KHALID

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 my realistic but tough challenge continues, I wanted a visual way to keep track of my daily average and to let my readers see how well I was doing.

After a quick scan of Google images for a suitable themometer and a few photoshop edits, I’ve now got myself a lovely money meter.

My daily average is sitting at around $5 and hopefully it’ll being increasing with the full launch of StudentUncovered.com and some other content sites.

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.

August was another slow month, with little or no revenue generated. I’m still working hard to establish quality sites on the WWW and slowly but surely my content is being ranked well. I hope in due course to persue revenue through private advertising, but for now I’ll need to stick with 3rd party ad networks.

The good news is that my blog is generating a few dollars these days, with the sale of all 5 of my text link ads. The ranking for KhalidsLife.com has shot up to 4th in Google for “Internet Entrepreneur” and I hope the blog will stay strong in due course.

Revenue for August: $21.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Another week has wizzed by without a single blog post from me, mainly because I’ve been busy working and don’t seem to have a minute to spare. Last week my dad and his partner flew off to Egypt for the week so I spent the evening with them. Saturday my girlfriend and I did a “double date” with one of my best friend’s Gareth and his partner.

The double date was particularly useful in a business sense as Gareth and I had a chance to talk about websites. A few months ago we started a workout site, with Gareth writing the articles and me doing website maintenance, seo, promption etc. The agreement works well as we each make up 50% of what is required – good content and good promotion.

In an attempt to compete with leading fitness sites and provide visually appealing video media, I’m going to talk to a boxing club owner about using his gym as the site to shoot clips. In return for free advertising I’m sure he’ll be quite keen. I’m also going to design a small site for him so hopefully we’ll both come out with something beneficial.

I spoke previously about article distribution and the free backlinks that could be accumulated from a well written article. Distributing and editing articles yourself is time consuming, so I decided to try a distribution site. For $6 they fired it out to hundreds of sites and less than 24 hours later it had been indexed by Google across 5-10 sites. I opted for deep linking, i.e. a link not pointing to my homepage but to a subpage. I’ll be monitoring the success of the service in due course and let you know if it brings in the backlinks I need.

Today I had a consultation for my gastroscopy examination, hopefully one step closer to curing my stomach problems! The longer you leave something the more you worry and I’ve been unwell for two months now…you can imagine how I feel! I just have to stay positive and my busy schedule helps take my mind off things. Unfortunately I was sick twice, once whilst getting blood taken but I’m back home now and going to relax with The Wire. I’m a huge Soprano’s fan and my girlfriend bought me the first series of The Wire recently as it has had some rave reviews. So far so good, I’d definately recommend it.

Aside from meeting the boxing gym owner on Friday, I’ve got to find time to add more content to StudentsUncovered.com and contact nightclubs to arrange for free entry for my photographers. I’m excited about launching the site, I’ve put in a lot of work to make it a quality student portal and will continue to do so. However, I am still shocked at some people’s views to website advertising. In my previous post I mentioned how I was going to offer free advertising to local letting agents, and I did, with not one response! Perhaps when my site ranks #1 for “Student Accommodation in *city*” then they’ll pay attention to me!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

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.