KhalidsLife.com

April was a good and bad month for me. Good because I managed to sell a site in 15 minutes and make $525, but bad because my network earnings were down with my main publisher partner, Media Jump. Here’s a breakdown of my income…

• Site sale: $525
• Media Jump: $163.22, down from $330.69
• Value Click Media: $50.19, up from $13.37
• TTZ Media: $36.45, up from $35.10
• Text Link Ads: $7.50, same as last month.
• Total: $782.36, up from $385.17

Media Jump was my biggest loss but my overall searches were up from 11,000 to 17,000 - higlighting they are just not paying as much per click. It is disappointing because I would have broken March’s earnings without the site sale if they had maintained the same pay per click.

Value Click was almost triple because I added two more banners and the network provided over 200,000 impressions in the month’s period. TTZ was up slightly, again due to more visitors, but their downtime over April has caused my earnings to be less than expected.

On a plus note, I doubled my income and can smile when I look back on my achievements.

• New daily average: $25.23

How did you do last month?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I recently announced I was experimenting with purchasing real traffic in an attempt make money with a brand new site. Here is a quick breakdown of what I did:

• Setup Red Hot Wallpapers
• Added lots of hot and sexy images
• Put three ad units from three different companies
• Bought cheap traffic
• Attempted to make money

The three ad networks were Media Jump, Adengage and Adult Friend Finder. I spent under $20 on ads via Adengage and hoped for the best. I did manage to receive over 5,000 uniques and hundreds of ad clicks, but the revenue generated was nothing!

Adengage revenue for 60 clicks:

Adult Friend Finder revenue from 517 clicks:

Unable to measure Media Jump revenue as it fluctuates:

In short, I may have been successful if I had chosen a better niche with higher paying keywords. This was an experiment though and it did highlight one thing - chose your niche carefully!

If you chose a low paying niche and get $0.01 per click, you are going to have to generate 100 clicks to make a dollar. With a higher paying keyword in a different niche (earning $0.10 per click), you’d only need to generate 10.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Years after receiving my first Google Adsense cheque (see first pic below), I received my first deposit from Media Jump, the company behind the text link ads across the majority of my sites.

I feel I have reached a milestone and I am now building on the strong foundations I have laid over the past 7 months. Yes I have seen thousands of dollars come and go with selling sites, but this is the first time in 2008 I have received a deposit for over £100.

Fingers cross it’s a sign of good things to come.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

It is nice to see all my hard work finally paying off and a nice trickle of income coming my way. I’ve been working really hard and I’m glad to see some significant progress. In fact, I can report I have succeeded in achieving my first goal of $10 per day!!!

Here is a breakdown of my earnings for March 2008:

>> Media Jump’s Quick Links: $319.20

>> TTZ Media - $35.10

>> Value Click Media - $13.37

>> Text Link Ads - $7.50

>> Review Me - $10.00

** Grand Total: $385.17 = $12.42 per day! **

I still have a long way to go but it’s a start and I’m pleased

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Checking my earnings daily are becoming depressing. Although I can see I am pulling in a few dollars, it is nothing special. I will never sneeze at any incoming revenue, I am just slightly disheartened as I was expecting more.

I am still waiting, with a glimour of hope, that Tribal Fusion will accept my publisher application for OffBeatInk.com and my earnings will increase. I heard they pay anything from $1.50 upwards CPM which would possibly double my earnings.

My goal, which still stands, is to achieve $150 profit per month over my entire network. I’ll be doing some calculations shortly and will post the results up. Based on my incomings and outgoings, I am definately losing money. However, I am still persistant and determined to become a successful webmaster.

A quote I absolutely adore states, “With love and patience anything is possible“. I’m living by that rule despite spending countless hours with seemingly little progression.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

EliteKit.com was a project I started over a year ago in a bid to increase my online earnings. Originally, I ran a small webstore, EarphonesDirect.com, which sold brand named headphones such as Sony and Sennheiser. As time progressed, more people at my work (I worked in nightclub security back then) asked me for two-way radio headsets.

Realising there was more money and less competition in the security products and two-way radio accessories markets, EliteKit.com was born. A year on and the doors are closed. Why?

Well, aside from being unable to dedicated a lot of time to the site, the market I was competing in was a nice and hardly anyone worked in it full time unless they sold/rented two way radios (at £200 each wholesale, that was a no-go for me) or were a bodyarmour supplier (at £400 each wholesa,e that was a no-go too!).

I am slightly relieved the site has closed its door. I am attempting to earn money using Auction Ads by placing eBay auction adverts on the site alongside useful information regarding two-way radio headsets. I suppose this is a new project into affiliate marketing…we’ll see how it goes!

I do have some stock left I’ll probably shift on eBay myself…anyone want a hand-held metal detector lol?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Of late I’ve been testing different ad networks to see which converts best for me. This has mainly been on OffBeatInk.com (OBI) as the site is receiving nearly 2,000 uniques per day and is less than two months old. Further to this, OBI is the only site in my network that is accepted by ad programs due to its popularity and content. Kortaz.com can only really work with Widget Bucks and Adversal due to the fact it relates to proxies.

Since opening OBI, Value Click Media has been a general winner, earning me aroun d $1 per day for both a 468 x 60 banner and a 120 x 600 skyscraper. Whilst this isn’t fantastic, I can’t grumble as I’ll happily accept anything given to me right now! At times I wish I still had Adsense but even if I did get it back I’d always be worried of becoming banned again.

I’ve  applied to Tribal Fusion as well as other CPM and CPC networks as I think its only fair us webmasters are paid for impressions too! Afterall, I bet the companies who pay these agencies are paying for it!

Playing around I’ve managed to rule out a few due to either lack of earnings or showing compeltely unrelevant ads (hence the lack of earnings lol!). One company was showing Van Insurance ads on OBI….why?????

Although it can be fun to test different network and play about with them, it can become frustrating as I’m not earning anymore. I think my next step will be build a strong PR rating and sell text links on my sites.

Ahh, the life and times of a struggling webmaster.

I worked for about two hours tonight finishing my mini entrepreneur video now in the about section of the site. Windows Movie Maker kept crashing! It is soooo unstable!

I also wrote a page recommending publisher programs I have had success with. If you want to earn money online and don’t have Adsense (everyones 1st choice lol), check my recommendations out!

More posts coming soon, it is 11pm and I’ve been working hard everynight…I’m nakard!

I was a customer of HostNine.com for around a year, and during that time I experienced a massive decline in the quality of customer service. My story is far too long to explain in detail and quite frankly I am tired of talking about how crap the company is, so please excuse me whilst I make my points short and sweet.

KhalidsLife.com

The old, established version of KhalidsLife.com was completely lost after Host Nine experienced a hard drive failure. Both their daily and weekly backups were seemingly corrupt and the company did not have any record of my account when I telephoned them.

Kortaz.com

Their downtime and the fact they suddenly decided to suspend my account as it broke their TOS meant the site was pushed off Page 1 on Google, losing me 2,000 unique visitors per day! This was despite me asking them if it was ok to have the site hosted with them and it running on their server for several months.

Downtime

The server my accounts were on had received numerous attacks. The support for this was shocking, I was simply pointed to a forum post rather than given an answer to my specific questions. My thread reply, which was removed, stated…

“If the Host Nine website can stay online during these attacks, why can’t their customers? Surely you should put your customers first and ensure they are satisfied?”

Hosting Payments

I signed up three people via my affiliate link, earning me $75. When I checked my invoices they were $0 but I was still paying via Paypal Subscription. The balance in my affiliate account was diminishing, thus I assumed they were taking this as hosting payments, however they were also receiving money via my subscriptions and never informed me or pre-warned me of this.

I requested a refund two months ago for the $75, which would be easier than me cancelling my subscriptions then re-subscribing when my affiliate balance was $0. I am still waiting on that refund despite chasing it up…

Date: 25th Sept

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: FYF-937634
Department: Billing
Priority: Urgent
Status: Open

Hi,

Putting this in Paypal refunds, now you will need to allow up to 1 business week for this to complete, as the owner has to do this. No reply is necessary here.

Regards,
Joshua
HostNine Technical Support

Testimonials

After having the phone put down on me by technical support, no replies to numerous tickets, no refund, no specific answers to my questions, I decided to post a testimonial on their forums. It was deleted and I got the following PM…

Hi,

1) The post will be deleted - No questions asked
2) Phone courtesy is two way. I explained multiple times what was going on, and you refused to take it, I can’t help you didn’;t like the explanation
3) Regardless, you WILL get your backups.
__________________
Regards,
Joshua Brown
HostNine Support

Backups

I had to fight to get my backup for Kortaz.com after they suspended the account without notice. I never received a backup of KhalidsLife.com

Summary

You may think I am being biased and my case is a one-off but I’d advise you to even read their testimonials on their support forums (ones that aren’t deleted). I e-mailed the owner twice with no reply. In the end I gave up, have cancelled most of my subscriptions and moved my major sites to Liquid Web.

Host Nine destroyed what I had built, why shouldn’t I tarnish their reputation with a factual, accurate, fully explained testimonial?