There is no shortage of classified ad and auction websites for cars. Most of these sites are designed to get 30,000 dealerships to list all of their inventory for sale and charge them a high monthly fee to list their vehicles. If I wanted to advertise 15 vehicles a month on one of the popular car websites as a dealership they would charge me $3,600 to $6,000 a year. I didn’t carry inventory, so I didn’t have to do that unless I had consignment vehicles for clients for sale and I wanted to use their classified ad sites to get leads for those vehicles. On top of the fees, those websites also serve up third-party ads to make even more money and drive visitors away from the listings on their sites.
The online auction websites brag about how they have sold a billion dollars worth of vehicles and how much they have made charging the seller and the buyer to buy a vehicle through their auctions. It’s pretty crazy, but again they are all volume based businesses.
CoolCarGuy.com is designed to be different. I have never wanted to be “everything to everybody” and my lifestyle and advertising approach isn’t going to appeal to everyone. This is fine by me because I have no interest in being the next Wall Street wonder boy. I’m not looking to have thousands of vehicles on my website that I have to curate and approve. It’s too much work! I want an online “boutique” of really cool cars featured on my website and people have to pay a bit of a premium if they want to have them featured here. They also have to be “quality” vehicles and not “junk” cars, like you’re going to find on those other websites.
The way I see it is that I would rather be making a YouTube video for fun, interviewing someone about their cool car at a car show, helping someone get in the car business that is passionate about cars at CarsFreak.com for $99 a year with no brain damage. Let’s face it, we could be out playing golf or doing something fun with our time, so managing thousands of listings instead of hundreds is a big difference in business models. It’s probably not what you would expect most people to say. CoolCarGuy.com is my website and it’s my brand even if other people are still trying to knock me off.
I would rather have a “boutique” website of curated cool vehicles, just like my “boutique” car dealership that I owned and build a network of cool people who are passionate about cars and enjoy having fun like I do. That’s what makes CoolCarGuy.com different.
In essence, being The Cool Car Guy is a fun lifestyle that brings joy, knowledge, and a sense of community to those who share a deep appreciation for all things automotive.
