KHALID

Being an entrepreneur is all about taking calculated risks, but sometimes are calculations are wrong and our investments tumble. This occurs daily in the stock market and building/buying websites is quite similar.

As an entrepreneur we analyse the potential for a developed site or planned idea and the possible return on investment (ROI). However, we cannot control all the forces involved and can become a victim of a tradegy out with our control, for example when the dot com bubble burst.

Thankfully, the internet is a much more stable market place and this is a rare occurance but every day people register new domains or pour their hearts into an idea that aims for the moon but misses, and lands amongst the stars – plodding along but never reaching the top.

If you remember a while ago I was attempting to dominate the “bar jobs” market and registered about 50 domains which were developed into mini-sites, had BarVacancy.com custom coded and spent hours contacting bar/nightclub owners and managers advertising the free site. Similar to Gumtree, BarVacancy.com was purely for the nightclub industry and I thought if I targetted a niche I may do well.

Unfortunately a site like this needs a large marketing budget and I failed. The idea wasn’t a failure though, the sites plod along and makes enough money but I simply didn’t have enough time to pump more energy into it and re-generate it.

Fortunately my hard work didn’t go to waste and I sold the network to one of my frequent buyers who has a similar network that will compliment his purchase. For me it was about cutting my losses and getting out whilst I still could. I could have easily let the names expire or just broken even with Adsense on the sites but they were never going to be winners in my hands – that doesn’t mean they can’t be.

Sometimes you have to admit defeat and yes I lost money but I learned a lot, I gained experience and I am happy I tried. I think there is plenty of potential let in the network especially as it has been left to mature for 6 months and most of the sites have a good Google ranking but it wasn’t one for me.

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.

Purchasing traffic is something I wouldn’t recommend, it usually results in fake page loads of your site to imitate people. Purchasing visitors…well that’s a different story.

The effects of being Dugg or Stumbled Upon can be fantastic, both for real visitors, extreme exposure and revenue! You can buy Stumbles or Diggs, but what if your site isn’t voted for by non-paid users? It’ll probably be a waste of money.

Whilst I totally agree with focusing on quality content and positive word-of-mouth spreading like wild fire, sometimes we want a quick fix. So, what about buying real visitors?  Jon Warass, a fellow internet entrepreneur, successfully showed his visitors how to make $20 a day from a $200 investment and it involved purchasing visitors. You can read the proof post here.

I intend to do the same, with a free wallpaper site. I have built a site that provides “hot and sexy”wallpapers for free. Well placed ads dominate high CTR area’s and I’ve just paid $7 for a weekly ad that averages a few thousand clicks. Doing the maths, say out of 4,000 inbound visitors I get 200 clicks, meaning 5% of people visiting will click on my ads.

200 x 0.05 = $10 = $3 profit.

Not much I know, but the basic maths multiplied on a large scale could result in a large amount of profit. I’ll let you know how it goes, my ad doesn’t start until the 4th. It may be profitable, it may not be – It’s an experiment after all.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.