KhalidsLife.com

Success can be defined as the attainment of wealth or position. For me, success is the attainment of freedom - not having to work a regular 9 - 5, not being tied down by commitments to an employer or restricted financially by my outgoings.

I guess I need to attain the wealth that comes with success and the position it offers. Sometimes my motivation can literally die and I have a scary reality check that says “you’re never going to make it, don’t waste your time chasing a dream“.

However, for the majority of my free time - and by free I mean my brain is not being engaged - I spend it day dreaming about living the dream, having chased it for so long. Life is what you make out of it and you don’t need to invent the next Google or Facebook to live your dream (unless it involves owning half the world or controlling a public domain!).

This post isn’t a rant or emotional speech, I just wanted to say that you need to keep focused on your dream by first turning it into a reality, breaking it down into achievable milestones. I want to earn $200 a day online, but how am I going to do that because I can barely earn $0.05 per click on my ads! My answer to myself was to divide and conquer.

I built a network of similar sites over time and they share visitors amongst themselves. People thus stay on my sites longer overall and click on more ads. Some sites are extremely popular and/or have a good SERPs ranking, so this helps boost visitors and earnings (too the smaller sites as well!). As a result, I now have one network that earns $10 - $12 per day online. I divided a the tattooing market into small, separate areas and conquered the niche (to an extent).

So now, my $200 a day aim has become $190. And by the time I build another network, hopefully the tattoo network will have aged and become even more popular, increasing its earnings to $20 per day. So, before even finishing my second network, $190 becomes $180. And so on and so forth.

It sounds easy, but it’s not. You need to work hard, put in the hours and set good, solid foundations. If you put the time in you’ll get the money back. I only spend 1 hour per week updating my sites, so in theory for my $200 I should only need to work 20 hours per week.

I’m now working on my second network whilst experimenting with a number of different factors, including SEO, marketing strategies, ad networks and ppc. My time spent will go towards building another revenue stream and maybe one of my experiments will be successful, this increasing my earnings. If this is the case, I can then re-apply this to my tattoo network and boost my earnings further!

Do you see my point? You need to break down your success into manageable areas, like breaking down your salary to cover your rent, bills, food allowance etc. Patience is one key element, because like a good meal, you can’t rush cooking it by throwing in all sorts. Passion is the other, because without a true love for good food, you’ll never treat your cooking with the time and respect it requires.

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 received a e-mail not so long ago from a faithful reader Nathan, asking me whether it people were able to succeed at something without the necessary skills? The answer could be yes or no, depending on the person and how hard they are willing to try.

Specifically, Nathan was asking whether an internet entrepreneur could succeed without a vast amount of knowledge of the net or working online: “I suppose I’m asking whether it’s possible for someone to make money online without much skill, and if it is possible, even the slightest amount of money, maybe you could post it?“

My answer would be yes, and here’s why - To succeed at anything you need to start somewhere. You need to learn to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run. In a world where the internet is now our dictionary, encyclopedia, library and communications hub, learning to crawl isn’t as hard as it used to be.

You can Google almost any question and guaranteed you’ll find a discussion or answer about it. Whether the answer is correct or now is another issue entirely, but in business you have to try in order to fail, you can’t just read an opinion and know you would fail if you tried.

Providing an answer specific to making money online is a lot easier. You see, thousands if not millions of people are doing it, or at least trying, using many different ways. And many of them blog about it too! So you can easily Google a question relating to a “making money online” subject and get an answer or advice. I do it when I am comparing ad networks or looking for a service or product review.

It all comes down to how willing you are to work your fingers to the bone and try, fail and try again repeatadly until you succeed. Many people don’t want to waste their time doing that and so look for a quick buck - something that doesn’t happen online unless you are duping people and selling them an eBook full of false promises.

The beauty of the internet is that you can experiment and learn without wasting a lot of money. Take for example my Adengage Experiment, the costs were about $50 excluding my time and effort, but I am learning a lot. What other business domain could you create a possible recurring revenue stream and test it for less than the price of a pair of shoes?

This is why I love making money online - you can test, learn, fail (or succeed!) without declaring yourself bankrupt or losing your house! And there are so many opportunities without you having to be a master of html or seo. Take Off Beat Ink, my tattoo designs website. I use Wordpress, a free blogging platform, to write about an interest of mine that has turned into a profitable website. Here’s an approximate breakdown of my costs:

- Domain $9
- Hosting $5 per month (on a shared plan, I now have a VPS for all my sites)
- Content $0 (just my time)
- Marketing and SEO $300 (including backlink building, social media marketing etc)
Total: $314

…and this site now generates most of the $12 a day I am currently earning and received over 90,000 unique visitors last month. If I was to begin paying back the $314 I invested from today, it would only take me 26 days. Off Beat Ink is only 8 months old and already I have earned back probably double my investment.

This was the first time I ever monetized a blog, generated traffic to it, pushed it’s popularity online and really worked hard at making it succeed. My time and effort was the biggest cost, but if you are doing something because you are passionate about it, you should be willing to work at it all the time without wanting paid.

I remember when I first began making money online, I built small content sites for keywords that were searched under 3,000 times per month (as nobody else really did). These sites were usually 5 pages with keyword rich, related content and used a free web template. When ranked in the search engines, usually 2-4 months later, the sites started earning $0.50 - $1.00 per day each. Make 100 sites like that and you’d generate between $1500 and $3,000 per month.

The only issue you have these days is that everyone is doing something similar. You are better focusing on a maximum of 10 sites and ensuring you post fresh, unique content daily or weekly. The search engines will love this and so will your visitors. Remember if you are passionate about something chances are thousands of other people will be and will want to read about it. You don’t need to invent the next You Tube or Facebook to become an internet entrepreneur.

To sum up - you can succeed online by taking your time and learning each part of building a popular website. Remember to always aim for the long term and not for short gains. Focus on unique, well written content and then begin to push our site out into the world wide web. Slowly but surely people will come, it just takes time. You may not have the skill at the beginning, but by spending time learning, you will pick it up.

I hope I have answered you question Nathan and provided my other blog readers with some useful information. If anyone else has questions they would like answered please do not hesitate to get in contact with me.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

p.s I’m in London with work Monday-Friday this week so I’ll reply to comments when I get back!

Definition of Niche: a position particularly well suited to the person who occupies it; “he found his niche in the academic world”

In today’s World Wide Web, where each keyword becomes a market and every webmaster is a vendor, simply having one stall doesn’t cut it anymore unless you have a truly unique product to offer. According to Verisign - the digital infrastructure authority that manages Internet domain names such as .com - there were 153 million domain names registered in 2007, up 27% from the previous year.

For many of us budding entrepreneurs, creating the next FaceBook or YouTube idea is simply something we probably won’t be able to achieve, or fund for that matter. It’s not that we’re unable to think of great ideas and market them, it’s that these sites are a one-of-a-kind and generally very successful or huge failures.

You are rolling a dice hoping for that success, but for many, the odds of 1 in 6 are too slim. Entrepreneurs are risk takers, but we like to invest wisely. Dominating a niche in an attempt to become the king of one sector seems like a viable choice… and it’s working for me.

The benefits of dominating a niche include the following:

1. You’re concentrating on one sector so your knowledge of it is enhanced, thus your website’s content will be too.
2. Each site is targetting a different keyword in the same niche so you are spreading yourself well over one area.
3. You will automatically have relevant backlinks available to each other as each of your sites will be in the same niche.
4. Linking to each other helps boost your overall SERPs, as they help pull each other up the ranks.
5. Adding a new site and targetting another keyword will be easier as you already have an established network setup to help it get indexed and ranked quickly.
6. By establishing yourself and building strong foundations in one area, you are making it harder for others to compete.

I’m sure there are additional benefits to dominating a niche, but these are probably the most important. However, there can be downfalls too:

1. If the niche you are targetting already has this operation in place it’ll make it much harder to compete.
2. If the niche does’nt have many paying advertisers, having “all your eggs in one basket” will probably not convert to the profit you were hoping for.
3. The content is limited so spreading it over a huge network of sites may not be easy. For example, news about “tattoos” is rare so spreading this over 10 tattoo sites won’t be a walk in the park.

Overall I think dominating a niche, providing you have researched it well and have a viable business model, can be a success. At present I am doing this and have 3 sites in the same sector, adding a 4th by the end of today. It’s a proftable operation that is earning me money, and my aim is to have 5 sites targetting 5 different keywords and ranking in the top 5 of the SERPs (tongue twister I know)!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Recently, a fellow blog Jon Wheatley, video blogged about a statement made on website Retire @ 21.

The statement said “A lot of people spend 95% of there money on creating there website and 5% on promoting it, in fact it should be the other way round. Please do not make there mistake!“.

Jon completely disagreed, saying most large sites didn’t need to hugely advertise as their well coded design and web concept was enough to spread the good word like wild fire.

It prompts the question - How much should you spend? Allow me to use some examples…

1. OffBeatInk.com - my tattoo designs site - I have spent hundreds of dollars on marketing but the wordpress theme I use is freely available on the net, the logo is simple and I made it myself. The site is successful and ranking well in the SERPs, yet not a lot was spent on the design.

Does that mean Micheal’s statement is true afterall? No, not exactly, but he has a point. Off Beat Ink is just a blog about tattooing with a few cool wordpress plugins. It is a success because of the content I created then pushed out with the marketing. I spent more on marketing than the design, but what if the content was crap? My money wouldn’t have been well spent.

2. Kortaz.com - proxy listing site - Before I sold this I spent a lot of money on the design, with a custom coded site and free/paid placement automation. The marketing was through a few posts on webmaster forums offering, at first, a free listing. Word of mouth spread this site because it was simple, easy to use and offered something valuable to both proxy webmasters and proxy users. Jon’s point is valid here, spend time on the design and the visitors will come.

3. Ribbu.com - my cool pictures site. Again just another simple blog with some cool pictures. I spent $13 on marketing and got close to 100,000 uniques to the site through one, established, social media portal. Virtually nothing spent on marketing, just a little time on the content. Here, neither Jon nor Micheal are correct.

Three examples, three different strategies and three different successes.

I think the answer is that it’s site specific. How can you define exactly how much of your budget you should spend on a site? You can’t, and so you need to explore other avenues to ascertain what is a valid amount.

My best advice to you would be to ensure what you have is free if possible but as unique as it can be. For example, always write unique content but don’t go spending hundreds of dollars on a unique wordpress theme immediately - Tyler Cruz and John Chow didn’t (until recently), they just tweaked free ones!

If you can’t find a free solution, rent a coder to make you one, but don’t overspend with hundreds of features - you’ll only confuse your users. Google was a unique idea and custom coded, but it has one of the simplest interfaces ever.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I split my Search Engine Optimisation program into three main areas; On Site SEO, Off Site SEO and Backlink  Building.

This is the first of three posts about SEO and my aim is to help you understand the basics that often go unnoticed. Why take my advice? Well it’s free and to prove it works here are two examples of my recent achievements…

Kortaz.com ranked 1st for “Web Proxy” 

TattooLettering.net ranked 2nd for “Tattoo Lettering” in one month 

I’m not an expert and I don’t have all the answers, but these tips do help me so they will help you. So, what’s my advice? Well let’s begin with the meta tags…

<Title> Tag – Keep this your targeted keyword. If you are wanting to rank well for “Diet Plans” then your title should be exactly that, nothing more. Don’t confuse search engines with “Free and Simple Diet Plans and Weight Loss Assistance” if that’s not what you’re targeting. For my blog, my title is “Internet Entrepreneur Khalid Al-Khames”, so people know who the blog belongs to.

<Keywords> - Keep this to a maximum of 10 keywords, let’s not try to target anymore than that. I’ve never ranked a site 1st for more than 3 keywords, so 10 is out of reach, but keep a few extra in for choice. Use a keyword search tool to find other popular keyword terms

<Description> - Short and sweet, keyword inclusive, for example “Diet Plans and Diet Information by DietPlansUK.com”
Secondly, the content…

Articles – Your site should have at least 4 pages with 500 word articles that are keyword inclusive, for example “Simple Diet Plans”, “Vegetarian Diet Plans”, “Bad Diet Plans” etc etc (notice how they all have your keyword “Diet Plans” in them). Article headers should use <h1> tags too!

Links – Your internal links should be keyword inclusive and use the description tag too. For example, “Simple Diet Plans” should be “Simple-Diet-Plans.htm” and not “sdp1.htm”. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, use SEO friendly links by editing the hyperlinking in your control panel.

Sitemap – Get yourself a free sitemap, just google it.

Robots – Ensure your site has a Robots.txt file too

Images – Ensure your images have SEO filenames and use the alt description tag too. For example “Diet-Planner.jpg” description “Diet Planner”.

Social Bookmarks – Sharing our findings is all the rage these days, with sites like Digg, Netscape, Stumble Upon and Technorati having millions of users. Although most of these sites use the “No Follow” tag, it is still worthwhile getting backlinks from these sites. Add a Social Bookmark button(s) to your site because if you get, even 1, submission by a user each day, that’s 31 new links every month.

I hope this helps, good luck!

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.

In this volatile period where the credit crunch is affective us all and banks are less willing to lend, not so many companies are willing to launch hostile bids for others, even fewer at $44bn. So let’s kick this post off by giving Microsoft a small clap for their enthusiasm to purchase Yahoo.

I think Microsoft’s bid is partially due to being opportunistic. Yahoo need a helping hand after falling stocks and a lack of morale have left them in a bit of a pickle. The question is, would Microsoft make a decent return on their possible investment and how would this affect shareholders, affiliates and publishers? Whilst this may now be old news, I think it is important to highlight some interesting points that may affect web publishers in the long run.

According to some sources, the best opportunity for Microsoft to increase Yahoo’s revenue seems to be hidden in the depths of alternative forms of advertising, other than search. This is Google’s strategy, with their planned $3bn purchase of only media agency DoubleClick. Microsoft are aware of this tactic and so have laid eyes on aQauntive, with a $6bn price tag.

The idea is that both Google and Microsoft could use the platforms and technology to place ads more cheaply and efficiently. The automation of this could result in problems though. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can easily setup a site regarding health care or dieting and apply for the publisher program to display ads as a Google/Microsoft publisher partner but will bid brands, such as Unilever and Procer & Gamble want this?

Probably not and so they could easily end up re-locacting their investment in that area, perhaps to large established sites with their own internal advertising department. I mean, why would a multinational cooperation want to associate their brand with the average 15 year old’s MySpace page?

The result? With big brands backing out, dilution of the quality of network advertisers will probably occur as Google/Microsoft attempt to increase revenues and make up for their big brand losses. Less income for web publishers will most definately be a knock-on effect. You see, an ad is not a commodity that can be substituted or exchanged like a share, it really does matter to advertisers where their ads appear and it matters to publishers which ads appear on their sites. And for that reason, Google/Microsoft would have to tighten their policies surrounding accepting new publishers to avoid diluting their platform.

The future? The future looks hazy, especially with the possibility two major companies - Google and Microsoft - both who are ruthless and profit hunters, controlling the majority of internet advertising. This means earning an income online may become more difficult, less financially stable and less profitable.

My advice? Ride the waves out a little and let’s see what really happens, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket and perhaps invest offline too.

It is amazing how many different services there are on the web that “Guarantee …” with a “Money Back Refund” etc etc etc. Further to that, the amount of conflicting information is rather bewildering - “Googlebot hates…” or “Googlebot needs”.

Like many things in life, SEO is trial and error. There is no clear system that guarantees you a premium ranking in the SERPs and with so many different things you can do, how would you know what is right and wrong without conducting your own tests?

I managed to rank Kortaz.com #1 - #5 for a number of different keywords. Without sounding arrogant, I think that’s quite an achievement considering “Kortaz” was not even a keyword and the site was not filled with content!

I think the amount of backlinks with the anchor text as the keyword made the site strong and this was the driving force behind its ranking. These links were built up over time with webmasters submitting their own proxy links to be listed on the site.

Aside from backlink building, being popular in Digg and Stumble Upon have their benefits too (I didn’t used them for Kortaz.com but for other sites). As well as bringing in visitors, many webmasters look for content through these sites and this can generate backlinks.

It is quite important to mention on-site SEO too and that generally means ensuring your site is keyword rich with unique content and good anchor texts.

I’d really like to know what you do when it comes to SEO and how you rank well?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

In my quest to start a number of profitable mini sites, I’ve been researching domain name possibilities, only to find many keyword1keyword2.com and .nets are now taken. But wait, what about keyword1-keyword2.com???

It is quite likely the .net is still available and I’ve managed to bag two in the past 24 hours, both with a moderate amount of searches per month but a lack of competition.

After reading up on the advantages/disadvantages, there is slightly conflicting information. What I can say is that hyphens can help separate the keywords and it makes it easier to rank in SERPs.

One study suggests, for highly searched terms, too many hyphens in a domain may result in a penalty as spiders know what you are up to and take note of it, for example, on 1st December 2007, according to Google Trends, “Texas Box Office” ranked 6th in the top search terms. TexasBoxOffice.com ranks first on Google, but Texas-Box-Office.com could probably get in 2nd with some SEO work.

Another study suggests that the penalties associated with hyphens are a myth and Google will not bat an eyelid if you don’t use too many hyphens. For the two domains I have purchased, one has a single hyphen whilst the other has two.

I’ll definately report the results in due course. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.