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.

So far I have spent $419 on backlinks and bookmarking which has been money well spent in my opinion. As time progresses and the domain ages I am hopeful the site will rank better. From my previous experience I know this can take anything from two months to two years, it’s up to Google!

This is my first attempt of ranking a name well with the view of become a domain leaser. The term “electric showers” receives about 40,000 searches per month in the UK alone and I am confident I will be able to lease it. If not, then I’m sure private adverts will ensure a return on my investment.

The domain was registered on November 10th 2008, a little less than a month ago, and has achieved the following ranks…

• electric shower – 46th out of 594,000 competitors
• electric showers – 45th out of 385,000 competitors
• electric power shower – 38th out of 184,000 competitors
• electric power showers – 25th out of 257,000 competitors
• uk electric showers – 5th out of 563,000 competitors

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

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.

I was pleasantly surprised to find one or two of my sites have crept up the rankings without link building, just from the domains being a little older. In my experience this can really help and I have read some webmasters buy a domain then leave it for a year before they build a site.

The extra traffic I am not getting will help me nicely and I am sitting here with a smile and I own over 100 domains that are maturing day-by-day. I can’t wait to start producing good quality sites on domains I’ve had for maybe 2 or 3 years.

Right now though I’m still working on my current front line sites, including the content based ones I’ve been talking about. Both are coming along nicely, I just wish it was 6 or 12 months down the line and they were established.

Time will tell. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

So my new challenge is to make $1 per day…100 times over.

Now I know you are probably thinking crappy Made-For-Adsense (MFA) sites that have no value, rubbish content and backlink spammed, but I’m not even considering this route. If you are going to do something properly, take your time and do it right first time.

I’ve already started this challenge and setup 5 sites, building a minimum of 1 per week. It is costly so I’m monitoring my investment and my return, ensuring that the sites begin to convert to profit within two months.

In addition to this challenge, I am running two larger sites in parallel, launching Students Uncovered during Fresher’s Week (September). Bar Vacancy is still doing well, that project will take time though.

With each site, I’m trying different backlink building techniques. Some using article marketing, others social bookmarking and “ye-old-faithful” directory submissions. I’ll report my findings in due course but remember, “Content is King” – always ensure your sites have quality, unique content.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

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.

I intend to reveal more in due course but I wanted to put a question out to all readers. For a small content site (MFA), how many pages is ideal to rank well in the SERPs? I tend to find 3 pages with 500 words on each but I wanted to know what your takes was. Let me know!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

When I first began building sites for profit and dabbling in ppc revenue methods like Google Adsense, trickles of income began coming my way. My problem is that I become wrestless, I don’t like to wait. That trickle could become a stream, then a river and so on and so forth.

I wasn’t prepared to wait, and my first network of sites were sold for $50 each.

A lot of learning has occured since then and I now follow strict personal rules when considering selling a site. I plan for the future, I think about the short and long term gains and I don’t sell until I am sure I either need the cash or want to exit the market.

Proxy traffic is considered “trash”. Proxy users are generally people who want to bypass school filters, view adult content or get away with playing their favourite arcade game at work. The only company willing that offers good revenue and is willing to allow placement of their ads on proxy sites is Google Adsense, a network which I was banned from about a year ago.

Aside from Google, there’s Adversal and Adbrite, but both offer low payouts. Adversal did provide a few extra dollars per month for their non-intrusive pop-under ads so it is a network I’d recommend.

Getting a little off track, I bought Kortaz.com for $15 simply because I liked the name. Kortaz was originally a big site divided into smaller sections, including an arcade, funny videos feed, proxy and image host. The idea originally came about when I saw arcades making, say $10 per day, a video site $20, a proxy $5 and so on. I thought about combining them to create one large site that would generate revenue through each section.

Unfortunately it was difficult to market without a big budget, I hadn’t really thought it through properly, but being a businessman involves learning, so I’m glad I made the mistakes.

Knowing I could profit from proxy traffic, as I did by building and selling SneakOnline.com for $750, I turned my sites back to the trash nobody wanted (apart from us profiting proxy webmasters). I was bored with a proxy site as you couldn’t do much in the way of earning money, so I thought about a proxy listing site.

I didn’t want one of these topsites nobody visited, so I managed to find a free script that offered something more unique – a links lister with sections and a hit counter for each link. The only change I made was to randomize link orders. Kortaz, the web proxy list was born.

Originally I offered free placements to all and a few lucky people were “Featured” (premium placement) for free. A link back to Kortaz with the anchor text “web proxy” was always required on the homepage if you requested a free link.

As the number of submissions and backlinks grew, so did traffic. The hit counter beside each link, along with a few testimonials, was proof to webmasters Kortaz provided great traffic, all for $6-$10 per month (I changed the price to attract people during difficult times).

I managed to profit here from two things. The first was that links rotated randomly so each featured and non-featured link got time at the top of the pile in their own sections. Secondly, there was some negative press about the biggest proxy listing site, proxy.org, using bots to imitate traffic and click on Adsense units of sites listed on the site.

However, as the site grew, so did the problems. The script was designed for heavy use and would max out after 2,000 outbound hits, I couldn’t integrate automatic Paypal payments and so on. I managed to hire a great coder for $50 who developed the site as you see it today using a free web template (why waste money if you don’t need too!).

The new design was rolled out and I put some contextual advertising and Adversal popunders on it, afterall it was “trash traffic”! I managed to get the stage where the site was earning around $150-$170 per month. It was doing well and I had a small money-maker on my hands.

Traffic was excellent, with the site ranking first in the SERPs for “Web Proxy” and on the first page for a number of other terms. This was simply due to the high number of relevant backlinks accumulated over time (slow but steady link building).

My reason for selling – I needed cash, I have student debt and bills to pay. I was sad to see it go. I decided to list the site on Sitepoint.com with a price tag of $2k. I didn’t think it would reach this because nobody likes proxy sites but I was surprised it was sold within 48 hours. I think I could have gotten more but you learn. I think the strongest selling points were the SERPs positioning and the private link sales, i.e. no reliance on an ad network.

Building, establishing and maintaining Kortaz.com was one of the best experiences I’ve had online. I turned a domain name into a profitable website, I learned about SEO and link building and I tasted success.

One man’s dirt is another man’s foundations and Kortaz.com was exactly that. The owner didn’t want the domain and a lot of webmasters don’t like proxy traffic. I took two negatives and turned them into a positive – all in under one year.

I hope you learned a little from this story, good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Whilst he “No Follow” attribute may stop PR leakage, links are still counted towards the overall backlink count, which is what you should be targetting. In my post Off Site SEO, I stated “I’ve found building relevant backlinks works a treat when trying to rank well in the search engines.”

Regardless of whether these links are “No Follow” or not, they’ll still be counted. Sure it would be beneficial if they were “Do Follow”, but it is not the deciding factor.

Here are some important notes regarding the “No Follow” issue…

1. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves. In short, it doesn’t look good.

2. Search Engines follow NoFollow. Both Yahoo and Google have been known to count NoFollow links as backlinks in SiteExplorer. Proof from Search Engine Journal and Jon Warass.

Like many things in life, SEO is trial and error. There is no clear system that guarantees you a premium ranking in the SERPs and with so many different things you can do, how would you know what is right and wrong without conducting your own tests?

I managed to rank Kortaz.com #1 – #5 for a number of different keywords. Without sounding arrogant, I think that’s quite an achievement considering “Kortaz” was not even a keyword and the site was not filled with content!

I think the amount of backlinks with the anchor text as the keyword made the site strong and this was the driving force behind its ranking. These links were built up over time with webmasters submitting their own proxy links to be listed on the site.

Aside from backlink building, being popular in Digg and Stumble Upon have their benefits too (I didn’t used them for Kortaz.com but for other sites). As well as bringing in visitors, many webmasters look for content through these sites and this can generate backlinks.

It is quite important to mention on-site SEO too and that generally means ensuring your site is keyword rich with unique content and good anchor texts.

I’d really like to know what you do when it comes to SEO and how you rank well?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.