Current Focus (Grow Membership)
The current focus is on building the membership, and building participation. Some theories about how we can do that:
- Import Calendar Events
- Import Restaurants
- Import Chamber Businesses
- Create a Personalized Portal for Visitors to the North Fork as discussed in Idea Lab
- Send your press releases to stories@countyfence.org (Paonia mayor Paige Smith and Chamber of Commerce Nathan have agreed, we need more to do the same)
- How do we create the best culture for The County Fence?
The idea here is I’m trying to make it as easy as possible for some of the existing information aggregators to share their information with the County Fence, in the hopes that we become THE SPOT to find out what’s going on. In turn, the Personalized Portal will be our way of organizing the information that we’ve accumulated so we can provide an awesome experience to visitors while making more money for local businesses.
If this is successful we should see membership and usage growth within the North Fork.
Next Focus (Pay Our Team)
Our next focus will be bringing in some money so we can pay our team and support this effort on an ongoing basis.
- Introducing sponsors and advertisers, and making sure we can measure the traffic we are sending to them. We basically need to build our own ad placement architecture, because I have 0 trust in the existing networks - they are violating privacy and taking advantage of people and I want to have something that we control in house so we can provide guarantees and be accountable to the public.
- Can we charge for inclusion or prioritization in the Visitor Portal?
- Can we develop special premium vacation packages and share in profits with the local businesses?
- Can we charge for automations that import content from Facebook, Google, etc? We’re building these now for free to get our content ball rolling, but this provides a significant value to business owners in saving their time while getting their content in more places.
- Can private groups be a form of revenue? We could 1) provide project management capabilities similar to what you are seeing and using now within the County Fence Team. These features can be improved. 2) provide facilities for paid memberships, like if someone wants to offer a learning course or a paid media subscription.
- We could discuss other ways of making money at this phase. For instance a Quests feature to gamify subscriptions and create points based rewards and maybe a swag store and cosmetics for people’s content online and in print.