KHALID

If you are ever thinking of visiting Monteiths Bar for a drink or meal, please read this first!!!

Christy and I like to go out for a meal once every week if we can, and sometimes we’ll get together with friends and do something special.

Last week, Thursday July 2nd, Rob invited me out with his girlfriend Amy, and we went along with Stephen and Catherine too. Stephen also brought his cousin, who was over from South Africa. Christy’s birthday was the day before so it was nice to get out with friends and have a few drinks.

Rob had booked Monteiths Bar on the Royal Mile, so I did a quick Google check and unfortunately read some not-so-good reviews. Rob had been there before and assured me it was a nice place, so we ignored the reviews and went ahead.

Upon arrival, the waitress – who turned out to be the manageress – forgot Stephen’s drink, then turned up with three cocktails instead of two. Easy mistake, so we let it slip, despite waiting a further 10 minutes for his drink.

When it came to ordering food, the menu had only a handful of dishes on it, and a few were not available, making our choices very limited indeed. However, we let that slip too, and I ordered a pastry covered meat dish…which the waitress advised would take 35 minutes to cook as I wanted it well done! 35 minutes to cook a mains is a joke, especially in a professional kitchen!

I can’t remember what Rob ordered, and that’s because his meal was never cooked. You see, the waitress forgot to order Rob’s food, thus we all ate whilst he watched. He was told about 3 times his meal would be “5 minutes” and after about half an hour, he cancelled his order. Seemingly the food was “being dished up” by that point.

Whilst he was waiting, Rob ordered a cocktail, which the waitress – remember also the manageress – didn’t know how to make. She asked one of her staff “do you know how to make this drink”. Who allows someone to manage a cocktail bar not knowing how to make the cocktails on the menu? Rob’s drink didn’t turn up until he reminded the waitress about it.

Upon fishing our food, Rob asked to speak to the manager, which we found out was the waitress who had been serving us. She apologised without much sympathy and didn’t really do much to retain us as future customers. She removed Rob’s cocktails from the bill and discounted 10% from it, however it felt like she couldn’t wait to have us leave because of the embarrassment.

I left my business card as the bar had no contact information for the owners. I requested one of them contact me and I was assured this would happen. 7 days later I am still waiting on that call.

One mistake you can live with, two is simply careless and three or more is a joke, especially in a place that charges £25 for a main meal and £7 per cocktail. As a result of their gross negligence, general attitude, crap service and failing to call me, Rob setup Monteiths Bar Sucks to ensure others know what to expect.

We’re not out on a mission to sabotage the business, but after the service we received we wanted to let the World know how rubbish Monteiths Bar in Edinburgh was.

If the owners ever read this, I hope it has served as some useful information on how your business is being run.

Khalid.

Since selling my tattoo network I’ve been in a financial position to trial a lot of new web ventures. I’ve tried running a bar jobs site, I heavily marketed a student portal, I built several mini-sites and invested in domain leasing. Now I’m back to square one.

Did I fail?

No, I learned a lot, made some money and began planning my future properly. When I say I’m back to square one I don’t mean I’m back to the beginning, I’m back to what I’m good at – developing. Several attempts to take on big competitors, rush into multiple new projects and look for “the next big thing” meant I spread myself and my resources too thinly, resulting in some failures.

It’s not all bad though, I’ve bagged a fantastic small (yet established!) site I’ve been working hard on, I’m registered one or two valuable domain names, Adsense earnings are up and two deals are in the pipeline.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing, just remember that if you are venturing into new projects then do so carefully, don’t think that cash and a nice site will win the race. Stick to what you are good at and always have something to fall back on.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

After another tiring week has gone by, I’ve managed to hammer out another two sites and build some backlinks for another two. I’m really aiming for building a network of quality content sites with useful information – nothing that is cheap, tacky and made for Adsense. By the end of the month I want to have 10 really good content sites, building another 5-10 each month thereafter.

I’m dabbling in article marketing and invested a few hundred dollars in quality articles and submitted them to two different sites. The annoying thing is that they take up to 14 days to be approved which seems like an age, but when you are getting a permanent backlink (or two!) from a PR6 site for the price of a 500 word article ($10), you can’t really complain.

In other news, I nearly lost my blog again! Well, actually, I had a backup so it wasn’t too bad! The WordPress “wp-content” folder just disappeared and left my blog as a blank page. So I rushed to LiquidWeb.com’s online chat and immediately got an incoming call to my mobile from the States. The technical support checked the access logs to ensure nothing serious had occured like a hack, grabbed the backup and restored the “wp-content” folder whilst keeping my on the line. This is why I love Liquid Web. Which other web host would do that for you, any time of the day from another country?

Have a nice weekend and good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The other day I realised it had been such a long time since I did anything with my blog and decided I should have a little cleanup. I decided to only display adverts for ppc/cpm networks that I made money using and that I believe work – so I removed a few of the 125 x 125 banners and added Chitika – a new ppc company I am trialling and Adversal – a solid company that pays for unintrusive pop-unders (can be added to any site). I placed a Chitika banner in the footer of my posts to see how they do.

I changed the title “My Earnings” to “My Progress” as I believe I am making progress and you don’t need to earn more money to go forth. It also sounds less boastful. Finally, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version for security.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

p.s. the sexy cleaner helped me clean my blog haha!

In a previous post about Off Site SEO, I mentioned the importance of backlink building. In today’s web world where competition saturates some markets, webmasters are finding it increasing difficult to find quality links at an affordable price.

Further to that, trying to sell links that don’t have a high pagerank is even harder…until now.

In steps TNX, a link network/marketplace that allows you to buy a high amount of links within specific niches without breaking the bank. And, you can sell links easily too!

For the publisher, TNX will allow you to earn money on text links, even on pagerank zero pages! For the advertiser, TNX gives you access to thousands of link spaces across hundreds of sites without you remortgaging your house!

As I write this, there is 23035474 links in the system with 32665656 pages indexed by the site. In short, this is not a trivial system that can be laughed at, this is a resource that provides you with easy access to quality link building.

The entire process is easy for both publisher and advertiser:

For the publisher…
1. Install the TNX code on your site.
2. Add your site to TNX system. We will approve it in 1-2 days.
3. Raise the number of links displayed on pages of your website (max. 4 links).
4. Create your own ad campaigns or sell TNX-points to TNX-system or other TNX users.

For the advertiser…
1. Create an Ad campaign following all 3 steps that are provided you by TNX. Buy TNX-points if you don’t have them yet.
2. Relax and watch for results.
3. Edit your campaigns or create new ones using your experience.

So how much does it cost and how much can you get paid?

Well, I’ve personally never used the site as I’ve been too busy recently, BUT, the results seem good. According to Jim Karter, a webmaster, he did quite well with the system!

Well, first of all I put it on a website which did not had much unique content but had a page rank of 4 and around 3000 pages indexed. I hope everybody know how easy it is to create such non-unique sites, but those sites do not get search engine traffic. But I did not need search engine traffic. I added the code from TNX in my template so the links were sold for every page. In one month, I made around 140,000 TNX-points.

So, overall what I got in return of a useless (because of it non-uniqueness) PR4 sites is:

1. Cash of $66/month
2. Around 3000 to 4000 PR0 and PR1 backlinks for my new sites. (I did not need higher PR link for my new sites right now)

TNX use a points system to pay webmasters, so instead of money you get points which you can cash in or use to buy links for your sites. Like a virtual currency, the moneytary value of your points can fluctuate, which can have a positive or negative affect on your earnings.

If you are worried about the negative impact of selling links, i.e. losing your rank, TNX has that covered too! Unlike other text link networks, TNX use a code that seemingly Googlebot doesn’t pickup.

Overall I think TNX is fresh, effective way of link building/selling and it is something I’ll definately be trying it soon! If you’ve used TNX, let me (and other readers!) know so we can get some honest reviews.

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 remember reading a newspaper article recently about a man who was looking to rent a parking space in the busy town of London and simply couldn’t find anything. This attracted a lot of media attention, especially as we’re becoming more conscious about issues such as global warming, overcrowding and traffic distruptions.

I think public transport is a great way to get around the city, but only if it is reliable and clean (the interior). Unfortunately, this is rarely the case and so for many people who are looking for reliability, purchasing a car is the only option left.

First obstacle over, now finding a parking space. Scouring newspaper ad sections, Gumtree offers and convenience store window ads takes a lot of time and effort, which people generally don’t have these days. Aside from that, why would you want to spend your Saturday afternoon looking for a space to park your motor? I couldn’t think of anything more boring!

And if you choose to be one of the millions of people who park their car on the street, you may become the victom of vandalism or even theft! Iff you have to pay for parking, well you might as well spend hours raiding your piggy bag preparing the correct amount of change for each day you travel!

In comes Park Let, a site dedicated to finding you a space with minimum inconvenience. Covering the majority of UK cities, including London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Park Let offers, at present, 10675 parking spaces and garages currently available for monthly rental or sale!

Using Google Maps, you can easily navigate to your local town and pick out a park space, view the complete details including address and price and apply accordingly. Alternatively, if you don’t find a space, you can easily setup e-mail notification when one becomes available!

Park Let take a 2.5% commission on the sale price of a parking space and 15% of the rental. They even collect payments on your behalf, making your life as a seller that bit easier and as a buyer less hassle continually arranging a payment with a vendor.

Park Let is a great example of a cool idea that has turned into a viable business providing a useful service to both parking space seekers and sellers! A truly entrepreneurial business model.

Park Let – Parking London

Building up a new network is a great feeling, especially when you see a return on your investment. The only difficulty with expanding quickly was that I had to purchase a new $14.95 per month hosting plan for each domain.

This was great because it stopped me making stupid mistakes and creating sites without thinking them through. On the downside it was time consuming and quite costly. Don’t get me wrong, Liquid Web are a fantastic host with great staff (touch wood!) so the $14.95 is well worth it, but if you want to run a network you’d really need to think about something biggar.

After shooting a quick support ticket to a sales advisor, they checked out my sites and advised me on the $60 per month VPS. Whilst I am fully aware you can get hosting for a lot cheaper, after my troubles with Host Nine I don’t think I’ll ever risk quality for price. If you are going to do a job, do it properly.

The staff quickly migrated all my sites over and helped me through the process of domain parking etc so a big thank you to them! I did have to wait about 48 hours before I could update my sites again due to some minor complications with my domains (my fault!).

Now I’ve got everything in one place and making one payment per month which is good. Things are expanding here, so if you haven’t already, subscribe to my RSS feed for the latest news coming soon!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I seem to be in a trialling mood now I’ve got some cash to spend. With my birthday just passed and pay day today I can afford to invest in some trials, hence my previous post and now this one.

I’ve always hoovered around the idea of using pay per post as a mean of gaining credible backlinks along with creating a buzz around your site. So I decided to deposit $50 into my PPP account and run a campaign for tattoo lettering.

The process was fairly straight forward and having the power to choose the minimum quality of sites that will link to you (by means of pagerank or alexa rank) is quite appealing. We’ll see how it goes, something I’ll definately keep an eye on and report back about.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The following is a paid review that is completely my own opinion…

PayPerPost is a website that brings both bloggers and advertisers together in order to create a single portal to connect the two parties. The site is completely free to use and works as an effective marketplace where advertisers and bloggers both have choices.The system works in a simple way – An advertiser posts information about their site/product/service they wish to be reviewed, along with post criteria such as minimum word count and price. Bloggers can then look into the opportunities directory and review the sites/products they qualify for. Once the blogger has completed this, they submit a link to their post and the transaction is complete! Simple really.All posts are then reviewed by Pay Per Post staff. When they are satisfied the job has been completed, the advertisers account is debited and the bloggers credited. Voila!The immediate benefits to advertisors is that they can get access to hundreds of bloggers from around the world and create a frenzy about their product/site/service overnight! To the average blogger, Pay Per Post is a cash machine that they can tap into 24 hours per day…providing they put the work in.Being lazy at first, I decided to sign up for an account and have a quick peep, but nothing more. It wasn’t until I logged back in and earned a few bucks for a short review (here) that I realised the opportunities available to me to earn. I quickly became addicted and intend to try to post a review at least once per week.

At this stage, my only hesitiation is separating the sufficient from the spam. I am curious as to how Pay Per Post intends to ensure bloggers just aren’t writing crappy review for a quick buck and thus lowering the quality, which will in turn lower prices. I’ll be monitoring this situation and will probably post reviews from higher paying advertisers to separate myself.

I would certainly recommend Pay Per Post as a secondary income to your blogging hobby or career…it can be rather fruitful.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.