Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Marketing Pilgrim has announced their SEM Scholarship for 2007. This years prizes are awesome!

• A full conference pass to the Search Engine Strategies conference held in San Jose, this August.
• The winner’s article will be published in the industry print magazine, Search Marketing Standard.
• Enrollment in a “Certified Search Engine Marketer Pathway” course at SearchEngineCollege.com
• One month of industry coaching and training from search marketing expert Andy Beal.
• One year of AdWatcher.com service (ad tracking and click fraud monitoring) and one year of AdScientist.com service (bid management).
• One year subscription to WebmasterWorld.com.
• One year premium membership to SEOmoz.org.
• A free web analytics account from CrazyEgg.com.
• A one year Bizwatch account from BizResearch.com.
• A one year subscription to the SEO project management site, SoloSEO.com.
• A copy of Aaron Wall’s “SEO Book.”
• A copy of Jennifer Laycock’s book, “Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing.”
• A copy of Andrew Goodman’s book, “Winning Results with Google AdWords.”
• A copy of Kim Krause Berg’s books “Please Ring Bell for Service” and “How to Quench Your Web Site Visitors’ Thirst.”
• A cash prize ($100) courtesy of Cre8asiteforums.com.
• Link-ninja sword (wooden), throwing stars (rubber), clock, t-shirt and $100 cash courtesy of WeBuildPages.com.
• More prizes to be announced.

The contest is simply an article writing contest, contestants submit their articles (400 to 1000 words) that may cover any topic in the SEO, PPC or SMO (Social Media Optimization) fields, the readers will decide the top 5 articles and then a panel of experts will decide which is the best article that deserves those prizes as well as the recognition. All articles must be sent on April 6, you can read the full details here.
I think I am going to give this a try, not sure what subject I’ll be writing about, do you have any suggestions? I am going to think about it this weekend and hopefully come up with an interesting idea to write about, writing the article itself is usually easy, its the unique idea that matters the most, as well as the useful info. that will benefit most of the readers that will make a difference when it comes to voting.

The following post is a review for a new website that provides useful information on finding the best online saving account, this is a sponsored post, however I’ll be reviewing only quality websites that I find useful and think they will be useful for my readers.

The website is basically a guide to help you find the most suitable online savings account, it provides links and descriptions for websites offering those services, along with percentages of the returns those banks give, the website has a nice web2.0 look which I find appealing. You can also Compare online banking, find a savings account or checking account and earn more interest today with SavingsAccounts.com

If you haven’t heard the news, Google launched its new Adwords Pay Per Action Beta, instead of publishers paying the usual per click cost, they now get to pay per action (filling out a form, registering on a site or making a purchase)

PPA is limited to US residents so far on both the publisher and advertiser sides, PPA FAQ answers some of the questions you might have on mind about this new service, I am not sure how would this effect the affiliate marketing industry and what impact it will have on the established Affiliate Networks out there, I guess that it will mainly depend on the kind of offers PPA will have and what kind of advertisers it will draw.

You can find more information about PPA on the Adwords blog post:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/03/pay-per-action-beta-test.html

I’ve started writing a business plan around a week ago for the main project I’ve been working on for quite a while, Project F, I previously took the Business Edge course from CompueBase around 2 weeks ago which lasted around 12 days, so I thought I should practice what I learned, its not the 1st time I write a business plan, I previously wrote one when I participated in the Arab Business Plan Competition around a year ago.
So what are the main parts of a business plan?

1. Executive Summary: The most important part of the business plan, usually 1 to 2 pages max, the executive summary should contain the gist of your business idea, why do you think the idea is successful, the summary of the financial’s and the future plans/exit strategy. Some add some sub points to the executive summary, those usually are (objectives, mission, vision and keys to success)
2. Company Summary: I guess this points explains it self, this section usually contains information about the company ownership, startup summary and the initial funding that you might need, you should also mention any current clients that your company might already have, their numbers and their geographic location.
3. Services: This section includes all of the services your business will be offering, target prices for those services, target clients/audience for each service, this section can also include any service differentiators your company has that separates it from the competition (if there is any).
4. Market Analysis Summary: Now comes the fun part! in this section, you analyze your market! lol, its usually easier said than done, in this part you put your target market in segments according to their age, income level, geographic location or whatever, it mainly depends on your business idea, its usually nice to use percentages and pie charts in this part, other sections that may go in this part are service business analysis, target market segment strategy and competition and buying patterns.
5. Strategy and Implementation Summary: Well how are you planning to implement your strategies? implement your business? how are you going to differentiate yourself? this part usually includes your competitive edge, marketing strategy (important!), Sales strategy, your sales forecast (this part is usually all tables and charts) and the Milestones (important steps in your business, opening the office, launching your marketing campaign)
6. Management Summary: Who’s the CEO? CFO? technical officer? its very important to mention those things in your business plan, especially if you have partners, everything should be clear from the start, what parts of the business each partner will handle and the responsibilities each partner has, personnel plan is also an important section to be included in this part, this section includes your plans to hire people, numbers and time frames and what jobs those employees will be handling.
7. Financial Plan: Fixed costs like rent, server fees and things like that are usually mentioned here, insurance expenses, marketing expenses and any other kind of expenses, this is followed with the startup funding table, which is basically the costs that you need to get your business on it feet, this is followed with the break even analysis which means the time that you expect you will earn back the money you spent in the startup funding costs, that is followed with the projected profit and loss table (most important if your seeking funding which is the most cases with business plans) and lastly the projected cash flow (also very important for funding), all of those parts usually consist of tables and no text. You can also add the projected balance sheet if your feeling up to it.

Thats about it I guess, you will usually end up with 20-30 pages after your done with all of those parts, of course that depends on how much your into writing

Alright, its time for another SEO post with some tips on how to get some traffic out of Google!

Inner Links!

Inner links are the links inside your pages, lots of us know how important it is to get links from other websites pointing to your website, but lots fail to remember or simply don’t know the importance of your inner linking structure, here are some tips you should know when building your website:

1. Link to your pages with one format only, meaning that you should link to your home page with http://www.domain.com only and never use different version of the link like http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com/index.html and so on. Same goes for all of your inner pages.
2. If you have an existing website, and you’ve already linked to other pages with different link formats, check what version of the link has the highest PR, if you http://domain.com has a higher PR, use that version in your links, and setup a 301 redirect from any other versions your using to the version with the highest PR, that way any PR value will be transfered to the highest PR page with the next PR update.
3. Use the keywords your targeting for each page as the link whenever you link to it from another page, allot of websites link to inner pages with click here, or more information, thats just a waste of value that you could be transferring to those inner pages.

Robots.txt

Some argue that robots.txt is no longer important, some search engines no longer use, but others still do, and it wont harm to add a robots.txt file and block spiders from indexing unwanted file, you can also block any archive folders from being indexed and risk the penalty of duplicate content, although according to this video on Webpronews Google no longer has a penalty on duplicate content, but others may still do.

A recent post on linkbuildingblog.com covered the topic of robots.txt in more detail, you can read it here.

I just found this piece of interesting news while I was browsing around before heading off to bed:

 ” ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) – A Turkish court ordered access to YouTube’s Web site blocked today after a prosecutor recommended the ban because of videos allegedly insulting the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. “

I immediately started wondering after reading the news about the whether would this court order actually limit people inside Turkey who already visit youtube from accessing youtube by other means? proxies are available and its never been easier to head to one of those 1000’s of free web proxies and access any blocked site, I do believe that anyone in Turkey that has never visited youtube before would be more likely to try and visit the site by any means possible.

Would the court order effect youtube? I doubt it, according to Internet World Stats, there are 10,220,000 internet users in Turkey, how many of those use youtube? I have no idea but I would bet that it wont effect youtube’s stats, it would however be interesting to see youtube’s reaction to this if there will ever be one in the 1st place.

Another side to this news relates to Turkey’s strong and persisting efforts to join the EU, this is yet another reason for the EU to refuse or delay adding Turkey to the quickly expanding EU.

You can read the full news article here.

Sorry for not posting in about a month, I’ve been extremly busy with the 2 projetcs I mentioned in my previuos post, and with other projetcs as well, online and offline.

Money4Action.com

The biggest major update that I have is the launch of www.money4action.com I’ve mentioned the website before under the name M4A, the website is basically a “get paid to” website, you sign up for sponsored offers and make money in return, the model is well known I guess, its been around for a while now, but surprisingly these websites actually do make good money, M4A made around $350 in revenue in the 1st 2 days of the launch (profit is another story), I’ve partnered in this project with Paul Lynch, a good friend of mine and the current owner of www.talkhomebusiness.com (yeah he’s the one that bought it from me)

I am currently using 3 CPA networks in the website, Azoogleads, Maxbounty and CPA Empire, I’ll be adding more offers from CPA Storm and Coapeac ASAP.

Web Hosting Directory

The webhosting directory project is going fine, a bit slower than what i hoped, it took me sometime to find a coder for it, I sent him the PSD 2 days ago and he should be started by now, I cant share the design just yet, that would reveal the idea behind it, all I can say that its a web2.0 hosting directory, unlike any other hosting directory you see online now. I am planning a huge advertising campaign with Imad for this project as soon as its launched, this would probably include a banner AD on every hosting forum you can recall.

Proxies

I’ve changed the 2 most popular proxies I’ve got to CGI proxy instead of phproxy, CGI is way better in combating hot linking and it consumes less memory and CPU usage, I would recommend anyone with a proxy eating up your server resources to use CGI Proxy.

PPC Arbi

I haven’t really started yet, I’ve created a good number of Arbi pages though, I cant wait to get started and drive traffic to those pages ASAP, I am planning to use Ad center to get the traffic, I might also try 7search and searchfeed, setting up the campaigns for each page is time consuming, thats why I’ve been putting it off for the past month. My next post will hopefully have an update on how the arbi is going.