The Blog Of Oussama Messaoud - Ways to make money online -

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After a few days of thinking (diversity or focus), the decision is made : FOCUS! I started working on my monetization programs messaoud.info and decided to keep the following :

Google AdSense
TTZ Media
Project Wonderful
Widget Bucks
Kontera
Banstex
AdToll
Scratch Back

Focusing on these programs will allow a better control of the blog, lighter page loads, and a nittier design on which I am still working, removing the big skyline header, and opting for a simpler use of colors.

To compensate and exceed what was generated by the removed program, I am adding 3 other direct sources of revenue :
- Direct Ad Sales : 125×125 buttons costing $7/month. These come with a FREE 7 Day Trial offer.
- Stripe Ad Sales : Text Links on the Stripe visible on the top of the screen for $5/month. These come with a FREE 2 Day Trial offer.
- Paid Reviews : These are sold directly too.  $15/review.
More details on the Advertize Page.
I think it is the right time to start selling Direct Ads, since the blog is now PR2 and Alexa ranking is starting to go down again (it reached 300,000 at some point, and then I had the hosting issue, and it started to go up). As Jay, from DatMoney says : “I am one of the biggest procrastinators”. Now it’s time to get things going and get this blog to generate some more money after the time spent on getting traffic. I won’t go the porn way, Jay, but I will put some more efforts on generating more and more interest around the blog : more quality posts with more frequency, more socializing, and many sleepless nights.

More to come in the next days. And hey, I forgot to tell you that I set up a new Contact Form, so don’t hesitate to share or ask questions.

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

It’s been quite some weeks that I am seeing “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.” on my WP admin. The reason is that the first time I saw that link and clicked, the instructions I’ve read on the upgrade process just made me feel #@%$^:s. It seemed like a real pain with all those files to be overwritten, others that you should pay attention not to overwrite, all the manual desactivation and reactivation of plugins, the maintenance time, etc. etc.

Since then, I’ve been ignoring that link I see every time I am up to blogging. It is calling me and screaming at me, but I try not to look it in the eye.

Today, I said to myself : I am sure some guy/gal thought of coming up with a way to automate that. I googled the issue and came across Keith Dsouza’s techie-buzz.com. He has a plugin named Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I didn’t try it yet although it seems to be the best plugin ever, and most people are very happy with it if we believe all the comments. However, a little minority seem to have some issues, so I am not taking the extra step yet, fearing to finish up in the minority group, or even more serious, screw something up in my blog.

Anyone tried the plugin? Anyone has some advice on how to upgrade WP with the least of pain? I am really fed up with that link in the middle of my admin pages.

Since a lot of our fellow bloggers are talking about it, I won’t talk about BidVertiser and its new program of RSS ads, especially that I didn’t write a post for 3 days now.

However, I will talk about a new change that will happen in this blog very soon (maybe today) : I am removing AdSense. I took this decision after reading this excellent article from CourtneyTuttle.com.I will keep AdSense on other websites I own and that have a fair enough CTR, and remove it from those who have a low rate. This blog unfortunately belongs to the second group and I will be replacing by Bidvertiser for the moment. At least, they have a low minimum payout and even if CTR is low, I can get my money quite quickly. I will see how it turns out with them, and then decide if I keep them or if I sell those spaces privately.

I also am happy today to notice a new improvement in my Alexa Rank Now I am in the Top 700,000. The RSS subscriptions are also getting slowly better. Seems like I’m on my way to hit the 2008 target!

Yyyyyyeees ! Less than a month after the official launch of The B.O.O.M under messaoud.info, we are for the first time of our history ranked in the first million sites in Alexa! Boy it feels good to see only six figures in that Alexa Traffic Rank. As of today, we have a traffic rank of 958,117. This is a great start for 2008! And this makes me add an extra goal for the year: finish it in the top 20,000 sites . I have no idea whether this is realistic or not, but I will do all that is humanly possible to achieve the goal.

It’s been 3 weeks since messaoud.info launched as the new version of “The BOOM (aka The Blog Of Oussama Messaoud)”, and we’re already celebrating a new year. So I will try to sum 2007 up and see what we can learn out of it!

So the first thing will be a graphic about traffic in 2007 :

The most evident conclusion is that the launch of messaoud.info domain with my own hosting plan, gave a new breath to the blog. I must admit that it was also due to a change in the attention and time I personally gave to promoting the blog. This is encouraging to see how results are starting to appear.

Then, some figures about money made online using this blog during 2007 :
- Google AdSense : $73.33 ($24.81 in the last quarter alone), which means that it is starting to bring more and more regular income.
- Income4beginners free e-book : $40
- Mobile customization site : 19 EUR
- Dollars For Life : $6
- Zlio : 2.7 EUR
- Few other PTRs and PTCs : few cents
- Kontera (joined 1 month ago) : $0.21
- TTZ Media (joined 3 weeks ago) : $0.15
- Scratchback, Commission Junction, TextLinkAds, WidgetBucks: Just started to use those, no revenue yet.

Which rounds up to almost $145 $150 (Update after adding Zlio) for 2007. That’s $12 per month. Quite ridiculous right? But hey, this is without counting that except the last month, the rest of the year. I didn’t make much effort. So the potential is huge!

Looking forward to 2008 for new challenges and new goals. Stay tuned for the 2008 goals post.

Ok, so here we go : A new domain and my own hosting. From now on, my blog will be at this adress.
Please make sure to subscribe to the new feed, since the old one will not work anymore.

Here is a quick link for the RSS feed : http://feeds.feedburner.com/messaoud/CLrx

I am excited, and ready for the new experience. This is the second change in less than 2 weeks. But I promise this will be the last

The previous period was for me a time of evaluation as far as my blogging activity was concerned. I was totally reconsidering my way of using this blog and its future direction. I must admit that it was a total mess during the last months with a lot of “try and test”.

I decided that it was time for a new beginning. I sorted out (and am still doing it) what I wanted to keep in my blog and what wasn’t necessary, and I thought that a great way of emphasizing the new direction is to start over with a new look/template.

I spent the whole night transferring from the old to the new template and I think a big part of the work is done, although I think I will finish sometime tomorrow since I need some sleep and that it’s 4:45 AM local time.
It already looks prettier. Moreover, the problems I used to have with Internet Explorer are now solved.

I am looking forward for a great new blogging adventure.

Stay tuned !

Oooof !! What a relief.

Finally RegisterFly, my former registrar, lost the case in court and all the domain names were recovered and transfered to GoDaddy (at different stages of the process).
It was a long waiting period, but it fortunately ended happily.

Now www.p-likepixels.com (the site where you can have free pixels to advertize your web site) is back online. I just sent the email to the users telling the happy news.

So enjoy it.

In the meanwhile, I will go and make sure all other domains finished transferring.

So, some more “pissing-me-off” stuff. My domain names’ registrar RegisterFly has some big problems with ICANN. Theit CEO screwed up big time, using the company’s money for liposuccion or whatever crazy stuff he thought he’d do. So the company has no money, doesn’t answer support tickets and barely answers the phone. They also do not allow renewing domains. A total mess.
So among other domain names : messaoud.info expired.

The good news is that ICANN is aware of this and customers of RegisterFly will not lose their domains once RegisterFly loses its accreditation (in progress), and all the domains will be bulk transferred to another ICANN accredited registrar. Only then messaoud.info will be back online.

Until then, you still can access my blog using this address : http://messaouden.blogspot.com

I am really sorry for the inconvenience.

Next week is going to be a key week for the future of my company. We are organizing a big seminar on Web 2.0 (the first to be held in Tunisia) and I am living and breathing it these days.
It is called TuniWeb 2.0, here is the website (fr).
Fingers crossed for me !!