Total Auto Network

So we scrub Craigslist/eBay to get a full scope of the market. But this is only weekly because it would be too cumbersome to try and do it on the fly. Unless I just RSS'd the feed in but then it wouldnt be curated and formatted in the way to keep the site organized. In my opinion would be spammy this way. But the problem I run into when aggregating the ads is trying to figure out when they are sold so we can mark them as such and not confuse buyers / annoy sellers. So the Ad Submission allows the seller to get in touch with us directly and let us know or make changes on the fly instead of waiting for our scrub. Obviously we still recommend Craigslist because its hyper local and reaches way more people. That form you screenshot'd is from a plugin called Contact Form 7 (a common WordPress contact form plugin) where those two fields are defaulted that way. I guess I could unrequire Email but then people could submit ads with no contact information. So it would be useless to any buyer, except maybe as just a record. Not sure on this. Again the Ad Submission on my site is just an option. I didnt even have it on there at first but decided to add it so I could better communicate with sellers directly to help moderate their ads. And just to be clear, I am not trying to act like I'm doing this out of the kindness of my heart. I absolutely want to make money and that is the goal. Right now I am using Google Ads hopefully in the future, direct advertisers or selling parts. Right now the all sites together make a decent amount of money, but its not a full time living, especially after paying my employee and working nights/weekends. I still work my other consulting gig. I'm trying right now to turn a group of aggregation sites into a full-fledged business with a brand and everything. Thats the goal. It's not easy but I'm confident it will work well, even if it takes me another 3 years. I really do appreciate the feedback. And I need to take a closer look at the boiler plate info on my legal pages to make sure I am not misleading anyone.

Oh one point I missed. I wouldn't say I know squat about Z cars, but I def am I noobie. Now when it comes to Wranglers, Broncos, Zuks and building a rig, there is another story

BTW Zed, just noticed you are in Washington County. I live on the border of Beaverton in PDX. Do you drive you Z in town? I never see them around here. I only recently saw a 510.

Zed Head thanks for stepping in and trying to help. I did send a DM to siteunseen to try and figure out what is going on, as well as to the owner of classiczcars.com to make sure I'm not breaking any rules on here. And yep you've hit the nail on the head with a lot of points. Although we would have posted siteunseens ad without phone number, we do all the time so I still think he has me totally confused with someone else. Also I def did not share any info with anyone else. The part about sharing contact info is to cover me when using 3rd party advertisers like Google or 3rd party mailing list software like mailChimp. It's legal boiler plate info basically to make sure I am in compliance with Google's policies. The reason I put my info on here was to be as transparent as possible. Here is my personal website 83cv.com (although embarrassingly I haven't blogged much in a long time) and my personal FB profile https://www.facebook.com/christopher.m.vincent And you are right I do need to work on my customer service thus I'm here in this thread trying to address the community directly. Yep I have a bunch of sites, I published a lot over the last couple years to see what the winners would be and now I am building out the ones that are doing the best / I'm most interested in. I only built sites about cars I'm personally interested in, such as 4X4s, vintage cars, campers, RV etc. You are right on your last post I am spread too thin with this many sites though. I have a full-time assistant and my girlfriend helps me with the social media but still way far behind. Plus I do a lot of IT consulting so honestly I am not giving the popular sites enough attention and love that they need. I'm probably going to be consolidating some of the sites together so they are easier to manage. Just to be clear that twitter account is not me. I haven't even set up the full website for my brand yet. Just have that weak landing page now. But like your point said that is why I have all my sites listed there so its completely open and honest. My goal wasn't to come on here and spam my stuff. I agree with you, It's appropriate to contribute to the community before trying to pimp your stuff out. I just wanted to reply to this thread specifically so people can see that I'm a legit dude. As far as being a Z car enthusiast, I love em. Do I own one? Not yet, with the baby coming I can only get the gf to allow me one toy and thats the built out 05 LJ (LWB TJ Wrangler) that I have. One day I want to restore a 510 and maybe slam it. As far as my sites content. Def something I need to work on. Now that some of the sites are getting traction, my next goal will be to provide better unique content and some cool stuff other than just an ads archive. However the ads archive is something I believe that is a high value to future buyers/sellers. It's something I wish I had when I was buying my 05 LJ in 2011. I had to scrape through Jeep forums trying to get the info I needed. I saw an opportunity to organize this data in a single site format. And I can do it for different unique cars. You'll notice that I'm not doing this for basic cars like the Honda Civic, just trying to get ad clicks. It's all for rarer for the most part discontinued models, where info is harder to find. Also I dont just RSS or API the feeds into my site. Each ad is hand curated and created so that visitors have a standard format to use when browsing. I want to make the user experience as clean as possible. I've had a lot of people give me positive feedback on my process, so it bums me out to see the negativity on here. I hope I can win you guys over, because honestly I just want to be a positive part of the online community and contribute.

Oh ok that makes sense. You have me mixed up with one of those 3rd party companies that contacts people via Craigslist looking to do escrow or whatever. That's not me, and yes those are super sketchy. I know its hard to tell tone in text, so I'll let you know I'm trying to be combative at all. And yes I did just join yesterday because I saw that people were posting about my site without the whole picture. That is why I opened up the book and told you guys everything. Posted me personal cell, etc. I'm not one of those hide behind my keyboard warriors. siteunseen, I'm also not trying to come out you. I am only addressing your comments because Zed asked me too. Honestly man if you think I'm trying to scam or whatever just call me today or direct message me on this forum I'm sure we can clear up this misunderstanding as opposed to going back and forth in a thread. And and just to be certain I cover everything you said here, I didn't copy anything from Zhome.com. I've actually never been to that site before. But I will check it out now. The only exception would be if I grabbed one of his pics via Google images. And if that is the case, and he has a problem with it, I can take it down and replace with something else.

Thought that was clear, but yep I'm the owner of 240zforsale.com among some other Datsun car sites. And as far as siteunseen's posts I think there is some confusion. I've never talked to him. Def not on the phone. I think he has me confused with someone else or someone else's site. If I'm wrong he is welcome to post the email conversation in this thread and we can figure out what the problem is. Or he can call me. I'd love to clear it up with him because he def has a poor opinion of me and my site, and I am totally oblivious to what he is talking about. Not trying to be rude, but I honestly think he has me mixed up with someone else. As I stated I don't have multiple numbers, I dont ask for a down payment. I dont scam. In fact I dont even know how I would scam because I am just curating content. My site is just an aggregator and the direct submission method just allows me to better keep the ads updated. PS. I also don't pick pockets on Bourbon street

Hey guys, just saw this thread. I'm the owner of this site. (Hi my name is Chris Vincent) I'm not a scammer lol, and I'll be super honest with you guys and tell you anything you want to know. First off yep the site makes money off of Google Adsense but its not very much right now. Maybe $30-$40 per month, and I pay my VA to go out and scrub Craigslist/eBay weekly to pull ads so I pay him by hour at least 4 hours per month. This doesn't include my own time, so basically its a loss for me right now. I just launched a new mobile theme and social media / mailing list so its even more time for the same amount of money (ie I'm working for free). My Intentions are pretty clear on the About Us page but just to clarify, my goal is to catalog and archive all 240Z listed for sale in North America. I want to get a living database going so in the future buyers / sellers have sort of a fair market value calculator to go off of. Its also a little slice of history and just fun to look at for build ideas, etc. The site was first online as datsun240zforsale.com back in 2012 but I dropped the Datsun to avoid any trademark issues. There is already quite a few historic ads on there so if you want to dig you can get a really good idea of asking price over the last couple years. The problem I run into is trying to figure out when cars are sold and marking them as such so this is a weak spot. But I have some ideas for auto flagging older posts so its more clear when viewing. The directly submitted ads help us connect with the seller directly to take care of this. I'm not trying to jack someone or spam them or anything like that. Long term goals not sure yet. Might help sell parts 3rd party, might get direct advertisers, dont know. Trying to optimize the site now and build a little community first. (Hence why I am here responding and not just ignoring this thread.) Anyway I'm just an old Datsun fan guys, I like the 510 a little more (and yes I have a similar site on that one as well). I have a long time girlfriend we have a baby coming in January, I have a six year old step son I've been with since diapers. I don't have multiple numbers. My personal cell is 480-747-3030. Call me I'll answer, we can chat about Z cars. Hope this will clear up some stuff, respond to the thread if you guys wanna know more.