Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

WordPress released this new version 2 days ago which fixed a number of bugs in the earlier 2.3 version and also fixed an important security bug, I haven’t upgraded my WordPress installation in a while, I was running on 2.1 ! and I am glad no one tried to hack the blog! I was lucky but its always better to be safe than sorry!

Most of us delay upgrading their software and scripts because it either takes time or it slips your mind, today I came across a plugin that will help you upgrade your WordPress installation, actually it does it all for you, here is a list of its features:

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

I’ve used this plugin for this update and it worked like a charm, the whole thing took less than 3 minutes, it backed up the files and the database before starting the update process, uploaded the new files from the source and unzipped them, I was a bit worried about it deleting the custom themes I had but it didn’t.

Here is the link to download the automated wordpress upgrade plugin.

[tags]upgrade wordpress, update wordpress, automatic wordpress update[/tags]

Got an email a few days ago from Patrick Gavin of TLA with an invitation to Shoppingads.com which is currently in beta, Shoppingads is the new product from MediaWhich which previously acquired Auctionads, Shoppingads is based on a CPC model instead of the CPA model that Auctionads is based on, Patrick mentioned that avg. CPC is around $0.20 which is quite impressive if true.

Shoppingads says that they partnered with a number of online merchants to display their inventory, I’ve only seen Amazon products so far though.

Shoppingads offer the ability to either add your own keywords or let them recommend ads based on your website’s content, which some say isn’t very accurate till now, but I guess it is expected since the site is still in Beta.

Seems like a Google PR update is going on, but this one is mainly targeting sites that are obviously selling keyword rich links, there are some major sites seeing a big drop in their PR, I’ve noticed it this morning when visiting Tyler’s blog and saw that it dropped to PR3 from PR5, this is happening to lots of other websites such as:

• http://www.searchengineguide.com/ PR7 -> PR4
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ PR7 -> PR4

And many more, looks like Google is serious about stopping websites from selling links and they are definitly generating the kind of buzz after this update that would stop allot of websites from selling links, at least the big ones that are easily noticed for selling links, problogger.net and Johnchow.com also saw a PR decrease.

There is a thread on DigitalPoint discussing this new PR update,  allot of websites are seeing the effect while others haven’t been effected yet, the PR update is still going on so stay on look out.

In an earlier post I mentioned that Danny Sullivan confirmed that selling links may harm your PR, which apparently he was right about, so we shouldn’t be too surprised about this.

[tags]PR update, pagerank update, Google PR update[/tags]

Just a quick post to let Arabic publishers out there to know that the Adsense forums is now available in Arabic, Adsense recently started supporting the Arabic language probably after getting adequate constant stream of Arabic advertisers.

Arabic is spoken by over 323 million people worldwide as the 1st language so this is definilty a good addition that hopefully lots of Arabic publishers will benefit from.

Adsense started supporting Arabic websites using the search product only on August 2006,  and later on added the support for content ads. Adsense currently supports 30 languages.

[tags]Adsense forum, Arabic Adsense forum[/tags]

Making money online is really easier than some people think, of course it all depends on how much money were talking here, but pulling in some extra cash with not much effort or investment is pretty easy, today I’ll be giving a tip to those starting out fresh in this field, especially to those with limited budgets.

You might have heard about lots of people making lots of money money from blogging, there are many ways to do that, some take the network path, which is probably one of the best ways to get a nice large check at the end of the month, however building a blog network isn’t that easy, it requires lots of time and money, and for people starting out with working online, spending $1000 to setup a blog network isn’t always the preferred option.

So, how can you start making money out of blogging the easy way? 1st of all let me introduce you the concept of the concept that this method revolves around, allot of companies and website owners realize the value of a good post/link from a good blog, thats why services such as Payperpost and Review me popped up, those services basically connect advertisers with publishers (you) which basically means that all you need to do is setup a “good” blog and start earning some money.

Allot of advertisers base the value of your blog on:

1. Google PR
2. Alexa rank
3. Technorati rank

Most of these attributes are easy to gain, most of advertisers particularly look for PR (whether thats the right thing to do or not is a different topic) and there are two ways to increase your PR, the 1st one is setup a new blog on a new domain, build links to the website and wait for about 3 months for the next PR update, or you can buy a domain name that already has a PR and some authority, setup a blog on it and start blogging, a couple of places you can check out for expired domains are:

1. Dnforum
2. Namepros
3. Sitepoint

You can probably snatch a PR4 to PR5 domain for about $50 if you were quick enough to BIN it in time.

Its probably a good idea to write some content on your blog before applying to websites like PPP and Reviewme, Blogvertise.com is also another website you can check out, from my own calculations, you can make around $300 to $500 per month from one PR5 blog, especially if you build up its Alexa and technorati rankings, with more money coming in, you can afford to build links to your main blog, and when the time is right, setup another blog and so on, before you know it, you’ll have a large network of blogs pulling in some good $$$

You’ll eventually need a reseller hosting plan to host your blogs, but you can start off with a shared hosting plan that allows you to add a couple of addon domains to your main account.

You can always add more revenue models to your blogs by adding Google ads, Auction ads or whatever you want, the blogs will start getting search engine traffic by time so you might want to make some extra cash out of that too.

[tags]making money from blogs, blog reviews, money making blog, blog network[/tags]

According to Alexa, youtube gets more traffic than Myspace, how accurate is that? I cant bring myself to believe this kind of information, especially with the recent traffic information released by Comscore about Youtube doubling its traffic in May reaching 12.6 million visitors, while Myspace surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark in May, this is just another proof of how screwed up Alexa’s data is (below)

I came across widgetbucks.com (aff) from another website that I dont recall right now, my 1st impression of the website was good based on its looks, the concept is pretty new and unique, so I decided to register and check it out in more detail.

I haven’t tried the ad units on any websites so this is only an initial review, I would guess that CTR would be pretty high due to the look of their ad and the animation going on in it, not sure how well its going to be for usability though.

Creating a widget is pretty easy, widgetbucks took a different route in creating its ad units than other similar sites, you dont have to add each of your websites and then get the ad code for that website, you simple fill out a simple form which includes the url of the websites or web page that you will place the ad on, select the size (they need to add more sizes), color and select the category of your website OR let widgetbucks generate ads based on your website’s content, the accuracy of their ad targeting is yet to be determined!

Adding PPC services to Pagerankincrease.com

I had a discussion with my good friend Elias from Media Supermarket about a week ago regarding adding PPC services to Pagerankincrease.com which is something I’ve been planning to do for a while to extend the line of services that the site offered to something other than link building, Elias is a certified Adwords individual and has lots of experience in the PPC field, he’s the ideal partner to handle this new service offering and I am excited to start working with him.

I’ll be updating the website real soon to add this service.

Cleaned up the blogtoll!

I browseed through my blogroll links yesterday and noticed a number of deleted or dead blogs and so those were removed, if your blog is one of them and your back please let me know and I’ll put the link back up.

Welcome to my new blog skin! I finally managed to change the old free theme which surved me well tbh, this is a paid theme made by Adii, the original price for the theme is $79 but I changed a couple of things and removed a mod so it costed me a bit more, the theme is exactly what I was looking for besides the newpaper style home page which was the main thing that I changed.

If your starting out with blogging or have a limited budget for a blog design, you can customize a free theme, I’ve gathered a good number of websites that offer high quality free wordpress themes which you won’t find easily through searching Google, you can find those themes here, here, here, here and here.

Website Sale

A friend asked me to help him sell his website, so I am including it here, the website is an iphone blog with an excellent design and custom coded backend, the website features include:

• All custom PHP coding
• SEO PHP structuring
• Easy to use admin panel
• Current content on the website included
• PSDs for design and blog images included
• Note design included

Contatc me if your interested in the website, below is a screenshot. the website can be found here.

[tags]blog skin, wordpress themes, wordpress skins[/tags]

Well its confirmed now, Danny Sullivan confirmed the news, some high PR websites have seen a PR drop  after selling links on their pages, however this has’t effected the rankings of the website, but in the case of text-link-ads their website was de-indexed!

High PR sites such as The Stanford Daily  which has a PR9 and dropped to a PR8 have been clearly selling links, Google says those checks are made manually to make sure the website is selling links, this is good news, since most probably they will be checking high PR sites, but if you want to play it safe with Google, you better not sell links, I guess i’ll be removing the text-link-ads box on my blog this month, I am glad that I haven’t relied on selling links and that I am currently concentrating on CPM ads.

Talking of CPM ads reminds me to finish the post that I’ve had in my drafts for almost  a week now about the different monetization methods you can use for your sites, hopefully I’ll be posting it on the next couple of days.

[tags]text links, CPM ads, high PR sites[/tags]

Faye3.com received some excellent attention lately, it got reviewed in a number of newspapers and magazines, and it recently was featured in Eye On Technology which is Jordan’s Premier ICT Magazine.

Below are scanned images of the magazine’s cover page (faye3 is mentioned on the front page) as well as the 3 pages that covered faye3.com

I would like to take this opprtunity to thank Manal Sultan from Intaj for writing this article.