I want to monetize this domain. I'm thinking of taking the San Diego reader and calling all the medical marijuana dispensaries, saying I represent XY company. Then asking if they have affilliate banner programs that pay checks via ACH or whatever. Or maybe even free weed for advertising. If you check www.weedtracker.com they have tons of banner advertisements. Should I just build a stupid review blog with like 3 rows of banners ? Should I call all the dispensaries and get their email addresses and create a dear john type of letter that says hey you all should get in gear and get some animated banner advertisements and a campaign going. I know if properly developed this site could bring in bucks. Pot is a $1.4Bn industry here in CA, and marketing the products/services is completely legal to a certain degree/extent. WeedTracker has gotten away with it for nearly 5 years now. If I could get a hard money loan against the domain, say $5000 - I would print fliers and business cards, and pay for a high quality development, but I don't. I'm on my own. Just thinking of building a stupid joomla/wordpress site on it with a ton of animated ads. Check it presently, it could be way better and gets >100 hits per day.
Just saw on the news that pot has the chance of becoming legal there in Cali. Good luck with the website!
Traffic is generated by a Twitter and a Facebook account using Stumbleupon's Su.pr (http://su.pr). It is a plugin you install that synchronizes with your site's RSS and streams your recent postings or new content as automatic announcements to said accounts. I have about 800 friends on my facebook account as of today. The site started in November of 2009 and has since made me about $68 with Google's ads. That and 'dank weed' is a SEO/AdWords keyword which I rank #1 for. When I first got the domain, for a while - it Estibot'd at $1000. Now it seems to estibot at $480. I don't know why. Still a good site with potential, I just need to renovate it. I am just goint to make a pure marketing site. Almost park page ish.. and a little forum and a strain wiki.
But those wont generate much traffic at all. The marijuana niche is also not easy to make money online. You'll need a lot more traffic to make a buck compared to other industries.
Exactly which is why I plan to market aggressively with high quality gloss fliers and business cards. I will visit marijuana distributors and get them on board with our affiliate scripts. Either I can or they can produce their own animated graphic banners. It's going to take time for me to get it all up and running though. Right now I have a simple concept in mind. I think marijuana advertising will be somewhat limited in what you can do. Just as you won't see alcohol and tobacco on freeway billboards, you probably won't see pot there either. This domain reminds me of RedWine.com, which sold for $150,000 recently on Sedo. I think on a global scale, people of course may be consuming more wine than weed. That could change within, say, a few years? Maybe a decade? 20 years? http://www.dotweekly.com/red-wine-com-domain-sells-for-150000 Who knows?