If you have $2,000 to spend to improve your site, what would you use it on?

[JoyFreak]

I would hire good writers to create great content for your niche. We've had great success with articles ranking things in your niche and interviewing people and members who have excelled in your niche. Etc...

This.

 

[l3ta]

New telescope related equipment... as it would go MUCH further (via articles and posts using the equipment on the site) than ANY SEO related impact would.

You can actually have a dedicated telescope for your site that your members can use remotely to view the sky and do a bit of imaging. That would be like a premium feature. You can actually sell telescope time. Do it!

 

[cdub]

This.

The real hat trick is to have articles and interviews so long and good that you split them in two and put the second half in a section where only paying members can see which helps pay for the articles you write.

I do this with @Bob 's excellent AMS addon.

 

[Aerodynamic]

The real hat trick is to have articles and interviews so long and good that you split them in two and put the second half in a section where only paying members can see which helps pay for the articles you write.

I do this with @Bob 's excellent AMS addon.

That's brilliant.

 

[JoyFreak]

The real hat trick is to have articles and interviews so long and good that you split them in two and put the second half in a section where only paying members can see which helps pay for the articles you write.

I do this with @Bob 's excellent AMS addon.

Clever. People should take note

 

[Tracy Perry]

You can actually have a dedicated telescope for your site that your members can use remotely to view the sky and do a bit of imaging. That would be like a premium feature. You can actually sell telescope time. Do it!

To do that, you really need a dedicated observatory (between $10K-$40K with some equipment included in that cost) in a Bortle 3 or less area (have access to the latter but if purchased my own land would be another $15K-$22K for 5 acres land fairly close to my residence). Then you need dedicated high speed internet to it (which is not available in that Bortle 3 area around here and would require StarLink services.... which are also not currently available in this area ).
Since all my current capture scopes are already automated, and you can stream live video from the cameras and it is controlled locally, streaming what I do live would not be that hard.... I know there is software that can interface and allow remote use, but the problem is restricting it to a certain user at a time. It probably would not be that hard to do but would WELL exceed $2000 to do so.
But you are really limited by what you can see as to get visibly pleasing images, you have to stack static images. This is not even what you would see of the M_38 (Starfish Cluster) from a 72mm telescope as this is a 120 second exposure.. I'm going to have to play with some live streaming to see how much more "faded" the colors are in it.


To get great views that people would want to pay for would require a scope in the $10-$19K range, then you would need an appropriate camera for that telescope (usually another $4-$8K due to needing full frame size cameras).

I don't think I'd live long enough to even recoup a small portion of that amount of expenditure!

 

[Frode789]

The real hat trick is to have articles and interviews so long and good that you split them in two and put the second half in a section where only paying members can see which helps pay for the articles you write.

I do this with @Bob 's excellent AMS addon.

Definitely a good idea later once you have a good user base. Maybe not do this when your site is low/fairly new ^^