KhalidsLife.com

As you may or may not know, I’m about to launch Students Uncovered. I want local letting agents to advertise on the accommodation pages of each city, for example Student Accommodation in Edinburgh.

What is the best way to approach these companies to get them on board with a view of having them pay for advertising in the future? I was thinking of a short and sweet e-mail, something along the lines off…

Good morning,

My name is Kal and I’m the founder Psyched Media, a company that owns and operates a number of web properties. One of our newely established sites, StudentsUncovered.com, is a fresh and exciting student portal providing useful local and national information to students across the country. At present our site contains information about student accommodation in Edinburgh and we would really like to get local letting agents on board to advertise.

As our site is launching during Freshers Week (15th September) and we are running a national advertising campaign throughout a number of student nightclubs. We are keen to offer you a free 468 x 60 banner placement on our site for a trial period of one month.

After this period I would be happy to discuss a possible partnership should you wish to continue with your banner placement. Our previous internet projects have generated up to 250,000 unique visitors per month and I am confident your company could benefit from this targetted advertising.

If you would like to accept this offer, please e-mail us back with your banner and we will place it upon our site immediately. Alternatively, if you need to have a banner created, we can do this for you in return for a link to our website on your homepage.

I look forward to hearing from you.

What do you think of this? Do you have any other suggestions to approaching these companies?

Thanks in advance and good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Getting ranked well in Google is no easy exercise, especially when you are starting a new site with a brand new domain and attempting to exceed the quality of rival sites. To be honest, the only method I’ve ever found to work 100% is link building where the anchor text is the keyword you wish to target.

I was pleasantly surprised to find one or two of my sites have crept up the rankings without link building, just from the domains being a little older. In my experience this can really help and I have read some webmasters buy a domain then leave it for a year before they build a site.

The extra traffic I am not getting will help me nicely and I am sitting here with a smile and I own over 100 domains that are maturing day-by-day. I can’t wait to start producing good quality sites on domains I’ve had for maybe 2 or 3 years.

Right now though I’m still working on my current front line sites, including the content based ones I’ve been talking about. Both are coming along nicely, I just wish it was 6 or 12 months down the line and they were established.

Time will tell. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I was in London with work this week hence the lack of posting, my apologies! I’m still alive…just. Unfortunately I’m suffering from abdominal pains that have lasted for two months now. I’m waitin for an ultrasound to rule out gallstones and then a gastroscopy (camera down the throat).

Unfortunately, the waiting time for the latter examination is up to 4 months! Going private is an option but it costs over £1,000 - money that I have but don’t want to spend when I pay taxes and am entitled to free health care.

In an attempt to take my mind off things, I have been building sites continously. I need to let them mature and that means leaving them for a few months. You can’t expect a new site with a brand new domain name to rank well immediately, you need to let things age a little. So, I’m turning my efforts back to my bigger sites and recruiting freelancers to add more content. The hard part here is finding local writers with good knowledge, e.g. a writer in London who has knowledge of local nightclubs. Does anyone have any good sites? My friend recommended Guru.com so I might give them a try.

In other, offline news, my cleaning company, Edinburgh Clean is doing well. We’ve got a few clients and things are building up slowly but surely. I’m looking at expanding into other domestic and commercial services but I need to research this more. I’m a firm believer in not putting all your eggs in one basket hence I invest both on and offline.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

After announcing my $100 a day challenge, I’ve been working hard to produce some results! So far I’ve researched, built and pushed out 11 new content sites. This excludes some older sites, such as my bmi calculator.

It has been a tiring and costly week and now the tough part begins…getting these sites ranked well. I’m still trialling a number of different methods, including article submissions, directory submissions, wordpress theme sponsorship and social bookmarking. So far I’ve not found one method that solidly works and so I continue to experiment! If you have any methods that work well, please share them with the readers and I by commenting!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

How easy is it to make $1 per day? Pretty easy if you put in the effort, my friend Bob Schmuck managed to do it recently. In less than a month and with only $50, he created a site that generated a daily average of close to $1.

So my new challenge is to make $1 per day…100 times over.

Now I know you are probably thinking crappy Made-For-Adsense (MFA) sites that have no value, rubbish content and backlink spammed, but I’m not even considering this route. If you are going to do something properly, take your time and do it right first time.

I’ve already started this challenge and setup 5 sites, building a minimum of 1 per week. It is costly so I’m monitoring my investment and my return, ensuring that the sites begin to convert to profit within two months.

In addition to this challenge, I am running two larger sites in parallel, launching Students Uncovered during Fresher’s Week (September). Bar Vacancy is still doing well, that project will take time though.

With each site, I’m trying different backlink building techniques. Some using article marketing, others social bookmarking and “ye-old-faithful” directory submissions. I’ll report my findings in due course but remember, “Content is King” - always ensure your sites have quality, unique content.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

After another tiring week has gone by, I’ve managed to hammer out another two sites and build some backlinks for another two. I’m really aiming for building a network of quality content sites with useful information - nothing that is cheap, tacky and made for Adsense. By the end of the month I want to have 10 really good content sites, building another 5-10 each month thereafter.

I’m dabbling in article marketing and invested a few hundred dollars in quality articles and submitted them to two different sites. The annoying thing is that they take up to 14 days to be approved which seems like an age, but when you are getting a permanent backlink (or two!) from a PR6 site for the price of a 500 word article ($10), you can’t really complain.

In other news, I nearly lost my blog again! Well, actually, I had a backup so it wasn’t too bad! The Wordpress “wp-content” folder just disappeared and left my blog as a blank page. So I rushed to LiquidWeb.com’s online chat and immediately got an incoming call to my mobile from the States. The technical support checked the access logs to ensure nothing serious had occured like a hack, grabbed the backup and restored the “wp-content” folder whilst keeping my on the line. This is why I love Liquid Web. Which other web host would do that for you, any time of the day from another country?

Have a nice weekend and good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

My apologies for a lack of updates recently, I’ve been working hard building new content sites. In an attempt to build solid backlinks, I have opted to spend heavily on Wordpress theme sponsorship and try my hand at submitting articles to major directories.

These methods do work as many successful website owners recommend either to build backlinks and I have some personal experience with Wordpress theme sponsorship.

The sites I am building are small content micro-sites. I own 97 domain names at present and I have decided I need to do something with them! I am really bad at buying names then never using them, so I’m actively turning this around and hopefully going to increase my earnings at the same time.

Although building micro-sites is relatively cheap, don’t think building a GOOD micro-site is! Here’s a breakdown of my costs…

• .com $10
• hosting inclusive in my VPS at ($60 per month)
• 4 unique 500 word (approx) articles $30
• 2 unique articles to submit to eZineArticles directory $15
• 1 Wordpress theme sponsorship $40
• Total: $95 (excluding hosting costs)
  

If this site was to make $1 per day, a $270 profit would be drawn from it every year. Where else in the business World can you make a 284% return without any major risks?

Althought I have 97 domains, not all of them are suitable to become a micro-site and not all will become profitable when created. Some will be used for larger sites whilst others will be deemed useless and not renewed.

Hopefully the hard work will pay off. My buddy Bob recently turned $50 into $1 per day, read about it here.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Revenue from July was only really from a single source, the sale of CoolNicknames.net. I sold this to top up my income as I was spending money like water on new projects. Aside from the $600 I accrued from this sale, I also generated $15 from Text Link Ads - not bad for part time blogging but I could be doing much better.

Total: $615

This post is a short and sweet update as I am currently working on new projects over the next few months that won’t generate much in revenue as they are taking a long time to develop, build and launch. I hope to being generate substantial revenue before 2009 but with only a few months to go this will be a difficult challenge.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I’ve often purchased a domain name on a whim, setup a site, played about with it for a bit then forgotten all about it when I realise it won’t become a money maker. I did this with two sites, Red Hot Wallpapers (RHW) and Ribbu.

If you remember, my challenge with RHW was to purchase cheap traffic and convert it to clicks on my ppc ads. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, and I couldn’t go down the social media route as the traffic is adult(ish!). With Ribbu, I received a huge surge in traffic from StumbleUpon then it all died down very quickly.

I recently re-visited both these sites only to find they were generate about 500 unique visitors per day each! A lot of the traffic is from Google Images but it’s still traffic! So I’ve slapped on some more ppc ads and hopefully they’ll convert in due course. I’ve started posting on these sites again, and even if they aren’t successful in gaining a good position within the SERPs, I’m still getting daily visitors.

Just remember never to forget an old site, they’re probably worth something.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

One of the few projects I’ve been working on is Students Uncovered - a cross between an information site for all and a student portal with student related news, questions and more. The site has plenty of useful information for both students and non-students, including nightclub reviews and accommodation advice, as well as photo galleries and funny media.

I managed to find a fantastic wordpress theme to use that is very adaptable and integrated both pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-lead (PPL) adverts with two good companies, Media Jump and Tradedoubler.

I’ve mentioned Media Jump before - they are a small UK company and an alternative to Adsense. I managed to earn about $10 per day with them through my tattoo network and this was through “double clicks” - a user would have to click on a link then click on a paid link. Imagine the possibilities if it was single clicks only!?!?

They’ve recently introduced a new system called “FastBox” that is single clicks, much similar to Adsense. I have a good relationship with Media Jump and was invited to try this system out. Although their system is not as advanced as Google Adsense, things are going well and hopefully they will continue that way. If you are interested in signing up with them, drop me an e-mail and I’ll introduce you to my account manager.

Tradedoubler is an affiliate company who provide a marketplace for large organisations such as the Natwest bank. I decided to opt for PPL programs, specifically credit cards as many students are looking for 0% interest offers. PPL basically means a user will click on one of my ads and submit a true application that will be processed. Regardless of the decision to offer or not offer a credit card, I will be paid. This model is good however with the credit crunch, people may be less inclined to attempt to borrow as they are being easily refused and each credit check reduces your credit score.

I intend to build some good backlinks to the internal pages of Students Uncovered and get them ranked, such as “Nightclubs in Edinburgh” and have a cool marketing plan to get the site known amongst the party hard undergraduates - offline marketing.

I have purchased t-shirts and rubber stamps with my logo (and web address!) on it and intend to send attrative photographers to nightclubs across the country, wearing my t-shirts and stamping people they photograph. If the students don’t remember the hot chick wearing the t-shirt the night before, they’ll certainly be reminded with a web address stamped on their arm in red ink!

What do you think of the idea and marketing plan?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.