KhalidsLife.com

Recently I sent out two photographers to cover Freshers’ Week in Edinburgh and Glasgow. They successfully publicised StudentsUncovered.com, took hundreds of photo’s and built on the foundations of possible strong partnerships with local nightclubs.

I didn’t expect traffic to jump into the thousands but we are hitting over 100 unique visitors/day. This is a nice steady flow which I’ll look to build upon in due course. In addition to this offline marketing, I have distributed numerous articles to hundreds of article directories, allowing me to begin building on a strong position in the SERPs.

I understand I need to let the site mature and allow the content to rank, but I’m just not sure what my next step should be. I’ve thought about further offline marketing and having some promoters to capture student information for marketing purposes, e.g. stand outside nightclubs (with their permission) to capture e-mail addresses for marketing. I would then offer sponsored positions on these mail shots to clubs etc in a bid to generate some revenue. What do you think of this?

Do you have any other suggestions?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

As September comes to an end and the student term begins here in the UK, freshers week is just around the corner. In a previous post I mentioned how I was intend on sending photographers out to take plenty of snaps of students having fun and stamp their arms with our web address.

Hopefully, this inexpensive marketing plan will work and send visitors to the site. Each photo will be watermarked with our web address on it too so if the students copy the photos to e.g. their myspace profile, people will be inclined to visit our site.

The marketing is costing around about £10 per hour per photographer and that doesn’t include the t-shirts and stamps which are quite expensive too. I’m limiting each city I have on StudentsUncovered.com to 5 hours photograhy work, totalling 6 cities which equates to £300.

I am testing the water with 1-2 cities next week and if they are successful I’ll send photographers out to the others. What do you think of the t-shirt (kindly sported by my girlfriend) and stamp (proof) designs?

students uncovered t-shirt

students uncovered stamp

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.

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.

For one of my new projects - still in the pipeline, - I need to do direct advertising. People ignore e-mails and Google ads are competative (and pricey!), so I’m resorting to offline marketing.

I did this before with Elite Kit, my former security supplies e-commerce store, by writing letters to security companies and nightclubs. To be honest I’m not sure if it worked as there is really no way of tracking it, unless you provide a discount code or re-directed url. But, for my new project, this is not an option. Well it is but it would just complicate things and cost more to implement.

Business Cards work well if you introduce yourself. This would require a lot of legwork, especially since this project will eventually provide a service to the whole of the United Kingdom and then expand further into Europe.

The main benefit of the site is that it’s free whereas rivals charge £25 - £35 per submission. There are only two main rivals but they are well established. Tapping into this market won’t be easy, hence why I need to think outside the box. I don’t want to waste money, especially as the marketing budget for this project is cash hungry.

Do you have any suggestions?

I understand it’s a little difficult if you don’t know the service so I’ll provide you with a brief outline. Sorry I just don’t like to give it all away until it’s launched. The site is a classifieds ads portal relating to one particular niche where turnover is high, i.e the businesses in this market are constantly needing replacements.

Let me know your thoughts, hopefully I will be launching on the 15th of this month!

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.