Archive for News:

Having Some Fun

In an attempt to enjoy my hard work and engage with my customers, I began hiring some real “characters” to perform short videos for my site Edinburgh Taxi. The results were amazing and truly made me laugh, but have generally had a good response from friends who have watched them.

I’m not expecting any of them to go viral, it’s really just a big of fun and something different.

What do you think?

There’s more over at my Edinburgh Taxi Youtube Channel.

An Update on Borrowing Money

My last post questioned what you would do if you had to borrow money to boost a marketing campaign. After listening to some advice I held off on radio promotion and opted to promote Edinburgh Taxi offline. Face to face marketing gets peoples attention, especially when you’re standing in a bright yellow t-shirt handing out plastic business cards. Yes, plastic – they don’t tear or bend, but they’re bloody expensive!

At this point I should mention I shelled out a lot to buy a card printer and consumables but people have been snapping the cards up so it has been a worthwhile task. The credit card was used but I know I can pay it back. No risk = no reward.

I’ve avoided posting about the success of my taxi partnerships as I’ve been focusing on making them work, but I’m happy to announce things are going well. If I could sum it up without getting into specifics, the money earned on a monthly basis from Edinburgh alone is in the low four figure range. This is a great achievement on a geo domain name and some offline marketing but it hasn’t been easy. Whatever I earn, and more, goes back into the business to generate more custom.

People often think that I sit behind a desk and the money rolls in; try saying that to me at 5am after standing all night in the cold with a couple of pr staff! I work day and night on my projects and radio advertising is still on the “to do” list but I’ll need to hammer the telephone number into people’s heads and get a few more thousand calls before I ask for that invoice!

Good luck with your pursuits,

Khalid.

What has happened to blogging?

Where has everyone gone? No posts from me or other internet types with blogs for a while now…have we all got sick of publicising our lives?

Personally I love to write when I have a clear head and something substantial to jot down. I’ve never been one to blog for the sake of it, because “I must do 5 new posts a week”. I quickly realised I’m no John Chow and the idea of talking about how much money I make from my WordPress site simply doesn’t appeal. For me, blogging is a way of recording where I’m at and where I’ve been; almost like my online memoirs.

I’ve spoken to a couple of friends who mention that people who are intent on blogging and posting on forums daily would get somewhere by actually doing instead of talking. I think they’re completely right and I’ve put it into practice recently by putting my head down and moving forward with my plans. I’m really proud of the progress I have made and it has given me a much needed boost to keep going.

I’ve also been dedicating some of my time, both in my employment and personal time, to aiding charities with website help and financial donations. The work is really rewarding and makes me feel like my time is not only spent on me but lending a hand to others.

Hopefully I’ll have some exciting updates soon!

Good luck with your pursuits,

Khalid.

How NOT To Apply for a Job

I regularly use Gumtree.com to find temporary workers, such as promotional staff. Occassionally, I also use it to find full time employees for my workplace, however this post relates to the former.

Recently, I placed an advert for leaflet distribution staff, which is a minimum wage job in my opinion. I asked simply for some personal details, their availability and any previous experience. Here’s the worst yet funniest reply I’ve had…

hi there my name is luciano and i would like to help u on that my number is 07********7 and i live in edinburgh and would u be able to pay abit more per hour like maybe max £10 for hour if thats possible coz im really needing money i skint so wb asap please thanks..

This is 100% genuine, I’ve only edited the telephone number. Now I appreciate it is a minimum wage job but I didn’t realise that translated into discarding grammar, punctuation and manners!

Marketing a taxi company

It has been a while since my last post, and that’s really been for two reason; 1. I’ve not had much to report and 2. I don’t want to report what I’ve been doing. As some of your may know from the pages of Ethan Hardy Ltd, I own Edinburgh Taxi and Glasgow Taxi (.co.uk and .org.uk).

I have agreements setup with companies in both cities to accept and complete work that come through the telephone numbers on the sites in return for a referall fee, a new kind of affiliate marketing. I am fortunate enough to have Mark Boyd working as an affiliate for me and promoting a companies on his Aberdeen Taxi site.

Things are progessing well with us racking up in excess of 1,000 calls per month. Mark and I are constantly competing between Edinburgh and Aberdeen, however he has a sub-affiliate promoting his number so qudos to him!

I’ve been trialling new marketing methods, including pairing up with local companies to co-promote each other’s services. I’ve also paid for adverts on student radio and Spotify, which I hope will spread the word about the number. I’ll let you know how that goes at the end of the month!

Like Rob, who is pushing some promotional items for his Claims site, I’ve got a giveaway in the pipeline that my friend Frank and a few others voted as a great idea.

I’m cautious about publishing every step I am taking as the taxi trade is particularly competative and it is difficult to comment on what worked and what didn’t as promoting a taxi number does not guarantee instant results – people may not use one for months to come and there’s no cookies tracking the booking!

Expansion online is one thing I’m focusing on as I’m fortunate enough to benefit from good positions within the SERPs and I’ve built up a small yet growing fan base on Facebook and Twitter.

Things are going well so my head is down and I’m working this idea until those 1,000 calls turn into 10,000!

Good luck with your pursuits,

Khalid.

Joining the Single Name Domain Club

If you’ve pinged KhalidsLife.com recently you’ll see I’ve moved over to Khalid.co.uk

I’ve been asked not to publicise the acquisition or purchase price due to the sensitive history of the name so I’ll refrain from going into detail. The name was formerly owned by Khalid Hanif who sadly passed away.

I am happy with the purchase and although I think I paid over the odds, I feel it was justified as I know it will be used for a good cause.

Expect to see a few changes around here soon!

Profitable Website For Sale

Good Morning All,

CrossTrainers.co.uk is now sold. Thank you for all the interest. I apologise if I did not reply to your e-mail, the site was sold extremely quickly.

Thanks,

Khalid.

Do you own any geo’s?

I was looking over my collection of domain names the other day as I have a few sitting doing nothing. Well, quite a few to be honest. So, I’m being pro-active and trying to monetise them, at least until they catch on and I’m offered something substantial for them.

At least 80% of the names have ranking websites, however I’ve never approached anyone to advertise on them. So, I got off my arse and made a few contacts with people I know, and as they believe in what I do, I’ve got some deals setup. There’s nothing life changing in these partnerships, however money is money!

I know the likes of Yell and uFindus have bought up a large proportion of keyword and geo names, and the money they charge to rent the minisites on them is extortionate! They have the infrastructure to do this on a massive scale and the sales staff to ensure it is profitable. If you run a business chances are they’ll have phoned you offering it for just £xx per week…I would charge that for a month!

So my little geo-jaunt has me working on partnerships for Edinburgh Taxi, Edinburgh Nightclubs and Edinburgh Hairdresser mainly, as well as continuing my day job in the double glazing market.

Happy days, we’ll see how it goes. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

How I Do SEO

I’ve been in talks with numerous webmasters recently about SEO – we’ve compared note, judges other companies and generally poked and prodded around for answers. I was passed this site which is critically assessing SEO companies and it made me laugh.

The first analysis was on Dave Naylor, a quite well known name in the SEO world. Now I don’t know Dave personally, but I do know his SEO company – Bronco – refused to show me an example of quality links they wanted to offer me. Fair enough, NDA’s and all that, but then I asked myself how Dave was getting business if he couldn’t showcase his work? I do know he’s done work for some well ranked sites, like Elaine’s All Kids, and I don’t see her complaining, so maybe Dave is worth his weight in gold. But, for someone that doesn’t know him and was steered in his direction, he didn’t do much to attract me. Perhaps it was because I had a specific requirement – quality backlinks – but isn’t that what most webmasters need?

The problem I have with public figures e.g. John Chow and such is that they gain a reputation for being amazing by posting how amazing they are. I have no doubt John Chow is making money, afterall his blog earns him thousands due to the number of followers, but what about all the other fake entrepeneurs and “seo experts”? I think they make money because they say they make money because they say they are amazing – if that makes sense?

I’m not saying Dave is a fake, he clearly knows what he is doing, what I’m saying is that I’m questioning how much of his success is down to his results and how much is because he is perceived as amazing? Dave this isn’t a dig, you just ended up on the above site first so I chose to use you as an example!

I have been learning SEO continually for years and had the opportunity to pickup tips from some great webmasters with fantastic sites. But, they only shared this information to me because I helped them in one way or another. We’ve shared resources, tested methods, trialled outsourcing and even today, we’re still learning together.

It’s no shock that the best of the best buy links, and whilst search engines frown upon it, Yahoo openly sells directory listings which is a link, so they must tolerate it! The key to SEO, in my opinion, is to have a quality site filled with hundreds of quality pages, fresh content daily and links built over time from multiple resources.

One year ago I began working for my current employer, and after battling for 12 months we’ve just reached page 2 in Google for our chosen keyword. The market is extremely competative, but we’re succeeding, only through doing the above though. There’s no magical secret in seo, it is how well you adapt the above to your website.

It may surprise you that as an SEO consultant myself, I’ve employed two companies who rank on the front page for Google.co.uk for “SEO services” to work on websites for me, and they both returned with link farmed crap. The cost to me was £x,xxx but I learned one lesson – if you want a job done properly do it yourself. These links get cached, but how long will they last before Google ignore’s them or they get removed as the company has a new client that needs the space.

By outsourcing I learned what the competition were doing, what to do myself and what to avoid. By analysing rival websites, ranking websites in other niches and cross-comparing with my own, I also learned how the higher ranking sites were doing better. Now, I do little bits here and there for myself and some clients, and I’m not afraid to show my current and previous work.

I’ve never pro-actively promoted myself as an “SEO Guru”, nor have the few people I choose to share information with, but we’re doing well because instead of shouting about how amazing we are, we just get on with the job in hand.

I really commend people like Dave for being able to get some of the contracts he does, and as I said before I have no doubt he’s good at what he does, I just think the media spotlight shines a light on these people that blinds others into thinking they’re better than they actually are.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Beta Testers Wanted

Hi all,

Just a quickie today. I’ve setup a system called Keyword Exchange where webmasters/affiliates are given keyword ideas with free to register domain names.

You view a listing, make a site and in return for the freebie I get a backlink (specified in the listing).

Once you’ve submitted a backlink (can be from any url within reason) then I review it and once accepted you can view another listing!

Sign up today, only ten users will be initially accepted. www.KeywordExchange.co.uk

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.