place a card or flier in the customers bag. I wish I found this site a year ago, I could of saved thousands. Putting all this in motion is a different matter. Phone calls, visits, incentives galore if necessary to get the snowball rolling and growing. I could be just talking out of my a$$ though. I have no idea what the business plan or objective is for the forum other than increasing membership and traffic. Just brainstorming for sh!ts and gigs. Hope it's worth something.

Well logistically since ian is in the uk I dont think he will be talking to my lfs around here. What I have been doing is every time I am in the lfs I talk about the site. Thats just me I talk to everyone drives my wife insane. There are so many people at the lfs that are new and need help. The only other thing I could think of would be to swap ad space with online retailers like the drs. However that would cut into the revenue of this site to lose advertising money. I wouldnt think that this isnt really a money making operation. Imo if we all just told one new person at the lfs about this site every time we went to the lfs it would make a big difference.

I do about like Ted,and yeah my wifes like Teds,she hate it cause I'll talk to anybody about salty tanks.
But when I'm helping at the LFS,I always write down the web addy to the site for the customers.Some of em check us out,some dont.

What if we offered online places some advertising if they linked to us?

what if we had some bumper stickers printed up?
I'd put one on each of my 5 vehicles.

one of my LFS's had some printed up that said "KISS MY WRASSE"
eh, i thought it was cute.

I went on Reef Central and promoted this site as a better and friendlier site to everyone. Needless to say, they didn't like me doing that! I don't know what their problem was.

i love it ill do that tomorrow.

I did that on SWF.com

That sounds like an interesting idea! I'll have a think about how I could sort something like that

I found this site when I was googling various newb information. I would think one of the best things you can do is make sure this site is showing up in google searches. How that would be done I don't know, but if this site shows up as one of the first few links for common saltwater questions I'm sure the site will grow.