Today’s article is a short update regarding changes in my portfolio. I have sold off my BuxTo Payments site, as that wasn’t making me any more money. It was in profit, and made me about £40 in the end. I’ve also created 2 new sites, one that allows you to generate a gift certificate offering your time, and another that provides the latest news and information about indoor fireworks.

GiveMyTime.co.uk

The Give My Time site was an experiment in working with PDF documents in addition to creating a mini site that actually offered some value. It works by using a background image, a custom font and PDF generation to create a printable certificate where someone can give their time as a gift. Another neat feature is that I used ImageMagick to dynamically generate an image thumbnail of the generated PDF.

If you have a valuable skill such as a trade or craft, your time actually makes a nice gift. With the issues at the moment with the credit crunch, I felt it was a sound alternative to spending money on a gift. I’m going to leave the site for about 6 months with no advertising so that I can build up backlinks to it.

IndoorFireworks.org.uk

I spotted an opportunity to create a site about indoor fireworks when I noticed that people were commenting like mad on a post on my personal blog. Indoor fireworks are a fun thing that existed in the 80s and 90s, but are exceptionally rare these days. Therefore I thought I’d create a mini site that helped people find these rare fireworks.

By adding Google Adsense and Amazon Associates affiliate links, I had made back my domain costs in just 3 days! (Incidently, IndoorFireworks.co.uk is taken). I will never make a huge amount of money on the indoor fireworks site, any profit is still good profit. I’ve got it ranked on Google.co.uk in the top 5, so I’m getting around 40 unique visitors a day. I might be able to sell a few links in the future for some extra cash.

My current focus is to increase traffic to my green sites (EnviroGadget.com and DailyEcoTips.com), as well as sell off my stock of domains. However, the lack of interest in these domains is leading me to consider developing sites on these domains first, then sell them on.