Hi folks, I wondered if you'd like to review the site Forumula1(dot)com for me. It started out life as a F1 forum (and a hobby) around seven years ago (been on different TLDs since then) and it's lost it's way (or I have, or both)! 
The site features news from GMM and articles written by our own contributors - usually younger individuals looking to land a paid job in both media or motorsport. The main draw is the forum though, and beyond encouraging that part of the site to grow, I wondered what you guys would do to build community and traffic. It currently has over 30k monthly visitors - this has been relatively static throughout the past couple of years.
In terms of monetisation, we use AdSense, AdZouk (more premium advertising) and sell tickets - reaching over £50k ticket sales in 2008.
Annoyingly, we lost some of our organic traffic due to the Google Exact update (it used to rank top three for 'F1 Forum')...sigh!
So far on my to-do list I have:
1. Add rich-content (we have great content but we're still living in the dark ages in terms of images/video etc).
2. Re-design the site, especially news section, combining that with forum design somehow.
3. Work on social side - we've not maximised this yet - although if we do we'll only likely get hit with another animal related Google update further down the line!
The site features news from GMM and articles written by our own contributors - usually younger individuals looking to land a paid job in both media or motorsport. The main draw is the forum though, and beyond encouraging that part of the site to grow, I wondered what you guys would do to build community and traffic. It currently has over 30k monthly visitors - this has been relatively static throughout the past couple of years.
In terms of monetisation, we use AdSense, AdZouk (more premium advertising) and sell tickets - reaching over £50k ticket sales in 2008.
Annoyingly, we lost some of our organic traffic due to the Google Exact update (it used to rank top three for 'F1 Forum')...sigh!
So far on my to-do list I have:
1. Add rich-content (we have great content but we're still living in the dark ages in terms of images/video etc).
2. Re-design the site, especially news section, combining that with forum design somehow.
3. Work on social side - we've not maximised this yet - although if we do we'll only likely get hit with another animal related Google update further down the line!
