Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Its been a long time since I did any updates on my blog and installed any new plugins and since I am seriously back to blogging now, I thought its time to upgrade my wordpress installation to the latest 2.9 version.

I will be posting monthly or bi-monthly blog update posts depending on the activity that takes place on my blog, I will be noting down Feed subscribers, traffic and blog revenue and any other updates such as plugin installations.

RSS Feed Subscribers

I added the feedburner chicklet today, and as you can see I only have 3 RSS subscriber, lol, on my defense, I haven’t been a constant blogger for along time, and I never really focused on promoting my blog or encouraging readers to subscribe to it, but all of that is going to change! why? well one part of it is that I plan to be way more active on my blog, secondly i am going to start a blog contest!

The blog Contest

The contest is very simple, signup to my RSS feeds and get a chance to win one of the following:

• $50 prize sent to your paypal account.
• Any template if your choosing from ThemeForest.
• 6 months free shared hosting account on any of their plans from my good friends at  MellowHost.
• 3 Link placement on any of the u4media blogs for 2 months, free!

More prizes might be added if I get any friends to sponsor it, if anyone is interested, shoot me an email.

Note: The contest will be running for 2 weeks. You need to leave a comment on this post to be entered and contacted if you won.

Blog Updates and plugins

As I mentioned above, I just upgraded my blog  to the latest wordpress version, its always best to update your blog right when a new version is out, simply because a new version is released either because there was an exploit that was found and fixed or there was a new feature or enhancement that was added, in either case you should install the latest version right away.

In other updates I added Mybloglog to the sidebar, I’ve been along time member at Mybloglog and I’ve had their widget on my old theme, but I didn’t add it again when I switched themes.

I also installed a number of very useful plugins that I would like to share with you:

1- TweetMeme

You may have noticed that retweet button added to each post, this very useful since it allows your readers to quickly retweet your content, its always a good idea to make it easier for people to share your content, you can download the Tweetmeme plugin here.

2- Comment Relish

This was a plugin recommended by PluginId, what it does is send an email to people who comment on your blog for the 1st time, usually thanking them for commenting and encouraging them to signup to your blog, feeds or email newsletter, you can download comment relish here.

While making sure of the download page I came across a blog post on Siteguide that gives 3 reasons against using comment relish, while blogs such as Problogger recommend this plugin, each side has a good view on things but I still think its a very good plugin especially if you keep the email it sends simple, not annoying and not too needy.

3- Add to any

Just as the Tweetmeme button is a good idea, these share/save buttons you see at the end of each post is a great idea as well, it makes  sharing your posts and content much easier for your readers, which is always beneficial for you. The plugin allows users to share your content on more than 50 social bookmarking/networking websites,  you can download the Add to any plugin here.

4- Enhanced WordPress contact form

As you can guess from the name, this plugin adds a nice contact form for your blog, its installation is extremely easy, it literally took me 3 minutes to install it and update my contacts page, you can download the plugin here

5- My Top Commentators

This plugin is only viewable in the admin side, where it displays the top commentors on your blog, very useful to find out who they are, you can view them based on a number of time frames, today, last 7 days, this month, this year etc. installing it is also very easy. You can download Commentators here.

I’ve recently registered at CPAlead and i started testing it out, I’ve seen numerous websites on sale that generate revenue through CPALead, the concept is very simple, your website members or visitors fill out a survey for either access to a premium area or to view certain content and you make money out of the survey, the payout depends on the survey and on the country your members come from.

The majority of the top paying offers are targeted for  the US market, but you can still find surveys for almost all countries so you can monetize your websites no matter where you traffic comes from, pay outs range from $0.25 to $30 in some cases!

My idea is to give our members on our games the opportunity to get premium memberships through means other than paying money out of their pocket, allot of members will certainly appreciate it since not all of them are able to pay real cash, of course what they get in return might not be as good as those who pay in real cash simply because some sruveys dont pay as much.

The part that i still need to figure out, still waiting on a reply from CPAlead on that is whether they have an API that we can use in order to credit members once they filled out the survey and to know the amount that each survey pays out in order to do a calculation on how much premium days the member gets since each survey varies allot in its payout, the good thing however is that cpalead automatically geo-targets the survey to whoever is viewing it, so we dont have to worry about building a system to do that, which would have been allot of work!

I am glad to inform you that Medievilwars was reviewed in one of the top online gaming magazines, Thirteen1 which is an online gaming magazine which you can read the full contents of the magazine online!

Its a very interesting concept if you ask me, its the 1st magazine that I saw so far that provides its full contents on the web, they also have an interviews section and an active forum.

You can check out the detailed review here, btw the game got a score of 10 out of 13 which is pretty cool!

Below are screen shots of the 2-page review.

Time for another speed linking post, I remembered to post this today after reading a bunch of good articles this week, hope you find them useful.

• What Is the Outlook for Paid Video Content? Emarketer
• Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality, Search Engine Land
• The Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year – 2009 Edition, Evancarmichael
• Why SEO is Easier than Social Media Marketing, Techipedia
• Facebook’s Latest Controversy – New Privacy Changes Violate Policy?, Rev2
• Linkable Asset Inventory: A Starting Point For New Link Building Campaigns, Search Engine Land

Enjoy!

I was thinking of what my next post should be, and I decided to share some images for our offices in Amman, I took these images from my mobile phone so they are not of extreme how quality!

Our logo and main office entrance!

The guys working !

More guys working and our whiteboard!

And finally our meeting room

The office space is quickly diminishing so were actually thinking of expanding the space in the coming months, these sort of issues are new to me and anyone else that is used to work from home or working at a company,  anyways hope you enjoyed the images!