KhalidsLife.com

In a previous post about Off Site SEO, I mentioned the importance of backlink building. In today’s web world where competition saturates some markets, webmasters are finding it increasing difficult to find quality links at an affordable price.

Further to that, trying to sell links that don’t have a high pagerank is even harder…until now.

In steps TNX, a link network/marketplace that allows you to buy a high amount of links within specific niches without breaking the bank. And, you can sell links easily too!

For the publisher, TNX will allow you to earn money on text links, even on pagerank zero pages! For the advertiser, TNX gives you access to thousands of link spaces across hundreds of sites without you remortgaging your house!

As I write this, there is 23035474 links in the system with 32665656 pages indexed by the site. In short, this is not a trivial system that can be laughed at, this is a resource that provides you with easy access to quality link building.

The entire process is easy for both publisher and advertiser:

For the publisher…
1. Install the TNX code on your site.
2. Add your site to TNX system. We will approve it in 1-2 days.
3. Raise the number of links displayed on pages of your website (max. 4 links).
4. Create your own ad campaigns or sell TNX-points to TNX-system or other TNX users.

For the advertiser…
1. Create an Ad campaign following all 3 steps that are provided you by TNX. Buy TNX-points if you don’t have them yet.
2. Relax and watch for results.
3. Edit your campaigns or create new ones using your experience.

So how much does it cost and how much can you get paid?

Well, I’ve personally never used the site as I’ve been too busy recently, BUT, the results seem good. According to Jim Karter, a webmaster, he did quite well with the system!

Well, first of all I put it on a website which did not had much unique content but had a page rank of 4 and around 3000 pages indexed. I hope everybody know how easy it is to create such non-unique sites, but those sites do not get search engine traffic. But I did not need search engine traffic. I added the code from TNX in my template so the links were sold for every page. In one month, I made around 140,000 TNX-points.

So, overall what I got in return of a useless (because of it non-uniqueness) PR4 sites is:

1. Cash of $66/month
2. Around 3000 to 4000 PR0 and PR1 backlinks for my new sites. (I did not need higher PR link for my new sites right now)

TNX use a points system to pay webmasters, so instead of money you get points which you can cash in or use to buy links for your sites. Like a virtual currency, the moneytary value of your points can fluctuate, which can have a positive or negative affect on your earnings.

If you are worried about the negative impact of selling links, i.e. losing your rank, TNX has that covered too! Unlike other text link networks, TNX use a code that seemingly Googlebot doesn’t pickup.

Overall I think TNX is fresh, effective way of link building/selling and it is something I’ll definately be trying it soon! If you’ve used TNX, let me (and other readers!) know so we can get some honest reviews.

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.

I remember reading a newspaper article recently about a man who was looking to rent a parking space in the busy town of London and simply couldn’t find anything. This attracted a lot of media attention, especially as we’re becoming more conscious about issues such as global warming, overcrowding and traffic distruptions.

I think public transport is a great way to get around the city, but only if it is reliable and clean (the interior). Unfortunately, this is rarely the case and so for many people who are looking for reliability, purchasing a car is the only option left.

First obstacle over, now finding a parking space. Scouring newspaper ad sections, Gumtree offers and convenience store window ads takes a lot of time and effort, which people generally don’t have these days. Aside from that, why would you want to spend your Saturday afternoon looking for a space to park your motor? I couldn’t think of anything more boring!

And if you choose to be one of the millions of people who park their car on the street, you may become the victom of vandalism or even theft! Iff you have to pay for parking, well you might as well spend hours raiding your piggy bag preparing the correct amount of change for each day you travel!

In comes Park Let, a site dedicated to finding you a space with minimum inconvenience. Covering the majority of UK cities, including London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Park Let offers, at present, 10675 parking spaces and garages currently available for monthly rental or sale!

Using Google Maps, you can easily navigate to your local town and pick out a park space, view the complete details including address and price and apply accordingly. Alternatively, if you don’t find a space, you can easily setup e-mail notification when one becomes available!

Park Let take a 2.5% commission on the sale price of a parking space and 15% of the rental. They even collect payments on your behalf, making your life as a seller that bit easier and as a buyer less hassle continually arranging a payment with a vendor.

Park Let is a great example of a cool idea that has turned into a viable business providing a useful service to both parking space seekers and sellers! A truly entrepreneurial business model.

Park Let - Parking London

Building up a new network is a great feeling, especially when you see a return on your investment. The only difficulty with expanding quickly was that I had to purchase a new $14.95 per month hosting plan for each domain.

This was great because it stopped me making stupid mistakes and creating sites without thinking them through. On the downside it was time consuming and quite costly. Don’t get me wrong, Liquid Web are a fantastic host with great staff (touch wood!) so the $14.95 is well worth it, but if you want to run a network you’d really need to think about something biggar.

After shooting a quick support ticket to a sales advisor, they checked out my sites and advised me on the $60 per month VPS. Whilst I am fully aware you can get hosting for a lot cheaper, after my troubles with Host Nine I don’t think I’ll ever risk quality for price. If you are going to do a job, do it properly.

The staff quickly migrated all my sites over and helped me through the process of domain parking etc so a big thank you to them! I did have to wait about 48 hours before I could update my sites again due to some minor complications with my domains (my fault!).

Now I’ve got everything in one place and making one payment per month which is good. Things are expanding here, so if you haven’t already, subscribe to my RSS feed for the latest news coming soon!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I seem to be in a trialling mood now I’ve got some cash to spend. With my birthday just passed and pay day today I can afford to invest in some trials, hence my previous post and now this one.

I’ve always hoovered around the idea of using pay per post as a mean of gaining credible backlinks along with creating a buzz around your site. So I decided to deposit $50 into my PPP account and run a campaign for tattoo lettering.

The process was fairly straight forward and having the power to choose the minimum quality of sites that will link to you (by means of pagerank or alexa rank) is quite appealing. We’ll see how it goes, something I’ll definately keep an eye on and report back about.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The following is a paid review that is completely my own opinion…

PayPerPost is a website that brings both bloggers and advertisers together in order to create a single portal to connect the two parties. The site is completely free to use and works as an effective marketplace where advertisers and bloggers both have choices.The system works in a simple way - An advertiser posts information about their site/product/service they wish to be reviewed, along with post criteria such as minimum word count and price. Bloggers can then look into the opportunities directory and review the sites/products they qualify for. Once the blogger has completed this, they submit a link to their post and the transaction is complete! Simple really.All posts are then reviewed by Pay Per Post staff. When they are satisfied the job has been completed, the advertisers account is debited and the bloggers credited. Voila!The immediate benefits to advertisors is that they can get access to hundreds of bloggers from around the world and create a frenzy about their product/site/service overnight! To the average blogger, Pay Per Post is a cash machine that they can tap into 24 hours per day…providing they put the work in.Being lazy at first, I decided to sign up for an account and have a quick peep, but nothing more. It wasn’t until I logged back in and earned a few bucks for a short review (here) that I realised the opportunities available to me to earn. I quickly became addicted and intend to try to post a review at least once per week.

At this stage, my only hesitiation is separating the sufficient from the spam. I am curious as to how Pay Per Post intends to ensure bloggers just aren’t writing crappy review for a quick buck and thus lowering the quality, which will in turn lower prices. I’ll be monitoring this situation and will probably post reviews from higher paying advertisers to separate myself.

I would certainly recommend Pay Per Post as a secondary income to your blogging hobby or career…it can be rather fruitful.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The following is a paid review that is completely my own opinion…

OOPrint.co.uk or OOPrint.com is offering the newest trend for bloggers looking to network with their “Business 2.0” card. Business cards are a great way to leave your mark with someone outwith the digital world.

The cards come in a number of different formats, including Standard, Square, Vertical and Large. After choosing the format that best suits you, the easy-to-use customisation process begins. From here, you can choose colours, designs and even tag clouds! Yes, at the bottom of every business card you can have a tag cloud showing what your blog is about and what keywords you mention most often! How cool!

Right now, OOPrint are giving away 100 free blogger cards (you only pay for shipping), so get your order in before the offer expires!

This post is sponsored by thriftyscot.co.uk - for all your car insurance needs!

Just some quick updates on what has been happening in the world of budding internet entrepreneurs. It is a shame not to pass on quality content, so here goes..

> Tyler Cruz higlighted his own popularity with this thread on Digital Point Forums - Link

> TechCrunch released a very funny video that has been circling the web - Link

> John Chow is being featured in Entrepreneur magazine - Link

> Aussie entrepreneur copies MillionDollarHomePage.com idea…kind of - Link

Enjoy! Oh, and I forgot to mention - You can sponsor my blog posts now for $5 a post. Contact me if you are interested!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

This article highlights five simple yet effective ways to generate real traffic that should convert well on any website.

1. Socialise

Social Media is the new MySpace marketing. Sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and You Tube and more generate thousands of unique visitors for webmasters every day. Your job is to ensure maximum exposure on these sites and maintain a good position in ranks too.

> StumbleUpon - Check out the freebies section of Digital Point Forums. There are hundreds of threads dedicated to Stumble exchanges. Search the forum for Stumbling services, such as 50 stumbles for $xx.

> Digg - Again, check out the freebies section of Digital Point Forums, there are threads dedicated to Digg exchanges too. Ensure your site has a BIG FAT Digg button on it too, the best wordpress plugin I can recommend was created by Paul Cheek and is called DiggIt.

> You Tube - A tip by Jon Warass - You Tube can send you 500 unique visitors overnight by simply uploading a video relating to your site’s niche with added credits at the end that display your site’s url. I have started doing this with the videos posted at OffBeatInk.com.

To edit You Tube videos you firstly need to download them and them and then convert them from FLV to AVI. After completing this, you’ll need to edit them. I download them using this site, convert them using Freez (freeware) and edit them in Windows Movie Maker.

Whilst I don’t encourage illegitimate Diggs or Stumbles, sometimes it is necessary to exchange these services with other webmasters to get yourself on the traffic ladder. I would strongly recommend you don’t overdo it because it may get you permanently banned.

2. Spread the word

> Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a web based service allowing users to share internet bookmarks, usually their favourite sites. If a person, whom has 100 friends, bookmarks your site, then that link is automatically exposed to those 100 people. If 10% add that bookmark to their profile, and they each have 100 friends, your link is then exposed to a further 1,000 people! A very lucrative marketing method indeed.

> Tell a Friend - If you want to share a good site with a friend, writing a short e-mail, copying the url and then sending it off is usually more time consuming than it’s worth. By having a tell-a-friend script on your site, users can quickly enter their friends e-mail address and it’ll automatically send them a short message stating e.g. “Adam thought you would like this http://…”. Quick and easy for the user…more visitors for the webmasters.

> Link Exchange - Link exchanges are common for site’s of similar relevance and are an easy way for webmasters to share traffic. A program I’d definately recommend is BlogRush. By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs. In simple terms, a link to your latest blog post is shown on other sites in return for your displaying the widget on your site.

3. Stop spamming

Spamming people and/or other websites may help you generate traffic in short run, but will be sure to fail you long term. Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither was any popular site’s user base. If you want to generate real traffic, that will remain constant - providing you update your site with fresh content daily - then spread the word professionally. Don’t send junk e-mails, don’t spam other sites, don’t leave stupid forum posts…take your time.

4. Sponsor it

Sponsoring a popular site is a great way to get exposure to their 100% of their user database. If a user thinks they are going to win something, they will be more inclined to participate, perhaps checking out your site too. Further to this, it portrays your site in a positive manner and the user will probably remember it in the future.

Sponsorship needn’t be extravagant either. A simple free t-shirt, perhaps a dvd or even something cooler - but relating to your audience and niche - is probably money well spent in comparison to banner advertising.

5. Spend time keeping your visitors coming back

One of the best ways to generate traffic is through word-of-mouth. People who like your site are likely to talk about it amongst their friends, so spend time ensuring they are kept occupied. That means fresh content every 24 hours, the latest news and information, the coolest videos and images, etc etc. Read - Five Tips To Keep Your Visitors Coming Back.

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.