Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Quick update on the new blog network I am building with Charl, it turns out the the initial salary we were thinking of wasn’t enough for most bloggers (the experienced ones) so we had to increase the monthly payment and remove any revenue share options.

The 1st blog in the network is going to be a gadget related blog, we registered the domain and the design for the 1st blog should be ready soon, due to the fact that we had to raise the blogger’s salary, were currently thinking of launching only 3 blogs instead of 5 and focus on them only until they are well established.

The original plan was to launch 50+ blogs in 2008,  but we’ve decided to launch a lower number (around 20) and have them well established, that’s way better than a larger number of lower quality blogs (in terms of content and traffic).

That’s all for now, I will share a mockup of the new blog skin as soon as I get it.

Thats right, I finally got my 1st Facebook app online, I’ve been wanting to do this a while ago but time didnt help much in the past month.

Your probably wondering what the app is about, well its really a simple application that I and a friend launched, it aims to gather support for Japan’s dolphins, did you know that 22,000 dolphins are killed in Japan, and its completely legal to do that! I 1st saw the news about this on The Insider, they covered the story and included some secret videos that were taken by the Save Japan’s Dolphins organization which aims to rally support of this cause and hopefully eventually putting a stop to this massacre.

The application displays a small box on your profile which includes a small msg. to explain what the app is about and invites you to display this ribbon on your profile:

Hollywood stars like Hayden Panettiere (the Hero’s star) and Matt Damon were among the people that gathered support for this casue, the insder website (link above) has some videos about there visit Japan where the killings take place.

[tags]facebook app, dolphins, Japan’s dolphins[/tags]

I’ve partnered with my good friend Charl to create a new blog network other than the network I personally own (currently at 45 blogs), the main difference between the 2 networks is with the new blog network, there will be a blogger dedicated for each blog, writing on a daily basis, myself and Charl wanted to start a project together a long time ago but sadly we didnt find the time to do so.

Charl currently owns around 5 blogs that are doing very well, with our combined efforts were hoping to build 50 strong blogs in the course of 2008 if not more.

So, were currently on the lookout for bloggers in the following topics:

1. Gadgets blog
2. TV shows blog (LOST, prison break)
3. Tech blog (IT news, web2.0, social networks)
4. Football blog
5. Games blog (wii, xbox, PS3)

If your experienced in any of these topics and your available to make at least a post per day, please do contact me, were offering a monthly payment + revenue share. Don’t expect big numbers, were only starting out!

While researching the idea of building a network, I came across the below resources which have been extremely useful, and I share them with you in the hope that you find them useful as well:

• Introduction to blog networks
• 46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network
• How to Launch a blog network
• How to advertise for a blogger

I’ll be posting frequent updates on this new venture, and give out as many tips as possible while we go through the process of building the new network, So stay tuned!

[tags]blog network, launching a blog network, how to launch a blog network[/tags]

Check it out, custom made! logo is still being fixed so that the url of the site is clearer, its also linked to the main site.

Sorry guys, its been a while since I last updated the blog, I haven’t gone on vacation or anything, just busy with my projects, faye3.com has been taking most of the time especially after the partnership with Maktoob.com, were working on a complete revamp of the website and the addition of some pretty cool features.

I’ve launched a couple of new websites, small ones, nothing major, ill post updates about them in my next (hopefully soon) update, I am also planning for a couple of new projects that will hopefully see the light soon, they are still in planning so I am not releasing any more details about them at this stage.

Everything else has been going pretty well, myself and Imad are planning a new marketing push for WH-D which has been well over due, we havent had the chance to properly market the website as we initially planned, both of s gfot tangled in their own projects and havent had the chance to carry out those plans.

Thats all for this quick update, thanks for all of you have visited the blog and waited for updates during the past month! I will post another update soon!

Finally after much delay and lots of hard work, www.faye3.com is now online in its Beta release, faye3 is an Arabic word (a bit Jordanian) which is called to someone who is “cool”

Registration will be open for some time on the website before we turn the website to be invitation based, so register an account now!

Faye3 has lots of cool features, to name a few:

1. User profiles, full;y customizable, you can also use the myspace layouts out there and our system will apply it!
2. Personal Blogs
3. Personal image gallery with public/private options for your images.
4. MSN/Yahoo/AOL/Outlook address book grabber (easy invites)
5. Nudges
6. Horoscopes
7. Fully WAP enabled!
8. Find the rest out yourself!

This is the BETA release, so please don’t mind any minor issues (if any) here and there, we will be opening a blog under Faye3 soon to post all the Faye3 related updates on.

Thats about it for now, I will be posting frequent updates on how this youg social network does, the concept of social networking is still new to some people in this region and so is anything web2.0 related, so its going to be an exciting ride and I look fwd. to it!

PR update settled down and here are the results on my main websites:

1. Premiushosting.com PR5 -> PR4
2. wh-d.com PR0 -> PR5
3. sohaibthiab.com steady at PR5
4. Funnyvideohub.com PR3-> PR4
5. Wallpaperfreedom.com PR1-> PR3
6. Money4action.com PR0 -> PR3
7. Myspacelounge.net PR1 -> PR4

Most websites increased in PR besides premiushosting, this was a good update.

Selling Myspacelounge.net 

I am currently looking to sell the arcade, its currently getting around 1000 unique visitors per day, and its increasing, website has some excellent rankings, for full details, check out my thread on WHT here.

This is sort of a quick update, don’t have much time for a fully fledged update, I am planning out 4 new projects, some are still in the research phase, others i started working on, phase 1 of project F is finally coming to an end, wh-d will also be launched soon, you can see it online right now but its still being tested and bugs ironed out, might be another week before I start marketing it.

I sold Post4hosting 2 days ago, yep, I finally did it, I had that site for over 2 years, one of the longest websites I’ve ever owned, its now in the hands of someone who hopefully will grow the community even more and harness the full potential of the website.

Thats about it I guess for this quick update, I’ll post another one when I have more news, I am also planning to post a PPC Arbi tutorial once I am done testing around some campaigns and have some solid results.

I’ve spent this whole weekend working on my sites and just wishing the day would extend for a few more hours, time tends to slip by when you mostly need it, so what have I been up to you ask?

Project F

Currently the main project I am working on and have been working on for the past 4 months, the project seems to stretch every time I think its going to end, I received the last html page for this phase of the project, I had a very hard time finding a coder to finish the last set of PSD’s, I hired around 3 coders and all fell through, the last coder I hired from rentacoder.com and he did an awesome job in a timely fashion, from now on, any html/css jobs that I need will go to my coder over there.

I think its time to give a little hint on what project F is, well a very little one, its a social networking project, a large one, I’ve got lots of unique ideas for the website and everything has to be well thought of for this website to grow to the size of what I am planning for, the website will hopefully be a big player in the social networking industry in a few moths of its launch, as I said, this is the biggest website that I’ve worked on, its taking lots of time and money, but it hopefully will be worth it.

Web Hosting Directory

Wh-d.com is going fine, I received an email from Jonathan (the coder I hired for the job) 2 days ago with some good news, apparently he ran into some programming problems that he was able to fix later on, so thats good, hopefully the website will be up by the end of this week. Hopefully I say!

Blog Network

I’ve spent most of the time this weekend building a new blog network which will be mainly used for link building purposes, I’ll be setting up each patch of blogs on a different c class ip, its not a good idea to have them all on the same c class ip for Google’s sake.

Network website

I’ve have a design laying around for a while now, I bought this design from talkfreelance, I don’t like having unused PSD’s, so I sent it to a regular coder that I usually use and I got the html/css for 3 days ago, I am still thinking of a name for the network, I’ve got a couple of names in mind but nothing set yet, any suggestions?

Post4hosting cleanup + possible sale

I spent around 3 hours yesterday going through all of the hosting accounts under post4hosting and suspended around 90 accounts! most were inactive and others had unlicensed scripts, I usually do this kind of clean up every 3 months or so, I guess 3 hours every 3 months isnt that bad, anyways, I’ve been thinking of selling post4hosting, I barely have the time for the website but the main reason is that I’ve had this website for a very long time and I am no longer attached to it, I would like to see it in other hands that will work and grow the community, the forum is really picking up now with nearly 55 new posts per day and 5 new forum members per day.

I’ve spent some good time optimizing the website and now it has excellent ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN for very competitive keywords, if your interested in the website and would like more details, please do content me and leave a comment and ill get back to you with more details.

Matt Cutts Blog hacked!

Well this has nothing to do with me :p but I was surprised today when I opened up page flakes and read the title of this post on Search Engine Land, apparently, Darkseoteam hacked the website, there is a post about this on their blog as well.

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.