Turk Hit Box

One of my moneymakers: MSNeklentisi.com

Msneklentisi.com is one of the sites I have bough couple of months back. It ranks high for most keywords related to MSN on google.com.tr. Averaging about 10000 uniques/day, its highest is 22000 uniques on February 16th. First of all, because of the high visitor count, its very hard not to make money off of this website. Secondly, the visitors’ ages range from 10 to 18. A young audience cannot differentiate between advertisements and the actual content resulting in high CTRs.

Using Yahoo’s Yslow, I have made considerable amount of optimizing, including total site redesign. The page now loads much faster and should be able to rank much higher with valid css and xhtml. On-site optimization is always one of the first things on my mind after I buy a website.

Revenue

I bought the website for 4300 YTL, which is roughly 3300 USD. The website makes between $15 - $20 every day, but I have also seen days when it tmade around $40. To generate this income, there are 650 clicks on the ad units on average. Last month, it made $633, which means that I can get the money I paid in about 6 months. I believe that if a website investment reaches its break-even point in less then 8 months, it is a nice investment.

Like Komiksozler.net, I wish it was an English website, then I would be making $1633 instead of $633 every month :).

Traffic

Like I have said, the website averages about 10000 uniques/day, but msneklentisi.com has a forum of 3000 members, which should guarantee the growth or at least the stability of traffic. I am also hiring people to post on the forum to attract more and more members.

Link Advertising with TNX.net

TNX.net is a text link ads service similar to Text-Link-Ads, but works in a slightly different way, where you can buy and sell points to have your text link on another website. Since most of my readers are mostly publishers, I decided I should write a review in a publisher point of view.

First of all, eventhough bloggers are just ordinary everyday people, they still want to work with the best. Seeing the “Beta” text does not turn me on, but it shows that they are still improving their systems, design or functionality. I would like to break this review into 3 parts: Design, SEO and Link Advertising

Design

The overall design is very Web 2.0, but checking the main page with Yahoo’s Yslow, the main page has a lousy score of 59. The main reasons for the low score are the 27 Css background images, no expires headers for files and no gzipping of css and js. Using CleanCSS on HIGH setting, TNX.net stylesheet dropped from 13.095KB to 9.861KB. The css file did not pass the validation, but there were only 2 small errors, which can be corrected easily.

Eventhough they have used 27 background images, I was shocked to see that they have included some images using the old school <img href=”…” /> method. Without alt tags and using tables within a CSS layout, there is no chance that they could have passed the validation. A total of 62 errors should not be in a professional firm’s website. If I had designed the website, the website would load 3 times faster with less CPU load and less bandwith.

SEO

Going through some of the key phrases like “text link ads”, “text link advertising” or “link advertising”, I was unable to find TNX.net on the SERPs. This means they really need to do a SEO campaign. I would highly suggest an analysis of Google Analytics results.

They are also missing META tags, which is the first step of Search Engine Optimization. TNX.net should really consider adding a description and keyword metatags including the above mentioned keywords. Looking at their robots.txt, they have blocked Googlebot from listing their main page.

Link Advertising

TNX.net is based on points, which you can earn by serving more pages including the TNX code get using their very easy to use sidebar. You can post on this DigitalPoint thread with your TNX id, you can earn 5000 TNX points. One of the things I liked was how their system rewards the pages with high Google PageRank. So if you have a website with lots of high pageranks sub-pages, you can quickly increase your TNX points and sell them to other members with an average of $0.60 per 1000 TNX points. You can also select the pagerank of the pages that you want your text-links to be served on! Of course the prices increase as the Pagerank increases. Your earnings are sent to your PayPal account which is a plus. I really don’t like waiting for checks especially when you have to pay for the mailing fee.

Overall, I really like TNX’s system for buying text-links. I highly recommend it to people with lots of high pagerank pages since you can benefit more of the system.

Chrisbloczynski.com Redesign

Chris Bloczynski is one my clients. Since his blog is relatively new and didn’t have the necessary requirements to enter my “Custom & Unique Wordpress Themes For Your Blog” giveaway, he wanted to pay for a custom theme. Well, because he is a paying customer, I had to move him up in my to do list. His design was ready about a month ago, but he has recently changed his design. Eventhough I did the whole design and coding of the theme, Jerry Gartner of Gartner Web Development has helped to add the functionality, Chris wanted.

I know all you will be asking how much it cost to Chris, I ‘ll tell you right now: $200. All of my designs are fully optimized. The xhtml and css coding are all validated and the total size of the images on Chris’s site is only 9,40 Kb. Thats what I call a fast loading website.

Here is how the theme looked originally:

So what do you think? Is mine or the one modified by Jerry Gartner is better? I think the original one looks a little more “sleek”.

PS: I have to copy Chris’s surname from his MSN address everytime to find his website. He need to add more wovels to his surname :p

Installed Simple Captcha Plugin

I would describe myself as a smart but lazy person. I have been reminding myself to install a captcha plugin for so long, but couldn’t find the energy. Well, I installed the Simple CAPTCHA plugin today, and guess what, it only took a minute to install. I really liked it since it has a refresh button for the captcha image. Please let me know if you run into any problems with the plugin (Contact me via the contact page if you cannot post a comment.).

I hope this will save me some time by not going through the spam comments lists checking for real comments.

Blog Income for January, 2008

I think I have to find a “rate” of posting for myself. I can’t seem to post regularly and I have to fix that since the blog income is directly affected. When I make a high number of posts in a month, I generate more than I expected. This proves that this blog should be the perfect example for the low income of not-so-hardworking people! However, since the blog is not my main revenue generator, please don’t think I was lying in my “Selling My Audi A3 for an Audi A5” post I wish I was included in the top bloggers’ cars list by David Ptilyuk.

Well, here is how much I made since the blog is up:

At least I bought two more websites, one of which has 15,000 uniques per day! I hope to share the websites in the following days of this month.

Sorry for the wait, changed servers

Due to increasing number of visitors to my websites, my current server was unable to keep up with the CPU load. At first I thought it was komiksozler.net (website I bought recently) causing the trouble, but after talking to the server administrator, I learnt that the server was already running at maximum capacity without komiksozler.net.

Old Server:

Pentium D 3.0Ghz
1 Gb Ram

New Server:

Core2Duo E6700 2.66Ghz
2 Gb Ram (Edit: added 1 more GB )

The new server has brand new parts and since its dual core, it can handle more than twice the work load. And I am only paying $20 more than $150/month that I was paying for the old server. I hope you guys are getting faster load times right now. I hope the new DNS settings settle down in the next 2-3 days and the transfer will be complete.

Latest Investment: Komiksozler.net

I love buying established sites, especially when they have high unique visitors per day! Komiksozler.net is one of them and I bought it about a week ago. Since it receives about 15,000 uniques per day and has custom written (messy) php code, it has been causing too much CPU load on the server and crashed it several times. If you have been unable to reach Turkhitbox.com, thats the reason.

Traffic

Komik Sözler means Funny Words and komiksözler.net ranks as number for both google.com & google.com.tr results and “komik sozler” keyword is responsible for the whole traffic. My target is to make the site rank for a larger keyword, “komik” in 2008. The site has about 464,000 results in google index. It is a very solid site and thats why it has become an authority site for the keyword, komik sözler which you can see below:

Since it has very messy coding and mysql structure, I decided to use Mint to tract the visitor count & popular pages. I would like to evaluate the data for about 4 weeks and exclude some of the unneeded pages using robots.txt. The reason I am doing this is that I want the content pages to get more value in the Google index. I also need to find a way to create a XML sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools.

Revenue

I bought the website for 3600 YTL, which is roughly equal to $3000. The site generates about $15 per day, so I bought the website for about 6-7 months of its revenue. Its not a bad deal if you think of it as a long term investment. I am thinking of getting private ads at the top as well to increase the revenue even more.

According to the previous owner, the site can generate more than $25 /day during holidays since more people log on to search for funny words to sms their friends. If I can make the site rank #1 or even rank in the first page of the keyword, “komik“, I can make that income stable.

The surprising side is, the $15/day income is made by about an average of 400 clicks! Thats a very high number and if it was in an English website, it would mean more than $100/day. That’s the thing with Turkish websites, they serve very low paying ads.

The previous owner also used 2 adsense content units and a single link unit. I have added another link unit and made backgrounds for the link units so that they look seamless with the other links. I believe this will will greatly improve the CTR.

Design

I think the site has a very simple web 2.0 looking design, but it suits the niche well. I am planning on changing the design of the game page (Komik Oyun - means funny games) according to the main page. I have cleaned up the design & the xhtml alot, and now it has only 2 errors in the xhtml validator. I should finish validating the website during the week.

Blog Income December

Well, first of all, happy new years to all turkhitbox.com readers! It’s been a lovely year with lots of challenges for me and thats the reason I loved it. Especially the fact that this blog continues not to increase its adsense earnings, I guess I will still have a challenge in 2008. At least, I was able to increase the November earnings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Selling My Audi A3 for an Audi A5

Eventhough this is a “Ramblings” blog, I never actually made an off-topic post and since I am selling my car, I wanted to give it a shot. I bought this 2006 Audi A3 in January 2006, a year before I started this blog. I bought it for around €32,000. The car has 1.6L FSI which produces 115bhp. The car came with ambition package (sport package), bi-xenon headlights and Bose sound systems. Over the course of two years, I modified the car to my liking. But most importantly, I started the Turkish Audi Club, TurboFSI.net when I bought the car. My car became the first project car, attracting more people to the forums. Well this is another story so I will talk about it at some other post.

Here is the how everything started. The stock car:

Here are the modifications I made:

1. K&N Air Filter
2. Black front grille & S3 side mirrors
3. Dension Ipod Kit
4. Eibach 5cm Sport Springs
5. 18” Privatz Nets Forged Wheels
6. 225/40/18 Pirelli P-zero Rosso Assimetrico
7. Neuspeed Engine Torque Mount
8. Wimmer-rst chip tuning
9. Medium tint on all windows.
10. Sline Front bumper
11. Votex hatch spoiler and sides

The result and the new car replacing it after the jump…

I really loved how it turned out, but something was lacking for me to enjoy it fully. It just wasn’t fast enough. After all the modifications I was able to make it 125 bhp. Although it is relatively quick compared to the usual cars you see around Istanbul streets (mostly 1.4 or 1.6 liter cars), it is actually far away from being a fast car.

The Audi A5 

So I decided to buy a 1.8 TFSI 170bhp Audi A5. I fell in love the second I saw her at the dealer. It has a truly gorgeous external & internal design! I ordered it in white, having spent countless hours cleaning my black Audi A3. The car is on order right now with these options:

1. Triptronic
2. Multifunction steering wheel with DSG paddles
3. Bang & Olufsen Sound System
4. S-Line package (Leather inside & sportier suspension)
5. Heated & automatic folding side mirrors
6. Colored Drive computer

I really wanted to order the Navigation package for visual purposes, but since it is useless in Turkey and make a difference of €5,000 in the final price, I had to leave it. Luckily there is a huge list of standard accessories for the Audi A5 including the Bi-Xenon Headlights. Usually, you should be paying about $50,000 for a car like this in the United States, but here we have very harsh taxes. The price I got was a whooping €71,000 before the dealer discount. I could have bought an Audi R8 for that price in the US. Here is a photo of a white Audi A5 for your viewing pleasure:

and these are the Sline Seats:

I have to wait 3 months before the car arrives; hopefully I will get more discounts when the car arrives. I wonder if I should host a “Who has the nicest car?” contest among bloggers. I sure know John Chow is not beating me with his 2003 Acura RSX!

Having Problems with Paypal

I have been trying hard to resolve a problemI have with paypal last 2 weeks. I have to submit some documents like:

- Valid photo ID

• Passport
• Driver’s License
• National Identity Card

- Recent statement for the MasterCard Card XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX
- Proof of address for XXXXX XXXXXX, Istanbul, XXXXXXXX, XXXXX, Turkey

• Utility Bill

That’s why I can’t accept any sponsorship banners on the sidebar. Eventhough I have emailed them numerous times, they have not approved my documents yet. I will set up a merchant account as soon as possible after they approve my documents. Eventhough Turkhitbox.com has increased its reader count alot, the price for the 125×125 sponsorship buttons will stay the same.

Secondly, as of today, Turkhitbox.com made $13.52 with Google Adsense this month. If I had the chance to accept some of the sponsorship requests, I would have my highest earning month! It’s nice to see that this blog is continueing its growth.