The way I see as the best plan to increase support for competitive TF2 is simply to take the time to actually talk with players, communities, clans, etc. that do not currently or have not ever experienced competitive TF2 play. It's too often that the majority of competitive players think that just because this community or that clan doesn't know anything about competitive TF2 we have to ignore them or make fun of them because they are just a pub group. We the players have to set the examples for everyone and encourage more people to get involved, whether it be simply with a smaller league such as UGC, moving up to CEVO or ESEA eventually.
Here is a prime example for everyone.
I have been playing TF2 since the midnight release in 2007. I have been a member of the =(eGO)= or Edge Gamers Organization community for 3+ years now and have moved my way up to being a TF2 Divisional Leader. It is just a title to me, but the majority of the players respect me as a person and player so I use it to my advantage to help promote TF2 in as many ways possible, with the competitive aspect of it, or with tournaments to promote it as some of you may have been a part of last year with the Free-4-All tournament I organized partnering with Edge Game Servers and eXtv. Now I know for a fact that the attitude towards eGO from a large number of TF2 players, competitive or not was that this community was a stupid, religious pub community that has nothing good going for them. They are nothing near what people were assuming of them through others, and I wanted to prove that the outlook of them could change if I tried hard enough and by convincing them to sponsor my team, not only did it bring in more respect for the community with us placing 3rd in open, but it also encouraged a lot of the members who never got involved with competitive TF2 to start playing.
The point I am getting at, is that we care too much about ourselves being successful, but instead we should be reaching out to the groups like =(eGO)=, Skial, LotusClan, and all the others because if people who are members of those groups see that they have a team that represents them in a good competitive league that gets streamed and shoutcasted, they want to get involved and do the same thing, even if its just watching. I have posted every stream/shoutcast of our team on the =(eGO)= website, every news article from ESEA, streams of invite matches, and so much more that I know if I wasn't posting them there wouldn't be nearly as much interest from the members to support the competitive TF2 community.