I recall the original concept for GulfCommunity.com was born in late 2003 after a rough trip to a local restaurant.   Food poising coupled with bad service from a local establishment led me to want to create a non-biased, uncommercialized place on the internet where locals could scold poor performing businesses and more importantly share stories of positive service experiences.   I fired up my work notebook one evening, worked through the night and had a rudimentary site published within a few days.

Along the way, it was always my intention to keep from "Selling Out", as it were.    The web space was cheap or free and my cost of ownership for the site was limited to annual domain fees and occasional expenses related to adding features or changing the page layout. Some friends and I posted on local forums, announcing the new site and quickly a group of fun locals began to populate the forums and an online community was born.

I recognized the need to provide content aside from the various user-driven content methods such as the forums, so I made calls to Gulf Coast Newspapers, the Mobile Press Register and the local TV stations.   Some, never returned my calls, others were locked in content arrangements with sites such as Al.com (a great site, btw) while others wanted a small forture to syndicate their content through our site.  

In keeping with the "Build it and they will come" mentality, I continued to add features to the site.   A family-locator during Katrina, a Gas-locator during Ivan, free blogs, free classifieds, free photo galleries.  The features stacked up but somewhere along the line the community of friends that frequented our forums, sadly grew apart from one another.  The hit counts went from hundreds a day down to hundreds a week.

Frustrated, I set out to provide advertising.   Billboards, radio advertising,  movie theater ads are all $600-$1200 a month with minimum contract requirements - all hard to reach for a budding community portal with no budget.
I invested in newspaper advertising, supporting the very entities with whom I received a cold shoulder, dabbled in print advertising and finally in google placements.   All brought the hit counts up but not to the site's potential.

In the meantime, I watch major media entities, many of whom were too good to talk to me or who ignored our press releases, steal our ideas and use them on their own sites.  Weak.

So, this month, I've decided to open gulfcommunity.com to public advertising.  I've found an interim solution to the local content needs that provides links to valid local stories without violating terms of usage for those sites.  Our hitcounts are still respectable but the site hasn't reach the full potential, especially considering it's been here for 6 years.  I've decided to open up the gulfcommunity pages to sponsorship with local businesses.  I believe we can provide tasteful marketing at a much more reasonable price than the other guys and in the meantime, the funds from those ads will go towards advertising campaigns aimed at raising awareness of this site and it's services.

This is something we should have done a long time ago but the altruistic drive of not splattering ads throughout the site was hard to overcome!
Have a great Christmas and amazing New year!
Bill Dodd

Founder, GulfCommunity.Com