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

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Winning won’t stop on messaoud.info. Today is Friday, and Friday is the day I announce the weekly winning RSS subscriber. This week, the prize is 1000 ECs, and the winner is : niceb…..y@gmail.com. Congrats!! I will send an email to the winner right now, and ask for the prize to be claimed. If claimed Monday or sooner, I will immediately transfer the 1000 ECs. If not, I will email the second in the list, and so on.

On another note, you may have noticed that I recently added a twitter counter, from twittercounter.com. It shows the number of your twitter followers (almost) real time. I say almost because as I write these lines, the counter shows 88, although twitter says I have 92 followers. 2 weeks ago, I had ONE follower. Yeah right, one! Here is the graph that shows the evolution over the last week (click to enlarge) :

What I did is pretty (I mean really, seriously, very very) easy and everyone can  start having more followers in twitter immediately. When I started the experiment, I received the first email notifying me of a new follower in the next 3 minutes!! It can take longer, but it will be nothing but quick.

Enough talking already. The trick is : You follow, you get followed. This is a general ststement. It is very true. Start following people, they will follow you. A big pourcentage will. But if you just starting following anyone on twitter, you may not get quick returns, and the rate will be fairly low. The thing here is to target people who will be interested by what you’re doing, and will more likely follow you if you do. So if you’re to start doing this, start by following those who follow the big names in your niche. If you are in MMO, Affiliate Marketing or something similar, follow the followers of ProBlogger, John Chow, Shoemoney. These people will follow you back. And they are those you want to follow anyway, since you have the same field of interest. The more you follow, the more you get followed, and you will also get a wider list of people you can socialize with, which brings you more exposure and increases your blog’s profitability. I personnally add 10 to 20 people daily to the list of those I follow and I get 7 to 8 new followers per day. I chose to go slowly because I think it’s better for interaction. You can choose to go faster and add 100 people to your list daily, but I don’t recommend it.

I would love to hear how it works out with you. If you choose to give it a try, please feel free to share your experience with us. If you have other tips, I’d love to hear them.

Hey everyone.

Just a quick reminder to let you guys know that 2 days are left for those who didn’t join my RSS contest yet, for a chance to win $10 in cash via paypal, or free advertizing. This is also for those who already joined, but want to add more entries and increase their chances. If you didn’t blog about the contest, didn’t refer someone, go do it and earn extra entries that can be decisive when the draw will be done. Deadline for joining is September 30th.

On another note, I added a FREEBIES section to my blog. This section will contain a list of freebies (e-books, applications, tools, etc.) that can help you market your blogs, get more traffic and learn techniques to maximize your profit online. I have a collection of free tools that I will use to populate that list. I started with 2 free e-books already and other freebies will follow. I am positive that this new section will become one of the most visited places of this blog in no time.

Please feel free to let me know what you would like to see in that section. What type of tools? Anything in particular?

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

I am going to need some Entrecard credits. I need a 1000 and willing to pay for those. The easiest way would be to go to my Entrecard Dashboard and buy some. Another way would be to go get some from ebay. But I am going to try to do it in a different way, with the set goal of getting them at the best price possible, by involving competetion.

You know how tenders work. When organisations need to buy something, they release an annoucement stating what they are looking for, and asking interested suppliers to send their offers. When it’s not too complicated and the product is simple, the least demanding supplier gets the deal.

I am going to do this experiment and see how good of a deal I can possibly get. For that, I am releasing the following announcement (hmm hmm):

Suppliers Guide For Bidding :
- Evaluate well your offer, by assessing the price on the market and keep in mind that competitors will try and provide the lowest prices.
- Under no circumstance should you send your offer after Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at midnight.
- Check back the blog often, as answers for questions will be published here. You could subscribe to RSS in order not to miss the updates.
- Group bids ARE accepted. A group of bloggers can gather the 1000 ECs together. However, they need to designate a group leader. If the group is selected for the deal, ECs can be sent separately from each member, or in total from the group leader. In all cases, the money will be sent to the group leader.
- Please note that in the event that I consider the lowest price to be too high for the 1000 ECs, I reserve myself the right to not selecting any offer. This is in the case where I could be havig a better deal buying from Entrecard directly for example. Although this is unlikely, given the nature of the concept of competing offers, the aim is to have the best value for me and the supplier. Suppliers should make sure that they put a price that works for them, and keep in mind that I am looking for a price that works for me as well.

Since I joined the Blogging Idol contest, I am looking for ways to improve my RSS subscriptions count. I tried several things, amongst which offering 30 ec for every email subscriber. I succeeded to double my count from 7 to 14, but this is far from being satisfactory. Seeing the way the competition is going, my chances of winning against some blogs who went from 0 to 100+ (following the rules or not?), are really really small. However, I would like to use the contest to motivate myself increasing the number of my subscribers and the goal I am setting for myself at the end of the month of July is 100 subscribers.
So, I am offering a deal : I will subscribe to the RSS feeds of everyone who subscribes to mine. In order to track that, I think we should use Email subscriptions. I will email everyone who subscribes so that he/she sends me a link for his/her blog and I will subscribe.

This will help creating a network of reciprocal readers, and serve our blogs by increasing their subscriptions count. Uniting can help our smaller blogs reach their various goals. And if you could spread the word about this initiative, it would be great and we can create a community just like “U Drop, I follow” that helps increase our readership. Of course, anybody willing to join the initiative commits that he/she is going to do his/her best to offer quality content to readers. It’s not just about numbers; everyone is looking for good articles and for an added value. Anyone willing to join the community, please leave a comment on this post with your URL, so that I can keep a list of everyone offering the reciprocal subscriptions and make them easier to find.
So go ahead : Join the community and subscribe to my RSS feed. I will get back to you within 24 hours and will subscibe to your RSS. I also created a little button for the initiative, that anyone can use on his/her blog to show (s)he’s a reciprocal subscriber.

Thanks everyone and let’s grow those numbers.

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And I mean rocks the rock! With the new partnership just concluded with SezWho, Entrecard goes a step further in bringing quality traffic and exposure to your blog. In fact, SezWho is a profile service that allows bloggers to comment and track commentators and rate their comments. With this partnership, Entrecard is aiming to bring quality comments to the member blogs by rewarding them with Entrecard credits.

I can see a lot of benefits for bloggers out of this partnership :
- It encourages readers to leave quality comments.
- It gives more opportunities of networking among bloggers since they will start to comment more often on each other’s blogs.
- It brings diversity to the way bloggers can earn Entrecard credits.
- It enhances the overall quality of comments throughout the network, since bloggers can rate each other’s comments and thus pushing everyone to control the quality of their comments to avoid being badly rated.
- It brings an added value to our blogs by allowing us to see the commenting activities of our commentatorson other blogs and thus introducing us to other discussions happening on the blogosphere.

So, I encourage everyone who hadn’t already installed SezWho on their blog to do it and be part of the experience. Here is the announcement post on the Entrecard Blog, that explains the partnership more in details and gives a plain step-by-step guide on how to join.

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I close the list of the 106 participants in this amazing contest. The principle is simple : Whoever gets the most extra RSS subscriber by July 31st wins some great prizes.

Now that I am in, I will need to come up with the right strategies to win this competition. Would we accept less than winning? Hell no!

I think this contest is what I needed to get the necessary motivation to work on the number of my RSS subscribers. I will have to be creative this month.

During the whole July I will be showing the Initial count next to the current one, so that we all keep track of the evolution.

I don’t have clear ideas about what I am going to do, but I know for sure that I will need all of your support to win this, and that I will be offering great incentives for my readers in case we win this battle. So for now, I will ask you to subscribe by email, so that I know how to contact each of you on July 31st when we win, and also to get updated real-time, in your inboxes, about my strategies.

So, everybody subscribe. Time is fading out. This is going to be an awesome experience.

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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.

I wasn’t expecting it anymore. But hey, Google loves to play games with us! I finally went out of PR Zero to PR1. Yes I now have a Google Page Rank

I admit it : I am quite happy with this. When I see that Winning The Web dot Com is still a PR Zero, and noticing that my Alexa Rank is constantly increasing, I can say there’s potential out there !

But then, only future can verify that .

January 12th, I started this experiment to try and figure out how much would a blogger pay for EntreCard credits. During 20 days, I invited visitors of this blog to vote and now is the time for results :

- Duration of the poll : 20 Days
- Number of voters : 14 (A bit disappointing but a good number anyways, that allows for some results)

Votes Break Down :

- 43% (6) would pay … nothing for 1000 ec
- 36% (5) would pay something to get 1000 ec :
* 1 would pay $20
* 1 would pay $15
* 1 would pay $5
* 1 would pay $3
* 1 would pay $1
- 21% (3) have no clue or gave another answer

Some Analysis :

So!! It seems that most people would pay nothing to get the 1000 ec. I hear them saying “I’d rather drop like crazy and keep my cash”. Which is fair enoughI guess. If you think about it, some EntreCarders drop 300 cards per day, so it will only take them 3 days to get the 1000 ec.

Others would pay for their time, but the value given is quite different from one to another. At least we know that there are people there who are ready to pay 20 bucks for the 1000 ec. But if you would consider selling 1000 EC credits, you better keep your price $5 or lower.

This said, I would argue that the best price for people who would spend money for those credits would be $3 per 1000 ec, which is $.003/credit.

I will, nevertheless try another way to calculate this : the average of all suggested prices, that’s (20+15+5+3+1+0+0+0+0+0+0) / 11 = 44 / 11 = $4 for 1000 ec = $.004/credit

Synthesis :

Although, based on this experiment, 43% of people wouldn’t pay a dime for EC credits, we could consider that those who would pay, are ready to spend between $.003 and $.004 for 1 ec.

What do you think of these results and how would you analyse them? I would really like to hear from you so drop your comments and shout your opinion.

I am offering free links on a page I just created on this blogs and named : FRIENDS. It is in the menu just below the header image.

I chose “Friends” as a name for that page, because I think that friendship is all about sharing and that’s the spirit of the page.

The rules are simple :
- You write a post about these free links, so that you help spreading the word (remember sharing?)
- You leave a comment on the Friends page so that I can keep track of your post and add your link in the list.

That’s it. So go ahead and do your thing. A free link is waiting for you!