Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Ok, so the blog contest is over and its time to announce the winners of the 4 prizes, but before I do that, lets the effect of the blog contest on my blog traffic and RSS subscribers.

Before starting the contest, I had exactly 3 RSS subscribers and I currently have 44 RSS subscribers, thats 41 new RSS readers, not bad I guess, I was hoping for a bit more, I am still way behind my yearly goal of reaching 2000 RSS readers.

The blog contest post received 45 comments, and 36 contestants, some have blogged about the contest as well. This has plaid a big role in increasing the traffic on my blog, below is a screen show of last month’s traffic stats.

Not all of this growth can be attributed to the contest alone, I did place some banners on two blogs to jump start the contest as well.

Ok, now its time to reveal the winners, I took some images while preparing for the selection of the winners.

Names of the contestants written on paper

All the names in a bole

The 4 winners!

And here they are:

Winner 1 ($50): I heart contest

Winner 2 (Theme forest): Mhaye

Winner 3 (6 months free hosting): Marshal Prince

Winner 4 (Links): Manan Saini

I will be contacting the winners by email to arrange for the prizes, if you dont get an email from me today please do contact me.

Its time for another speed linking post where I share the top articles and blog posts that caught my attention, hope you find them useful as I did.

The Big List: 2010 Marketing Predictions & Resolutions – Search Engine Land

Grasping This Concept Will Massively Impact Your Life – PluginID

30 Fast Life SEO Tactics/Techniques for 2010 – Seoptimise

AOL and Mashable in Talks? Rumor Says Mashable May Be Bought – Rev2

What’s Working for Social Media Marketers? – Emarketer

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over – Readwriteweb

I think that its very important to set your yearly goals, this is the 1st time that I set and write down my yearly goals to be honest, on one side this keeps reminding you and pushing you to achieve what you thought you could achieve at the beginning of the year.

Raising the value of Wizards Productions to $10 million

Wizards Productions is my the main business i am working on and have been working on for the past 2 years after the merger with Go3 Media, the goal is a bit bold but I believe it is achievable, we will see if we can make it.

Raising my RSS subscribers to 2000

I currently have 36 feed subscribers, I had only 3 readers when I started my RSS blog competition 5 days ago, I believe that jumping to 2000 readers is a bit high but I certainly think it is achievable.

Launching Site bidding and establishing it as one of the top Website marketplaces

I bought Sitebidding months ago and didnt really have the time to work on it, but I did change its design recently, allot more work still needs to be done, the original company that coded the site were horrible to work with, simple changes took weeks to be done, thats why I am on the look for another company, I contacted Interberry after a recommendation from Tyler and I think I’ll be moving ahead with them soon.

I will be posting more details about the progress of Sitebidding on a regular basis in the coming weeks.

Grow U4media’s blog network

U4media currently has 5 blogs under it, my goal is to hit 30 blogs by the end of this year, these are all blogs with content writers behind them and not auto blogs, I am not going to set any traffic or revenue goals for them right now but I am hoping that the network would generate around 1 million page views per month.

I am going to use my limited design skills and try and do a desktop background with the headlines of these goals and use it as a desktop background on my laptop, this should remind me on a daily basis about my goals and push me to achieve them!

What about you? have you set your goals for this year?

Since I finished updating my blog 2 days ago and already had all the files downloaded and the process laid out, I thought I should go ahead and update the blogs under U4media, I spent around 2 hours this morning doing so, which was mainly upgrading all of them to the latest WordPress installations and installing a few needed plugins that I mentioned in my previous post.

While installing the updates and checking Google Analyics like I usually do each morning, I noticed that all of the blogs are reporting 0 visits for the past 5-6 days, which didn’t make any sense, I quickly realized that I didn’t add the Analytics code on the new themes that the blogs were recently changed to.

This was a good chance to try the new asynchronous tracking code that Analytics is currently providing, the main difference between the new and the old code is that the new code is placed at the end of the <head> section instead of placing the old code at the end of the <body> section, thus supposedly it should be providing more accurate stats.

If you check some of these blogs such as Truth Daily which is a political blog, you will notice the pretty good theme its using, this reminds of me of sharing the best 3 WordPress themes resources I found and usually use when I am looking for a high quality theme quickly and at an affordable price.

Woothemes is definitely one of favorite WordPress themes sites, their designs are of excellent quality, and the best part is that they give out some of their best designs for free, which is always a good marketing tactic, it got me to mention them in this post didnt it?  their our paid designs are very affordable as well considering that you get an extra theme for free! Woothemes is one Adii’s projects, Adii customized one of his themes for my around 2 years ago. And I just love it!

OBox Design are my 2nd favorite source for high quality WordPress themes, however they have only one free theme and less than 10 themes for WordPress, other themes are available at a very good price and they also offer themes for Tumblr and Posterous.

Elegant Themes gives you the best bang for your buck, you get to download all of their great wordpress themes for only $19.95 and they have almost 30 themes that work for almost any kind of blog. I’ve been a member of their’s for almost a year, download around 5 designs and the great thing is that they add 1-2 new themes each month.