KhalidsLife.com

As you may or may not know, I’m about to launch Students Uncovered. I want local letting agents to advertise on the accommodation pages of each city, for example Student Accommodation in Edinburgh.

What is the best way to approach these companies to get them on board with a view of having them pay for advertising in the future? I was thinking of a short and sweet e-mail, something along the lines off…

Good morning,

My name is Kal and I’m the founder Psyched Media, a company that owns and operates a number of web properties. One of our newely established sites, StudentsUncovered.com, is a fresh and exciting student portal providing useful local and national information to students across the country. At present our site contains information about student accommodation in Edinburgh and we would really like to get local letting agents on board to advertise.

As our site is launching during Freshers Week (15th September) and we are running a national advertising campaign throughout a number of student nightclubs. We are keen to offer you a free 468 x 60 banner placement on our site for a trial period of one month.

After this period I would be happy to discuss a possible partnership should you wish to continue with your banner placement. Our previous internet projects have generated up to 250,000 unique visitors per month and I am confident your company could benefit from this targetted advertising.

If you would like to accept this offer, please e-mail us back with your banner and we will place it upon our site immediately. Alternatively, if you need to have a banner created, we can do this for you in return for a link to our website on your homepage.

I look forward to hearing from you.

What do you think of this? Do you have any other suggestions to approaching these companies?

Thanks in advance and good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I’ve often purchased a domain name on a whim, setup a site, played about with it for a bit then forgotten all about it when I realise it won’t become a money maker. I did this with two sites, Red Hot Wallpapers (RHW) and Ribbu.

If you remember, my challenge with RHW was to purchase cheap traffic and convert it to clicks on my ppc ads. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, and I couldn’t go down the social media route as the traffic is adult(ish!). With Ribbu, I received a huge surge in traffic from StumbleUpon then it all died down very quickly.

I recently re-visited both these sites only to find they were generate about 500 unique visitors per day each! A lot of the traffic is from Google Images but it’s still traffic! So I’ve slapped on some more ppc ads and hopefully they’ll convert in due course. I’ve started posting on these sites again, and even if they aren’t successful in gaining a good position within the SERPs, I’m still getting daily visitors.

Just remember never to forget an old site, they’re probably worth something.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Patience - in business - is something I do not have a lot of, I never had and I never will. I don’t like waiting, I hate having to wait and I don’t enjoy wasting time. At present I have two coders working on two different projects…and I’m waiting on both finishing.

Everything else is ready and my mind is on overdrive thinking of the launch. I even check Rent a Coder when I’ve not received an e-mail alert just incase they have replied. Quite sad really, but that’s just me.

I’ve been up since 8am this morning, met a client twice (before and after) for Edinburgh Clean, finished a tattoo site for the new owner of the network, commissioned a logo design for one of the new projects, had lunch and wrote this blog post. I’m constantly on the go and find it difficult to switch off.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. My flatmate reminded me I work too hard and need to rest and my girlfriend must be getting sick of my business talk. I don’t think I’ll ever settle until I’m successful and run my business ventures full time.

How do you switch off? Am I just weird?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, mostly whilst in bed and my entire flat is in a beautiful silence. I’m not turning weird I promise, but as a result of this deep though, I’ve managed to break down my $100 a day aim into different networks (by niche) and then further sub-divided this into single websites, each targetting a different keyword in the niche.

My aim is to dominate each niche I enter by targeting the top 10-20 keywords in that area. This does sound like a big task and yes it’s no walk in the park, but the benefits will far outweigh the labourious task of developing loads of sites.

The strength of having many websites in the same category ensures I have spread my risk evenly. When one network is complete, I will be adding fresh content to the main site daily and smaller sites monthly. This reduces the ongoing workload by greater than 50% whilst ensuring the network is not ignored. The time then available will then be spent on the next network.

I have it all planned out, but we know nothing ever goes to plan.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Blogs seem to pay off in the long run. Quite a few successful sites are blogs or some form of content management system (CMS). The immediate benefits are that WordPress is setup in a few clicks, you can add useful plugins to improve your SEO and it is extremely easy to rank in the SERP’s using a blog (if you do it correctly!).

OffBeatInk.com is doing well and my unique, daily content is getting GoogleBot hitting my site close to 4,000 times this month! That’s probably the highest I have ever seen on any site I’ve run…and that can’t be a bad thing! Search engines love unique content that is keyword rich and website relevant (all my posts are about bodyart, nothing else - no paid reviews of anything like that).

As a result of the minor yet profitable success of the site, I’ve decided to continue my trend and make a small blog network with fresh daily content. I have one new site that is online but I still need to add a few more posts before revealing it to you. If I can do one post in 15 minutes and have 4 blogs each generating $5 per day, that’s $20 for one hour of my time…no bad.

Long term I’d want that to be a lot higher and there will be occasions when one site will require more work than another but the beautiful thing about it is that, no matter how big or small the site is, one post per day works. So, if OffBeatInk.com began bringing in 10x the amount of visitors and 5x the amount of revenue…my 15 minutes work would still stand.

I would consider increasing the post length and quality to ensure the traffic and revenue increase remains stable, the theory behind it works though! What do you think?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

This post is sponsored by windsorpalmsflorida.com - for all your Orlando vacation rental needs

Apologies for not blogging in a while, my cousin was slagging me saying I promised to blog 1-2 times per day then my next post was after a week! I do apologise, sometimes I am just far too busy to update this blog daily and besides, not everyday something new occurs.

Last week was pretty eventful though! I got a new phone due to my old one being faulty. It is a Sony Ericsson K850i with 5mp camera and partial touch screen. It is amazing what you can achieve when you take the time to complain about bad customer service.

I’m going to try video blogging with it, see how it works out. I’ve got my eye on a webcam but don’t want to purchase one unneccessarily if my phone will do the trick.

On the web front, I’ve been working hard and finished my latest project today! I’ll launch it just after Christmas and perhaps get some reviews completed. I was thinking of using Pay Per Post, has anyone had any success with using them to review a site? If so, leave a comment and let me know, thanks!

Kortaz and Off Beat Ink are both doing well, with featured links on Kortaz completely sold out until January and people waiting to order! I’ve decided to keep a spreadsheet of advertisers and their details to create a mailshot when links will become available.

Similarly, Off Beat Ink is getting between 500 - 1,000 uniques per day, which is a slight drop in traffic but I’ve not spent any money on advertising this month. The site is ranking in SERP’s so I’m hoping more organic traffic will come through soon. The site is averaging $1.5 - $2.0 per day which is money I never had before so I’m happy!

I’ll be posting my goals for 2008 shorlty, watch this space! Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

This post is sponsored by loansubmit.co.uk - for all your loans needs

I’m really pleased with my progress online recently. I have managed to begin covering my costs and start making some profit, I just hope this success is long term! Running quickly through my sites, Off Beat Ink continues to pull in around 1,000 uniques per day and provides $2 income, Featured Links on Kortaz are sold out with a whopping 12 sales this month and this blog has generated a few dollars through post sponsorship!

So far so good, the next stage is to increase the popularity of my site’s further thus increasing my income. I have began on a third project that I mentioned here, I just need to add content and flood it with traffic. This is another blog but not one I need to update daily. I plan to launch either this week or next.

Taking advice from dedicated commenter Marc, I intend to attempt to sell advertising space on Off Beat Ink to private bodyart companies in the near future. Roll on 2008!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

p.s. I have decided to blog 1-2 times per day in an attempt to increase my readership! 

This post is sponsored by creditcards-gb.co.uk - for all your credit card needs!

When you are bored you tend to do things you regret…especially on the web. No I’m not talking about surfing porn and getting loads of popups appearing (how do I know that?), but buying domains when the light switch suddenly goes on in my business head.

One of them I’ll definately monetize as I want a recurring income without need to update daily. With OffBeatInk.com and my future gadget site (still in the pipeline), I need to post something new every 24hrs. Although this has its advantages, it can become a headache, especially when working full time.

Some nights I won’t go to bed till after 12am. I don’t mind because I always thing of the long term gain but I couldn’t manage a handful of sites like this unless they generated enough money for my to work part time.

The new project aims to target bloggers, a market that has experienced rapid growth in recent years. With the success of dot com moguls like John Chow and Darren Rowse, blogging has evolved into a very profitable industry. I want to tap into that market by offering products that will benefit bloggers…more info soon!

Anyways, I just thought I’d tell you my plans. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

This post is sponsored by thriftyscot.com - for all your refinance needs!

As the week drags along and you look forward to the weekend, most people think of relaxing, take it easy, chilling out. Me…I think of time to work on my sites. I’m sure this view is share by fellow webmasters who also have the unfortunate rat race lifestyle I do.

In a bid to keep myself going, I’ve been reading other blogs, watching inspiration youtube videos and thinking of how nice it would be to actually be out my overdraft for a change!

To make things worse, it started snowing here in Scotland today and I got caught in it…lovely eh?

Tonight I’ve got no plans so after eating dinner and tidying up I’ll continue what I started earlier. That consisted of updating OffBeatInk.com, driving traffic to the site, researching new ideas (I can’t help it!) and trying to sell the last few remaning links on Kortaz.com.

With just over 1k uniques per day and no money spent on advertising, OffBeatInk.com is making around the $2 mark. If I could double it by the end of this month and keep it consistant I’d be really pleased. However, waiting on the SERPS updating is a nightmare! Most of my traffic is from November’s exposure, fingers crossed that’ll continue and I’ll get a good search rank…double the traffic…double the earnings?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

…that’s my new target. With OffBeatInk.com making $60 per month, I want to double it - hence the first “x2″ - then creating a second blog with the same earnings…thus bringing in $240 per month ($120 x 2 blogs).

My initial target was $150 per month but with hosting costs, the effort I put into my sites (and because I always want more!), I’ve increased this target to a new level.

I will continue to post 6 times per week (Mon - Sat) on OffBeatInk.com with unique content and videos. Each month I intend to spend some money on promotion and will trial new methods of advertising I haven’t used before. More on that later!

My latest project will focus on a heavily searched keyword - gadgets. I have a cool, brandable domain that is easy to remember. Me being me, I’m not revealing it just yet. I also have a professional but clean wordpress theme to work with too and I am really excited about launching my new site.

I would like my new project to be earning $60 after month two like OffBeatInk.com. By this time - February - I then intend to concentrate on increasing the income from both these streams rather than starting a third project. I don’t want to take on too much at one time as I generally spend around 45 mins per day on OffBeatInk.com.

As time progresses and OffBeatInk.com finds a position in SERP’s, natural traffic will increase the site’ s overall exposure and thus have a positive knock-on effect on my earnings. If my gadget project follows (fingers crossed!), perhaps $240 will follow in the footsteps of my $150 target and become redundant?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.