KhalidsLife.com

Marketing a product or service can be particularly difficult, especially if you have stiff, established competition. Introducing my latest site, www.BarVacancy.com

Bar Vacancy is a free classifieds site specifically geared towards the licensed trade. Bar Vacancy allows you to post free bar jobs and will make money through people paying for “featured ads” and banner adverts.

The site rivals Gumtree, BarZone and every other site because it is FREE! Gumtree charge £25 per ad and BarZone £34.

I need your help…

Marketing such a service may sound easy. People often say “Oh that’s a good idea and because it’s free everyone will probably use it” - In theory yes, if a vendor was handing out a product you’d check it out before paying for it elsehwere.

The problem is getting the message out.

I let Adwords run for a few hours, targetting keywords for employers only so I could get some more jobs posted on the site e.g. “bar staff required“. £14 later at a cost of £0.40 per click, I got nothing. Understandably campaigns like this take time and I can’t expect immediate results, but just how far do you go before you try something else?

I’ve been looking at magazine specifically for the licensed trade, such as bar owner magazines and websites. For a good quarter page magazine ad I am looking at £1400 and there are no decent websites I have found so far.

I was thinking of doing down the route of business cards but they would only cover my city and would involve a lot of legwork. Flyers and mailshots is another idea and I have an e-mail campaign ready to go but I need more ideas.

What do you think I should do?

Thanks, and good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

May was a fantastic month for earnings overall, but the majority of that was the sale of my tattoo network. Here’s a breakdown of the revenue achieved…

>> $12,000 : Sale of Tattoo Network

>> $119.30 : Media Jump (down from $163.22)

>> $37.45 : Value Click Media (down from $50.19)

>> $36.45 : TTZ Media (same)

>> $7.5 : Text Link Ads (same)

>> Grand Total: $12,200.70

An amazing month and I’m very proud, it’s a shame it won’t be like this next month! The revenue from ad networks dropped due to the ad codes being changed on all the tattoo sites in the middle of the month.

>> Daily Average : $393.57

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I decided to share a little bit of my success with you to shoe you that making money online, no matter how little, is a worthwhile investment. I’ve just hit the $1000 mark with Media Jump, the UK pay per click ad network that hosts Ask.com ads. A total of 43,579 clicks were made on my ads since 29/10/07, averaging at $0.02 per click.

I’ve worked hard to achieve this amount and it is a fraction of what some webmasters earn online, but $1k is still $1k…except its in my pocket. As my network grows, my earnings will also, and those little trickles of income will become rivers in due course.

Work hard, work harder and keep working - it will become worthwhile eventually.

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.

Purchasing traffic is something I wouldn’t recommend, it usually results in fake page loads of your site to imitate people. Purchasing visitors…well that’s a different story.

The effects of being Dugg or Stumbled Upon can be fantastic, both for real visitors, extreme exposure and revenue! You can buy Stumbles or Diggs, but what if your site isn’t voted for by non-paid users? It’ll probably be a waste of money.

Whilst I totally agree with focusing on quality content and positive word-of-mouth spreading like wild fire, sometimes we want a quick fix. So, what about buying real visitors?  Jon Warass, a fellow internet entrepreneur, successfully showed his visitors how to make $20 a day from a $200 investment and it involved purchasing visitors. You can read the proof post here.

I intend to do the same, with a free wallpaper site. I have built a site that provides “hot and sexy”wallpapers for free. Well placed ads dominate high CTR area’s and I’ve just paid $7 for a weekly ad that averages a few thousand clicks. Doing the maths, say out of 4,000 inbound visitors I get 200 clicks, meaning 5% of people visiting will click on my ads.

200 x 0.05 = $10 = $3 profit.

Not much I know, but the basic maths multiplied on a large scale could result in a large amount of profit. I’ll let you know how it goes, my ad doesn’t start until the 4th. It may be profitable, it may not be - It’s an experiment after all.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The Rise and Rise of Kortaz.com

When I first began building sites for profit and dabbling in ppc revenue methods like Google Adsense, trickles of income began coming my way. My problem is that I become wrestless, I don’t like to wait. That trickle could become a stream, then a river and so on and so forth.

I wasn’t prepared to wait, and my first network of sites were sold for $50 each.

A lot of learning has occured since then and I now follow strict personal rules when considering selling a site. I plan for the future, I think about the short and long term gains and I don’t sell until I am sure I either need the cash or want to exit the market.

Proxy traffic is considered “trash”. Proxy users are generally people who want to bypass school filters, view adult content or get away with playing their favourite arcade game at work. The only company willing that offers good revenue and is willing to allow placement of their ads on proxy sites is Google Adsense, a network which I was banned from about a year ago.

Aside from Google, there’s Adversal and Adbrite, but both offer low payouts. Adversal did provide a few extra dollars per month for their non-intrusive pop-under ads so it is a network I’d recommend.

Getting a little off track, I bought Kortaz.com for $15 simply because I liked the name. Kortaz was originally a big site divided into smaller sections, including an arcade, funny videos feed, proxy and image host. The idea originally came about when I saw arcades making, say $10 per day, a video site $20, a proxy $5 and so on. I thought about combining them to create one large site that would generate revenue through each section.

Unfortunately it was difficult to market without a big budget, I hadn’t really thought it through properly, but being a businessman involves learning, so I’m glad I made the mistakes.

Knowing I could profit from proxy traffic, as I did by building and selling SneakOnline.com for $750, I turned my sites back to the trash nobody wanted (apart from us profiting proxy webmasters). I was bored with a proxy site as you couldn’t do much in the way of earning money, so I thought about a proxy listing site.

I didn’t want one of these topsites nobody visited, so I managed to find a free script that offered something more unique - a links lister with sections and a hit counter for each link. The only change I made was to randomize link orders. Kortaz, the web proxy list was born.

Originally I offered free placements to all and a few lucky people were “Featured” (premium placement) for free. A link back to Kortaz with the anchor text “web proxy” was always required on the homepage if you requested a free link.

As the number of submissions and backlinks grew, so did traffic. The hit counter beside each link, along with a few testimonials, was proof to webmasters Kortaz provided great traffic, all for $6-$10 per month (I changed the price to attract people during difficult times).

I managed to profit here from two things. The first was that links rotated randomly so each featured and non-featured link got time at the top of the pile in their own sections. Secondly, there was some negative press about the biggest proxy listing site, proxy.org, using bots to imitate traffic and click on Adsense units of sites listed on the site.

However, as the site grew, so did the problems. The script was designed for heavy use and would max out after 2,000 outbound hits, I couldn’t integrate automatic Paypal payments and so on. I managed to hire a great coder for $50 who developed the site as you see it today using a free web template (why waste money if you don’t need too!).

The new design was rolled out and I put some contextual advertising and Adversal popunders on it, afterall it was “trash traffic”! I managed to get the stage where the site was earning around $150-$170 per month. It was doing well and I had a small money-maker on my hands.

Traffic was excellent, with the site ranking first in the SERPs for “Web Proxy” and on the first page for a number of other terms. This was simply due to the high number of relevant backlinks accumulated over time (slow but steady link building).

My reason for selling - I needed cash, I have student debt and bills to pay. I was sad to see it go.
I decided to list the site on Sitepoint.com with a price tag of $2k. I didn’t think it would reach this because nobody likes proxy sites but I was surprised it was sold within 48 hours. I think I could have gotten more but you learn. I think the strongest selling points were the SERPs positioning and the private link sales, i.e. no reliance on an ad network.

Building, establishing and maintaining Kortaz.com was one of the best experiences I’ve had online. I turned a domain name into a profitable website, I learned about SEO and link building and I tasted success.

One man’s dirt is another man’s foundations and Kortaz.com was exactly that. The owner didn’t want the domain and a lot of webmasters don’t like proxy traffic. I took two negatives and turned them into a positive - all in under one year.

I hope you learned a little from this story, good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

On January 1st 2008, I blogged about my goals for the year. One of these was to earn a minimum of $10 per day online profit and I thought I’d dedicate this post to discuss how I’m well on my way to that figure.

My father recently told me “saving your first £1,000 is the hardest, but once you manage it you’ll find it easier to save your next £1,000 and you’ll never want your bank balance to go below £1k again“. I believe the same applies to making money online, infact doing anything that involves a challenge. Your first couple of steps are the hardest and you need to learn to walk before you can run.

My earnings with Media Jump’s quick links fluctuate daily and as they don’t have any sort of tracking or statistics, it is a bit of a guessing game finding out what works and what doesn’t. As you can see from the image below, my earnings up until the 23rd of this month are $120.65, which brings my daily average to $5.24.

Two things I’ve realised is that 1) You should never rely on a single source of income, and 2) you should spread your risks. As a result, I’ve implemented TTZ Media across my biggest sites and spread my risks (income wise) over two companies instead of one.

TTZ provide much better stats similar to Google Adsense and pay a whopping $0.15 per click minimum! This is fantastic news to publishers who are looking to get paid a respectable amount for their efforts. Their fill rate is 100%, the ads are relevant to your keyword(s) and the ad formats are easily edited in their control panel.

I’m looking to manage a CTR of 2-4% which is a reasonable target and one that should turn my goal into an achievement.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The challenge I face to become debt free is one that is more of a mountain than a molehill. I have 4 credit cards, 1 overdraft, 1 student loan and a graduate endowment (which I may not have to pay, it is dependant on your circumstances). I am not going to state the exact amount I owe, but its probably closer to £10,000 than it is to £5,000!

A lot of money I know, and now something that anyone likes to have hanging over their head. Breaking it down reveals where the debt lies and how it is repayable…

• 4 credit cards -Payable month, I’ll have cleared two with the sale of Kortaz.com.
• 1 overdraft - High interest rates charged monthly so this is a priority.
• 1 student loan - Payable when you earn £15,000 a year or more (which I do).
• 1 graduate endowment - A one off fee of £2,000 payable once you graduate.

My first debt attack will be on the credit cards. Selling Kortaz.com and raising $2,000 will clear two of these and leave me with some cash to spend on new projects. I may end up selling my entire network and starting afresh, I need to think of a new idea first before I commit to losing everything!

When the credit cards are clear I intend to then build up some savings and get out of the red and into the black. Finally, the debt associated with gaining a degree is the last on my list as the interest is minimal and can be removed from my monthly salary automatically.

I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed if you want to learn how I am going to do this. I intend to clear my debt by the end of 2008 and build up some savings, probably generating overall between £5,000 - £10,000 in addition to my salary.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.