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.

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.

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.

Finally! the new Mafiacorruption has been launched after an unexpected delay for a week, we’ve been working on the new version of the game for months now and I am extremely excited about it going live, the new version of the game has been launched under server 3 which is a brand new fresh server. The updates will later be moved to server 1 and server 2.

The new version comes with a complete revamp of the old design, a home with flash animation and around 12 custom designed pages inside the game which I’ve worked with the designer on for around a month, this is totally new for us in our games and in most other games that are similar where we would usually design a home page and an inner page only.

Beside the new design the game comes with a number of new features such as a custom coded merit system, ranking system inside the game and advanced search features along with updated features in the gangs.

Lets go through the major updates shall we?!

The home page!

Here is a preview of the old home page…

And here is the new home page, check it out live to see the animation.

As I mentioned the home page was only one of 12 other pages that were designed for the game, here is a preview of the old profile page:

And here is the new profile page which now displays more information about the member as well as displays his awards and rank which are two new features added to the game.

And the old inventory page:

And the new inventory page, other than the nice new look, you can drag and drop your weapons and armor from the right hand side in certain locations, the character that represents you also changes depending on what character you selected when registering to the game.

This has been a long awaited launch and was a good chance to do some house cleaning, our server admin moved the main server from mafiacorruption.com to s1.mafiacorruption.com and mafiacorruption2.com which was server 2 to s2.mafiacorruption.com so this made mafiaocrruption.com as the portal page from the game where you can login to any server you want from.

We will soon be moving to Hitmanslife and implementing a similar structure and updates to it with more features as well to differentiate it from Mafiacorruption.com

I picked up a website a couple of days ago from flippa which is bascially a similar website to flippa, sitebidding.com allows you to post your websites and domain names for sale, however it has a cheaper price to add a listing, further more it offers the option for the buyer to send the payment to sitebidding paypal address where the funds will remain until the buyer confirms receiving the files/domains in which case the payment will be released to the seller.

I am not sure if I am going to keep this feature or not, clearly this will need allot of daily work as well as being a big responsibility, I am going to make a decision about this later, however my plan is to revamp the current design and layout of the website and look into marketing and promotional methods, if marketed well and the fact that posting is free on the website, an edge over other websites such as Flippa will be present, I have high hopes of turning the website around and be a big success, lets see how that goes…

Its been a while since I did any affiliate marketing, close to 2 years actually, I’ve recently decided to get back to it and see what I can achieve in this field, I haven’t been a big affiliate marketer to be honest, which is another reason why I want to get back to it and see what I can do.

The other reason is that I like to diversify my income, right now most of my income comes from the online gaming business, which is great but its always better to add other income streams, thats why I also reactivated u4media and I’ve been pushing it strongly in the past weeks, I will be announcing the launch of the network real soon, but I honestly don’t expect much revenue from it, especially at the beginning, in the contrary I will need to spend lots of money marketing it, the more the reason why I need to increase my revenue sources.

I’ve decided to use some products at Clickbank to begin with, I ill be creating small websites (1-4) pages each for each product, I’ve selected one product so far, my plan is to create at least 5 websites during the upcoming 4 weeks, do some link building for each and probably some PPC advertising and test conversions and take it from there. I will probably be using products from Azgooleads as well, its been a very long time since I contacted my Azoogle AM, my AM was changed numerous times and I remember recieving emails about it each time, I just searched my gmail and emailed the most recent one asking for product suggestions.

A big reason why I deiced to try it out was the cloud living ebook that Glen wrote and which I bought a couple of weeks ago, I am very excited about this new test and I will be posting details about one of the websites and how its going.

The updated home page for Hitmanslife went online 2 days ago, it was around 3 weeks ago that we launched the new home page but what we agreed on doing is updating it with flash animations, the home page now looks way more attractive and will hopefully lead to more conversions in terms of registrations.

A new profile page for members and a new inventory page went live with the new home page, the inventory page is a total revamp of the older one with way more features and drag and drop features of the weapons in your inventory. Below is a preview of the new profiles:

I received the preview of the new design that my partner is working on today, and boy was I impressed, the new theme is going to be an excellent move towards the revamp I talked about earlier, this theme is way fresher and I just love it. Check out the below low quality preview!

Of course the network home revamp isnt just a pretty design, lots of new updates are going in the design such as member profiles and a social networking system.

On another note, I currently have 87 followers on twitter, which isnt bad in my opinion considering for being there for 5 days, twitter is a great marketing tool so far with lots of potential however its filled with spam, which brings me Twitblock, you can learn more about their service on this Rev2 review,  basically it helps allot with clearing spam profiles in your twitter follower list. Hope it helps you get rid of the spam in your twitter account!