blog

Nima Heydarian dot com

Nima Heydarian is a 24 year old Iranian blogger living and working in the US. He moved to the US in 2002 and is now a student and owns/runs his own business.

His blog typically covers technology, business and personal stuff… a bit like my blog really. Nima is also pretty prolific with his posting and his blog has been around longer than mine, since July 2006 to be exact.

Nima also owns and runs his own company, Timsar Solutions which is an internet consulting company. Nima ordered a review for his personal blog, nimaheydarian.com, so that’s what i’ll be looking at in this post.

The first thing you are most likely to note is his RSS count. That’s the first thing that stood out for me. It’s unfair to rank a blog based on the number of subscribers it has but that’s what people do. If it were me, i’d probably try and hide that subscriber count until it rose to 50+.

Secondly, there is no archives page or drop down widget. A big no-no. When writing this review i wanted to find out when the blog started but i could only do that manually going back page by page (and that’s a lot of pages!). So old content is effectively burried once it leaves the homepage.

It’s a big problem for blogs and bloggers (trying to keep good content alive on the site) and i’d suggest adding popular articles or random articles or even just an archives page… anything that may keep people on the site. If you’ve got it, flaunt it

There’s nothing wrong with the design / theme or header… it’s very simple, but very effective. There are a few things i’d change though… Two square 250 x 250 ads clutters up the blog slightly and if it were me, i’d remove one. I’d also remove the ’subscribe to my rss’ button / image before every post plus i’d remove the digg buttons and only show the digg buttons when an article is actually ‘digg worthy’.

Content-wise, Nima’s blog is actually pretty interesting and i’m surprised he doesn’t have a larger readership. I was particularly interested in this post as i was thinking of going 64 bit myself, but i just might hold back a bit longer. For the record, 32 bit systems are physically limited to 4gb of RAM - it’s impossible to use any more whereas 64bit Vista as far as i know can support up to 128gb (not on the home editions) or more commonly, 8gb on the home editions.

Nima has also highlighted why he set up his own business and the hoops he went through to do it. Interesting stuff. I also enjoyed his Iran pictures and posts… they’re personal, unique and something which not many bloggers can write about… Nima’s background is definitely a ’selling point’ for his blog and makes his blog that little bit more interesting.

Be sure to check it out!

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changing my flipping style

My 3 sites a week challenge worked for a good while… it was hard work, but it meant i was able to create and sell sites for fun I then had my repeat maths exam to prepare for and sort of had to devote my time to it instead. So the 3 sites a week challenge died a bit, even though i have recently started churning out a few sites again.

What i’m finding though, is that this ‘quick flip’ business is getting more and more saturated. You can no longer put together a partially unique design, some unique content and expect a few hundred $$$ in cash… you will see profit - don’t get me wrong, but not as much as you would have done 6 months ago.

So i’m now going to have to adapt to this change and added competition and view ‘flips’ as longer term work. New kids on the block want to make money and make it now, so they’ll be happy to flip sites for instant profit… in my eyes, that market is drying up now and site flippers have to hang on to sites longer and develop them further before selling.

So i’m issuing myself a challenge for the month of September;

• I have to create 1 new site
• I must create 15-20 quality blog posts for it myself
• I need to drive as much traffic as possible to the site
• I must then sell it at the end of the month for as much as possible
• If it makes sense and the site is super hot, i’m allowed hang on to it for a while longer

So rather than the usual quick flips you guys are used to seeing from me, you’ll now see me work at a different level. If this proves to be successful, i may well continue it every month.

Blog Flipping Contest

I’ve joined a group of 5 web entrepreneurs to compete in siteflipu’s ‘Blogging Flipping Gone Wild‘ contest. The aim of the competition is to see who can flip a blog for the largest amount of cash within 45 days.

It’s costs $25 per team to enter and the team that wins gets to keep all the $25 entry fees, the amount they get from their blog flip + 10% of all the other teams sales.

There’s some pretty decent bloggers in this who’ve flipped blogs for 5 figures… (not in 45 days mind you). I believe we can win it or if not, come close…

I’ll let you guys know who’s in my team and what our blog will be about at a later date. There’s one blog idea that i’ve had for a while - i know it has profit written all over it and i’ve pitched the idea to the guys…

We should be looking at selling a blog for $2k+ and i’ll do my best to make sure that happens… even if we lose, we’ll get 90% of that $2k… so $1800 split 5 ways = $360. Not a huge amount of cash but at the same time not something you’d say no to

The real rewards from this though will be more exposure within the blogosphere and more contacts… hopefully, if all goes well, i can continue partnerships for future projects.

why can’t i do this every day?

I have to admit, i love the feeling of ‘completing’ something. Whether it’s an assignment for college, a to-do list, a blog or a website…. it’s the same feeling and it’s a fantastic feeling.

I’ve managed to put together my first niche site in quite some time - managefuel.com.Expect to see it up for sale shortly. I’ve just been so busy recently i’ve struggled to make any sales or flips.

Believe it or not, i have about 40 of these sort of sites to develop and sell. I WILL get through them all… it’s just a case of how quickly.

I can’t automate building a site from start to finish, it must always have unique content and some sort of custom design/logo. But what i’m starting to do now is outsourcing content creation. I’ve had mixed results with it in the past, but recently i’ve found one or two really top class writers at decent prices (not talking about the managefuel.com content by the way.)

Content creation is a huge drain on my time and it’s not something i enjoy doing (apart from this blog). If i can pay someone to do it and still make a healthy profit from it all, it makes sense to outsource. So that’s what i’m starting to do as i’ve basically been forced in to it (as i’ve no time).

So that’s one down… about 39 to go

monetizing the blog

I’ve seen first hand the sort of traffic a fairly straightforward blog post can drive. Although every post i make isn’t going to get 20,000+ unique visits, i’m pretty confident i can come up with one or two of those sort of posts per month, every month.

The site will have to start paying for itself though… there’s no way i can afford to take on a dedicated server or even a VPS until i know the blog can pay for it. So this week, i’m going to focus on monetizing the blog…

I’ll be joining a few new publisher programs, placing button ads on the sidebar, perhaps a leaderboard ad in the header etc… The site has already gotten 530 visits today, there’s still about 16 hours left in the day for analytics to count - so that means i’m in trouble

If the site does happen to go down again, i’ll be moving it temporarily to BeerChief’s dedicated server whilst i try to come up with a better solution. I do have a shared server at both lunarpages and dreamhost and also a dedicated server at lunarpages, so i’m not exactly stuck if ANY of my sites or servers were to go down

The fact i’m being forced to even consider upgrading to a bigger, better server can only be a positive thing though. I do feel restricted now in that i’m almost ’scared’ to write ‘made for traffic’ high quality posts again… so it’s important that i get some ads on the blog and let it pay for itself…

I’ll be updating my advertise page yet again and placing some image ads in the sidebar, sitewide, to start off.