How to Make Money Onlinea blog by Sohaib Thiab

Just got back from a very long and hectic day at the forum, but a very productive one none the less, the panel discussions started at around 10am after 1 hour of the opening ceremony, panel discussions and presentations varied in different topics related to investment in technology, sadly thoughI forgot to charge my cameras battery so I wasnt able to take any pictures, but I’ll be doing so tomorrow.

I’ve met a number of interesting people in the VC and investment industry, some are justestablishing VC’s in the region, which was one of the biggest questions in the forum today, how can the region attract VC’s and also help develop the VC industry in the region.

The VC industry in the middle east is in its beginnings, we can even say that there is no VC industry in the region yet! which is bad news for entrepreneurs which have to rely on private investments and bank loans that always require collateral, however, due to the expected growth in the region, VC’s in the US and Europe are gaining more interest in the region, one of the presenters was a gentleman from a German based VC fund that are currently working on establishing a VC in the region, a Korean based VC firm also announced that they are establishing a VC firm in the region with a capital reaching $300 million, local VC startups originating from the middle east also participated in the forum, thats all great news for entrepreneurs in this region.

Today’s sessions ended with the announcement of the winners in the ASTF business plan competetion, I watched the 2 minute pitchesof each of the participants and I was glad to learn that some of them came up with ground breaking new technologies in the fields of search engines, mobile applications, and even in military applications and body armor, one specific invention grabbed my attention which is related to internet security, as in securing your online transactions which received the 4th place in the Intel and UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge among 1000 other business plans.

This was a quick run down of the forum events, tomorrow I’ll hopefully be able to post some pictures of tomorrows events and post some more details about today’s presentations.

Technorati Tags: investing in technology forum, VC’s, Intel, UC Berkeley, ASTF, investment, business plan

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.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, update wordpress, automatic wordpress update

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.

You may have noticed one major update, yes I’ve changed the website title and I am following the leads of bloggers like John Chow who’s targeting Make Money Online and Jon Waraas who’s targeting Make Money at Home (yes I feel generous and I am sending some link love) and I’ll be targeting two terms, “How to make money online” and Money Making Tips”

This decision haven’t been made easily as some of you may think,  I’ve thought about it allot, mainly because that I want to commit to any promises i give regarding giving out tips to help people make money online, and since I do want to be more active on my blog, I am willing to commit to this and do my best to give out useful tips.

Anyways, I am seriuosly considering getting a new blog skin that adds more content areas to the blog, maybe add more sections as well with some useful tools.

btw, if your linking to this blog, please do change the text you used to one of the two key phrases I mentioned above, if you have a blog and would like to exchange links, please do contact me.

I’ve also added blogrush widget in the side bar, not sure if it does a good job in sending traffic? but I’ve read some good reviews and noticed a good number of blogs using them so I thought I should try it as well.

Thats all for this update, I’ll be soon posting some images of a recent news article in Jordan’s no.1 ICT magazine about faye3!

Yes, I am dropping PPC ads on most of my sites and I am switching to CPM ads, I’ve worked yesterday on doing this transition on most of my sites, at least on the ones that get some decent traffic since most CPM ad networks require a min. amount of traffic on a certain site to accept you.

Since were talking about CPM ad networks, and if your thinking of trying any out, here is a list for some of the larger ones:

• Right Media, large network, owned by Yahoo, good payouts, http://www.rightmedia.com
• Value Click Media, heard their payouts have decreased allot, easier to get into than other networks, but dont take it for granted! http://valueclickmedia.com
• Tribal Fusion, good payouts, very hard to get into, http://tribalfusion.com/
• Casale Media, hard to get into, good payouts http://www.casalemedia.com/
• Burst Media, http://www.burstmedia.com

There are lots of other CPM networks which are smaller and easier to get accepted into, I am not a member in all of those networks so please excuse me for the lack of more in depth information.

I mentioned in my last quick post that I am going, along with Imad, to start marketing WH-D, well, we got a 728*90 banner designed from 20dollarbanners.com (best value for money banner design service so far) and placed it on a bunch of sites (webmaster related) and traffic started flowing right away, currently WH-D is getting around 700 uniques per day! and its growing, not many people are submitting listings/news though, which might be an issue with the design (feedback appreciated) which is something we’ll have to look into. Below are the recent stats for WH-D.

Speaking of website usability, I’ve been testing out an online heat map service which helps you visualize your traffic, where they are clicking etc. which has been very helpfull in finding some design flaws, I’ll be adding WH-D to the service in the upcoming couple of days, incase your interested in such a service, http://crazyegg.com is the website, it is a paid service, but you can test it out for free (limited number of visits) , there are also a free script that you can install which will produce a simple heat map for your page, but if your looking for advanced stats, crazyegg is the way to go.

Below is the official press release regarding the partnership between Faye3.com and Maktoob Group.

—————–

With the advent of the social networking phenomenon in the modern world of today, Maktoob.com (www.maktoob.com), the world’s largest and most popular Arabic online community, has paved the way with a huge move in one of the key areas of Web 2.0, by partnering with Faye3.com (www.faye3.com), the winner of this year’s Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC). The partnership promises to create the largest social network in the Arabic-speaking world that caters to the likes and tastes of Arab web users.
Speaking on this occasion, Samih Toukan, Chief Executive Officer of the Maktoob Group, commented: “social networking is an emerging phenomenon and today, the web is enabling everyone to create their own community based on their interests and locations. The platform aims at providing the tools for these active people. Maktoob is happy to pioneer the provision of the best tools which facilitate our dynamic social networking service.”

The Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC) is an annual competition that invites student teams from different universities to present a business plan for a technology-based entrepreneurial project of their choice. The QRNEC panel of judges includes specialists from Cambridge, MIT, and from several leading global companies.

Faye3.com team that won first place out of ninety-two participating teams at the QRNEC has been conceptualized by whiz-kids Sohaib Thiab and Hussam Hammo. Through it’s partnership with Maktoob.com, the website, which is in its beta phase, promises to be the first Arabic social network in the world that promotes topics and customs that operate in Arab society.

’Faye3’ is an Arabic colloquial term for “cool” or “hip” and this is exactly how we visualized the website would be,” explained Sohaib Thiab. “It is a dream-come-true for us to be working together with an organization as dynamic as the Maktoob Group. We’d like to invite just about everybody to become members of Faye3.com, to participate, make new friends, find long-lost ones and just have fun.”

Membership to Faye3 is free to all. Members can build up profiles, post their pictures and videos, make friends, create blogs, share private and public images.

Web 2.0 is popularized and perceived as the second generation of web based communities and services, such as social-networking, blogs and all types of user-generated content, which aim to facilitate collaboration among users.

Maktoob.com is transforming into a social website, providing several services, and will be much more than email and content. This will provide millions of members with the ability to expand their activities online and get to socialize.

About Maktoob.com:

Maktoob.com was founded in the year 2000 as the world’s first Arabic/English email service. In a few years, Maktoob has grown to become a full-service web portal, offering world-class communications and information tools that empower the Arab Internet user. More than just the best and most popular Arabic/English email service in the world, Maktoob.com offers everything from chat to discussion forums, from e-cards to mobile downloads, from news to the latest jokes and everything in between.

Maktoob’s main mission is to maintain and grow its position as the world’s leading Arab Internet portal by constantly offering its users a unique experience and by providing them with new services and products that encourage open communications and community building.

For more information about Maktoob, please visit http://www.maktoobgroup.com/maktoob_en.html
For further media information, please contact:

Nasir Iqbal
Headline Public Relations
Tel: 009714 – 2289655
Email: nasir@headlinepr.com

Technorati Tags: Faye3, Maktoob, Arabic Social Network

Great video that I picked up from Khalid’s blog, hope this serves as a motivation for all of us.

Following up on WH-D’s launch, the launch has been a great success so far, the website has generated some good buzz till now, and the marketing campaign I’ve planned for the website haven’t even started!

The press release has been mentioned in some big hosting news sites, such as:

WH-D Unveils Social Directory Site

WH-D.com Introduces First Ever Social Web Hosting Directory, Enters Web 2.0 Era

WH-D.com Introduces Social Web Hosting Directory

WH-D Unveils Social Directory Site

Dan Goron from Press Advance (he’s the media contact for the press release) told me that Devshed contacted him about a possible review for WH-D, which is great, I sure hope they do that review!

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.

The following post is a review for a new website that provides useful information on finding the best online saving account, this is a sponsored post, however I’ll be reviewing only quality websites that I find useful and think they will be useful for my readers.

The website is basically a guide to help you find the most suitable online savings account, it provides links and descriptions for websites offering those services, along with percentages of the returns those banks give, the website has a nice web2.0 look which I find appealing. You can also Compare online banking, find a savings account or checking account and earn more interest today with SavingsAccounts.com