Obviously the best and easiest course of action here would be to get official support from valve, whether it is by adding a spec friendly mode, a ingame matchmaking option, ingame scene news / streams or whatever it is, but of course all that seems a very remote possibility even after sal and extine went over there.
But we can still do the best we can to put ourselves out there, we have been doing a great job for sure, but there is some stuff that could be rethinked or improved, ie: attracting more casual / pub players to view streams whether they are comp or not, I see this is a great possibility that hasn't been explored too much. Being through pubs or spuf or whatever options out there.
I actually had no idea competitive existed until someone mentioned it on a pub, then I started watching streams/compnews and playing a few lobbies and one day the portuguese community decided to start a portuguese league and this guy (san alex) went on asking one by one the pub players if they were interested or not, about 6-7 teams were put together by the admins by completely new players to the scene and today there are probably 30-40 more portuguese competitive players thanks to that one single thing and I am one of them, there is still a lot to explore in terms of attracting casual players, whether it is to watch streams or even to start playing competitive.