Buy Me A Ferrari

I recently came across an interesting forum post by Viraj on the Blogger to Blogger forum - the post itself was asking why bloggers still list their prices in dollars rather than pounds.

This made me think as I am from the United Kingdom and therefore my primary currency is GBP (Great British Pounds), however, I still charge for advertising in dollars.

At the time of writing my advertising page, I thought that listing my prices in dollars would be more widely accepted with most viewers coming from the US. Thinking about it now though, even if the advertiser is from the States, there’s no reason why they couldn’t pay in pounds using Paypal.

If I’m advertising somewhere, I have to pay in dollars usually so can’t see it being much of a problem if people have to pay me in pounds.

I’m now off to update my advertise page with updated prices.

Let’s see how this turns out, if you have any comments let me know as I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In a recent article, I touched on the fact that I have a few ideas that need to be developed. I have most of the domains for ideas that I have, here are some of the ideas along with the domain name. If you are interested in domain names I’m unlikely to get round to doing all of these so I can sell any of them at a suitable price.

If you are interested, please drop me an email.

Here’s the ideas along with the domain names:

YourAppleTV.com

Possibly thinking about having a blog dedicated to the Apple TV or have some sort of community website or gallery where people can show and talk about their Apple TV setups. I may be more likely to sell this as it is pretty low priority in terms of what I have planned.

CarSnap.co.uk

I’m thinking or maybe having either a gallery website where car owners can upload photos of their cars, or, a forum where people can discuss motoring related topics and post photographs of their cars.

911Owner.co.uk

Might have some sort of club and/or message boards where Porsche owners and enthusiasts can talk about their cars or just Porsches in general.

AuctionForum.info

I did intend to have a forum set up that had auctions on. I am now more likely to sell this rather than actually develop it although you never know.

TopWords.co.uk

I have absolutely no idea what I was going to stick on this one, purchased it a while back now and originally though of something along the lines of Million Dollar Homepage but instead of pixels have words. However, I believe this sort of idea is already out and about on the internet.

WiiBoom.com

Again, thinking about maybe having a blog that discusses the Nintendo Wii and games that are being released for the Wii. However, I don’t have a Wii at the moment and don’t see myself buying one in the near future. If I was to start I’d just be talking about new releases instead of actually reviewing games. Maybe someone else could give me a hand with this one? Write some content?

DavidDunn.name

I just registered this as it’s my name and it’s a .name - no idea what I’ll do with it but maybe I’ll stick a portfolio on there or something in the near future.

AboutGardening.info

Was going to have a website discussing all aspects of gardening but not really on the top of my interests list. Would be willing to sell this if anyone is interested.

ComperBlog.co.uk

This one will be a blog about entering competitions both online and offline. This is something I have been interested in for some time now and would be good to post about competitions that people can enter alongside tips for entering competitions.

ComperForum.co.uk

This is designed to go alongside Comper Blog, where people can talk about competitions, entering competitions, new competitions etc.

NewcastleLad.com and .co.uk

This is going to be a blog about my local area; Newcastle. Will talk about goings on and up and coming events in the city of Newcastle.

There are a few additional domains that I am buying etc. at the moment but these will be things that I am just starting to think about - hence why I haven’t blogged about them. The above ideas are very much that - ideas! I’ll never do all of these at once and never intend to - one at a time works best for me.

If you are interested in purchasing any of the above domains, I may be interested in selling - drop me an email and we can discuss it.

Are there any ideas you’d like me to get started on straight away? Please leave a comment.

Would you like to follow these ideas more closely when I blog about them here? Follow my RSS feed to keep up-to-date.

Well, hopefully anyway! These are the different things I am going to try in my journey to making some money on the internet. Note; some of these aren’t just things I am going to do on Buy Me A Ferrari but stuff I will put onto other sites, or new sites altogether.

Monthly advertising

You will probably notice that there are several slots on the pages of Buy Me A Ferrari that you can purchase on a monthly basis. Yes, none of these have been purchased as of yet as my blog is really new, but since the 18th (7 days ago) I have had 631 visitors and 1,123 page views so this should pick up.

These figures are increasing every day so hopefully people will start purchasing the ads. However, I haven’t been promoting these spots too much as I hope to implement a theme that I will purchase shortly, then and only then I will go and properly promote the ad spots (you can still purchase them now though and they will still be affective when I change the theme).

Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful seems to be a relatively new concept but I have it implemented on both of my blogs as the idea is really good. Advertisers bid (from $0.00) for a specific spot on your website, the more visitors you have the more money you will make as the site shows how many hits you are getting.

I like the idea as the advertisers are able to bid up to what they deem an appropriate price per day - keeping both the publisher (me!) and the advertiser happy. I am currently making at least $1 a day from this, for something that I don’t need to do much to, to keep it going.

Rubicon Project

Again, I think this is a relatively new idea that is still in BETA (isn’t everything on the web these days haha!?). I am only running these ads on FerrariDave as I decided not to have and AdSense type ads on Buy Me A Ferrari although it may be something I will look into in the near future.

From FerrariDave I currently have around $8 in my account although I have only been running it since about the second week of January.

If you too are looking to make money, Rubicon Project may be a good idea for you as it serves all sorts of different ads from different networks, they must work and be more appropriate for your visitors as I wasn’t making the same sort of money with AdSense. Sign up here.

Kontera

I have Kontera running on both blogs and basically what it does is picks out keywords in your pages and links them to different adverts (you may have noticed the orange links). Kontera isn’t going to bring me my Ferrari any time soon but it does bring me the odd dollar here and there.

Matched.co.uk

Matched brings me a set amount per month for displaying an ad that looks similar to AdSense. I’m currently only running this on FerrariDave and it brought my in £8 (~$16) for last month. I like this one as it doesn’t depend on people clicking on ads, I’ll get the cash whether people click on it or not.

Affiliate programs

I am definitely going to look into affiliate programs as all the top bloggers talk about them so they must be good for making money. Anyone like to give me some pointers where affiliate programs are concerned?/

Other ideas

I have several ideas that are currently work in progress or maybe just in design stages but most of them will be supporting ads and hopefully making me a few dollars/pounds here and there. Most of the ideas however are something I am interested in, not just something I think I can make money doing.

All of the above things will be talked about in more detail in up and coming blog posts on Buy Me A Ferrari. I will of course be updating about the money I am making (or not as the case may be). If you would like to be kept up to date, please Subscribe to My RSS Feed.

Another great source of traffic for both of my blogs has been Entrecard. An idea where you can swap virtual business cards, to other site owner in the form of 125×125 buttons.

Other members of Entrecard see your button on the Entrecard website and click through to drop their own card into your Entrecard dashboard.

Dropping your card on another blog with Entrecard installed earns you one credit and someone else dropping their card onto your dashboard also gives you a credit.

Now, these credits can be spent on advertising on other people’s Entrecard, not only this, but now they have implemented a shop where people sell various things like graphic design, templates, raffle tickets and more.

Does Entrecard bring me decent traffic?

Every time I begin to talk about Entrecard to other bloggers, whether it be on message boards or on MSN it always leads to a discussion as to whether the traffic from Entrecard brings decent traffic or not.

First of all, it does bring a lot of traffic to your blog, especially if you become popular on Entrecard. However, does this mean that the people who visit are visiting to read my posts or whether they are just coming to drop their card.

Whether or not it is decent is very much debatable but one thing can be said; Entrecard should still boost your Alexa rank a bit as visitors are visitors, doesn’t really matter whether they’re reading your content or not.

I personally always try to read at least the two most recent articles on the blogs I drop my card on - sometimes I find some decent stuff too. Unfortunately I can’t say whether or not people are doing the same in return. I’d like to say they were but there’s no way I’d bet my bank balance on it!

What do you think? Are you visiting from Entrecard? If so, thanks for actually reading some of my stuff - really do appreciate it. Leave a comment and let me know.

For both of my blogs, StumbleUpon has been the biggest source of traffic so far. On FerrariDave since it started in November, StumbleUpon has brought it around 13,100 visits.

Using it is really simple and it can be quite fun to use at the same time.

What is StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a toolbar which works with all current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer among others. The toolbar’s main feature is the big Stumble button. When you click this, it takes you to a random website that has been submitted via the toolbar.

However, the website it throws at you isn’t as random as it may seem. When you register, you submit some of your general interests into their system. This firstly where it finds out what you like, so it can show you similar sites according to your interests.

Once you begin to use it more regularly, it also remembers what sites and things you thumbed up and also remembers the sites you thumbed down. These reflect upon the pages that it decides to show you.

So really, it is a very clever little tool that should (once you use it for a little while) show you some decent websites.

How it benefits my websites and how it could benefit yours

Most of the articles I submit to both this blog and FerrariDave are submitted to StumbleUpon by me or by one of my friends on StumbleUpon.

When this is first submitted it will then be shown to a limited amount of people to start off with. This will, as I said before, be shown to people with similar interests to what your page is about.

Then if any of these few people thumb up your article, it will be shown to much more people and your page climbs up the ladder like that.

So as you can see, it is probably one of the easiest traffic building methods that you can adopt for your website as it requires very little effort with pretty decent results.

Making money with the traffic from StumbleUpon

I have adverts on my website from the Rubicon Project and used to use Adsense before that.

A lot of the reviews on StumbleUpon on the internet will probably tell you that for making money it is pretty useless to use StumbleUpon as apparently none of the isers click on ads.

I have proved this to be wrong, some of the traffic that comes through StumbleUpon do in fact click on my ads on FerrariDave. Yes, I’ll admit, I ain’t on my way to millions yet, but it does bring some revenue, that I can guarantee.

Why don’t you download StumbleUpon, add me as a friend and have a stumble around - you could even thumb up some of the articles on here or FerrariDave. If you are already a member thumb this article up please!!

When checking out the Google Toolbar I discovered that this domain name (buymeaferrari.co.uk) has a Google Pagerank of PR2. As I had registered this from a registrar not from someone off a message board, I was interested in how it accrued PR2.

This led me to google buymeaferrari.co.uk which led to a whole range of interesting stuff.

The Sun Newspaper

Turns out, that in September 2005, this domain name was featured in The Sun, you can read the article here. Turns out the guy who had this domain had a website that asked members of the public to donate money to buy him a Ferrari. Not a bad idea when you think it made him £212.12 - not entirely sure on the time frame for that though.

Autoblog

Autoblog also wrote an article about the site, however, they weren’t as nice as The Sun were. Really made me chuckle. Read the article here.

Club Scuderia

On the Club Scuderia message boards, there was also this discussion on the subject and a debate about how the guy planned to pay for insurance/fuel etc.

Lexus Owners Club

Another message board in on the discussion was that of Lexus Owners Club. They were along the same lines as the rest, basically having a go at the guy for the website. However, I think that T7RY B hit the nail on the head, he may be regarded as a fruit cake, but he still made some cash with it!

Day of Defeat Forums

Dear… the guy who had buymeaferrari.co.uk definitely did create a bit of a stir! Here’s another message board talking about it.

And the rest…

As there seems to be loads, here’s a few more following the same lines:

• Fastdrive Born To Ride Forum
• ScoobyNet
• Get A Freelancer <– Someone wants a clone of it
• Tyresmoke
• Neowin
• Pistonheads
• SpikedHumor

So, I am very surprised at the history that I didn’t even know existed!! Suppose it’s good to have some backlinks before I even start.

Right… where will I put the donate button hehe!

After my post last night about free advertisement to try and get things going, a couple of people got in touch.

Both of the two lucky enough to grab themselves free ad slots opted for a 125×125 banner above the fold, and the two can now be seem, on the sidebar on the right.

The first person to take me up on my offer was Pam Hoffman from Internet Marketing Seminar Listing Service. Pam found the site through Entrecard and took me up on the offer straight away. She blogs about different internet marketing seminars. Give her site a click and have a look at her blog.

The second person to take me up on the free ad slot was Viraj from Blogger To Blogger - a blog and a cool forum; which if you are a blogger, you should join. I’ve been a member on there for a while now and like the community over there. Give his banner a click and get talking.

Thanks to both of the above for taking me up on the offer, there will be more offers in the future. If you would like to advertise now, I’m happy to listen to any offers - most of which I will accept as long as they aren’t ridiculously low.

Obviously the advertising slots aren’t going to fill up real quick due to there being no proof or any decent amounts of traffic yet.

So, as I’d like to see this work and fill up some of the slots at least, I’d like to offer the first two people to email me: advertise@buymeaferrari.co.uk a slot each. Just put in the email which slot you would like and I’ll reply if you are successful.

The first two to email will receive their choice of advertisement for one month only.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your email!

Things are going quite well for Buy Me A Ferrari, already, within a day of starting, it has had over 100 page views as we speak.

Most of this traffic is coming from StumbleUpon, but in this article I am not just going to talk about the traffic I have had today, but the traffic that my other blog has generated since I started it. I will be talking about what I did and what effect it had on my traffic.

Again, as I did with the first post I am going to split this into headings for each way of generating traffic, it looks nicer and is easier for me to deal with.

I will be blogging about all of these methods in more detail very soon, these are just summaries and small tips to help you generate some traffic.

StumbleUpon

Thought I best start with this as it has generated most of the traffic to this blog today! Those of you who have never heard of StumbleUpon or don’t use, don’t worry - I’ll do a post about it soon.

When I blog about stuff on either of my blogs, I pretty much always tend to thumb up the article and write a little review about it. This brings varying amounts of traffic just by me thumbing it up.

However, because I have built up a network of friends in StumbleUpon, these friends often see what I have submitted to StumbleUpon and check it out, consequently thumbing the article up and bringing more traffic.

Networking

No, I’m not talking about your LAN or WAN network or anything like that, I’m talking about your network of friends.

To get more traffic it helps a lot if you have a network of ‘online friends’, friends who have similar websites and/or blogs.

So the next time someone thumbs up your website on StumbleUpon, or diggs your article on Digg, start a conversation with them through the messaging systems. Most of these users wont have had this sort of treatment and will admire you for taking the time and effort to get in touch.

This builds a reputation as being a nice person and people will visit your website on a more regular basis, if you are genuine.

Message Boards

I am a member on loads of message boards, too many that I can count in my head without looking at my bookmarks!! I’m also a member of a whole range of different subjects that I enjoy along with webmaster message boards.

How does this bring me traffic? You ask. Well, not only do I have my website in my profile on all of these communities, I also post links to my websites in my signature, so that every time I post, people see the links within my signature.

Then, if they are interested in the name of the link, they’ll probably give it a click to see what the link is all about. What’s even better is that when you are a member of a message board with similar topics to your website, you’ll get more visitors as they’ll obviously be interested in the subject or they wouldn’t be there!

Another advantage to being a member on webmaster-related boards is that you can post about your website, directly linking to it in the post if the message boards have some sort of review section.

Tell your friends

As I have just about covered your online friends in networking, I am now talking about those people you see in real life, off of the internet.

Lets face it, most people now have access to the internet one way or another, whether it be at school, home or work.

Tell these people about your website, give them a link, most people will have a look as if they are good friends, they’ll want to know what you are up to.

Instant Messaging Name

If you have a decent contacts list on services such as MSN and Skype, stick your URL in your name on there. People are bound to be inquisitive and subsequently point their browser at your site.

Blog commenting

If you are a blogger, you are bound to read loads of blogs on the website or have a long list of RSS feeds in your feed reader. Next time you see a decent post that you are interested in, offer your input.

Most blogs now have comments enabled and allow you to link to your website when you comment. Make use of this feature.

Please offer some sort of input though, don’t just say a couple of words like "cool post" as it’s quite obvious that you are just doing it to post your link. Doing this will make you look like an idiot and people wont want to visit your site because of this.

Competitions

Run a competition on your website or blog, this alone will bring in traffic as everyone wants something for nothing!

Even better ideas are when you ask people to do stuff for entries, such as comment on your blog for an entry or subscribe to your RSS feed for a few more entries.

This obviously isn’t a do all and end all list, but these were pretty much the main ways of building traffic for FerrariDave and I will be executing similar methods on this blog. I will be doing posts about all of the above methods in much more detail as it will all be an integral part of generating some cash.

If you have any methods that I haven’t talked about please do comment and tell me what I’ve missed. I don’t know everything (far from it actually), so there will definitely be stuff I’ve missed out.

Thank you very much for visiting Buy Me A Ferrari, hope you like what you see so far. I’m going to split this first post into a few headings first so that it is a little easier for everyone to read and secondly because it’s easier for me to write!

About Buy Me A Ferrari

I started Buy Me A Ferrari as a blog where I can talk about the money I am making from my websites and all of the different methods I am trying. Hopefully I will be successful!

As much as I do want to buy a Ferrari - that isn’t the goal of the blog, making enough money from this blog to buy me a Ferrari is very hopeful - would be great if I did eventually make enough money to buy one (and even more).

I will be blogging about the different methods I am using to make money and also telling you about how much money I am making and spending (hopefully there will be more of the making and less on the spending!)

What I have done so far

So far, I have just basically installed WordPress, the theme and a few plugins.

The plugins

The plugins that I currently have installed on Buy Me A Ferrari are as follows:

• Akismet - I have got to keep control of the spam somehow - my other blog (FerrariDave) has benefited massively from this plugin and would have its fair share of spam comments without it!
• All In One SEO Pack - I also have this installed on FerrariDave and I must admit, it has helped me bring in a lot more readers from Google and other search engines
• DoFollow - Makes the URLs in the comments DoFollow rather than NoFollow
• MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad - I quite like this idea as it doesn’t really affect your template and just sits at the top of the page. If you would like to advertise, that’s what I’m getting to right now…

Advertise

I am setting my ad prices relatively cheap as I am just starting this blog, but the traffic to the blog will increase and I will be posting about the traffic at the end of the month. My current prices for Buy Me A Ferrari are:

125×125 Above the fold ($15/month) - This price is pretty low, but may seem expensive for a blog with very little traffic - however, within the first month this traffic will go up quite quickly so it should be a safe investment. These ad boxes are above the fold and receive a lot more exposure than those below the fold.

125×125 Below the fold ($10/month) - Again, I have set this price very low - it’s lower than those above the fold as generally these ads will receive a little less exposure.

Stripe text ad ($4/month) - These prices are really low and will be limited to 5 links in rotation only. So realistically your ad will be seen by one in five visitors. Not only that but it’s right at the top of the page and will be the first thing a visitor sees as they enter Buy Me A Ferrari.

Sidebar text link ad ($5/month) - Again, such a low price. This is for a link on the sidebar towards the bottom of the page. This will be limited to ten links at any one time so that there aren’t too many and you are getting value for money.

If you would like to advertise on this new blog for the extraordinary prices above, please contact me: advertise@buymeaferrari.co.uk - the prices above are actually negotiable but as they are really low, I doubt that should be necessary.

Summary

I’m not going to bore you any further. My next blog post will be about bringing in traffic to Buy Me A Ferrari and how I plan to do it. Thanks for reading up to this point, please subscribe if you would like to keep reading about my journey.