We have been in business since last 4 years and have come across lot many good people and a few crooked people. However the experience that we had with Rick Yang, the owner of Dhileads.com, also popularly known as Gonka and goes with AIM screen name of gonka2002 has been indeed a nightmare.

We were generating debt relief leads for Rick Yang and while dealing with him for a few days, we realized he is a crook, but unfortunately by then it was just too late. We realized that along with screwing us on our money, he was screwing his clients as well by selling an exclusive lead multiple times. Anyway, after a few weeks on payday when we started receiving partial payment, we realized he is a scum of society, but he owed us money and we wanted a way out. Ultimately over 10 K was due upon him, out of which he finally agreed to pay 3 K on excuse of client not paying him rest of the money. After lot many repeated warnings, he finally confirmed that he wired the money to our bank account. We waited and waited and no sign of money. Barry smelled a fraud and he gave Rick a good tongue lashing. I still maintained my cools and continued negotiating with him. He gave lot many excuses, the final of the excuse was his wife wired the money and there is some problem with his bank account at Hong Kong. IRS are you listening, an ex convict maintaining and operating an offshore account to handle his US business.
So his wife went to Hong Kong to clear issues with their offshore account. Another one month passed. Multiple times he promised sending the money and it was never sent. Sure we had come across clients who said they will not pay us our money due to X reason, but this scum always kept on lying and lying. Finally after 3 months of lying he blocked our IM and stopped responding.
What next: I was of the opinion to report him to authorities and even report to IRS and DOJ about his secret bank account. He is an ex convict anyway. But Barry doesn’t think he deserves a punishment that harsh. To me, if he is hanged it will be a lesser punishment for this scum. His lies have costed jobs of many employees, who were bread and butter earners of their families.

For now, all our ex employees have formed a group and daily they create new screen names at AOL. They daily send good morning ahole messages to him and the coward that he is, he couldn’t respond to it and locks them. It has been continued since last 1 month. Now our ex employees are planning to launch a call center attack against the scammer, by renting a call center for whole night and calling this scum for whole day abusing him and asking him to pay our money. I know for sure the thick alligator skin Rick has, he won’t respond to any of these attacks as he is a crooked fellow. In any place around the world, scum like these should be put in a solitary prison so that they should not be able to talk to killers and rapists in prison and mould them to more heinous crime as he is doing.
Rick I know you are such an idiot that you will read this blog and block it so that noone in your family can read it. Hopefully one day some one will kill you in the street’s and the world will be a better place to live without you.

Nitin Tripathi

We are into the times of Web 2.0. The web has changed. Sites are getting more percentage of traffic through Web 2.0 sites than good ole Google.

So now its time to change the link building strategies.
Here are a few of the action items that I can think of. If you follow all these, sure within short span of time, you will start receiving some good traffic from all Web 2.0 sites.
1)    Sure G still is supreme and with G, conventional link building still works. The links from .edu or authority sites are still key to rank in Google.
2)    Digg – Digg.com is fast emerging as a big traffic feeder for many sites. Quadszilla has posted a nice article on how to make to Front Page of Digg.
Randfish in his article mentioned how top users at dig are controlling the front page of digg.
Not all stories can make it to the front page, however with proper strategy, you may start receiving nice traffic from digg
3)    Pick up your favorite top 10 Web 2.0 sites and start submitting your articles and sites into them. These sites can be Netscape, reddit etc. Submit each and every article of your sites to these story / article submission Web 2.0 sites
4)    Create profiles at Social Networking sites and put your relevant site URLs in your profile. Be active at these sites; create a huge circle of friends. Do post the comments freely.
5)    Create profiles at all forums, put your URLs in signature and be vocal at forums. Don’t Spam, but participate in the forums wherever you can. It does bring in some good quality traffic.
6)    Link Exchange with quality blogs. Bloggers are the people who really appreciate the content and quality of your site. If you have nice content, you may get links from very popular blogs.
7)    Bookmark each and every single article of your site with relevant tags at social bookmarking sites e.g. del.icio.us
8)    Think about unique strategies specific to your site, so that you can put some pictures, videos etc at youtube, flickr type of web 2.0 sites
9)    Publish a few articles and news items at your site. Submit those at sites like lipstick.com
10)     Create some applications/ widgets for facebook and enjoy some free traffic from facebook as well?

Nitin Tripathi 

Sorry for being late in reporting the progress. From this point on I will submit a weekly blog on the progress till we start really seeing some action.

First week has indeed been very hectic and full of chaos. We created Ten web-sites mostly focused in Real Estate. Now comes the time of handling over the sites to Content Writers.

We got two new content writers on board. Content writing is not really everyone’s cup of tea. I personally provided two days training session to these guys to do the content writing. This session started all the way from beginning of web to the current style of content writing. I showed and explained them how to write catchy news, articles and content. Despite our best efforts, one guy was total dud. He was writing the articles that will make you yawn. On Car Insurance, he was writing articles like “Avis is offering 20% discunt on cr rantal”. On refinance he was writing articles as “Cosumre creeeedit card no way  make dent in ur pcket beware” Basically lot of spelling mistakes and full of irrelevant content. Many of the times I had to ask him, how can you write so bad. So finally we have to show him the door. The good side of the story is other guy groomed up real nice. Now he is writing 5-6 articles a day and most of his articles are good. So by now we have 10 sites ready, each with 2-3 good articles.

Moving onwards this week a few more new sites will be made. By the end of the week, we will have current 10 sites ready to be shown to the world. So at week 3, we will start doing Web 2.0 Link Building.

Again we already have a team well familiar with Web 1.0 Link Building. However this project will focus upon Web 2.0 Link Building techniques. I will write another blog about Web 2.0 Link Building.

So basically in summary things are moving, future seems bright and we are inching towards the target.

I thank all of you for head up, support and advices. Critics are always welcome.

Nitin Tripathi

Business sense and some fine details of 5K site projects

First off the 5K-Alpha-1 project is in process and going on smoothly. Once the alpha phase is over, I will update all of you.

I really enjoy reading your comments. At times, It gives me some ideas about the things which I haven’t really thought about.
Now I will answer to some of the valid points raised by a few commenter.

1) Business sense of making 5 K sites and profit ratio

First off please keep in mind that my most of the staff (not all) will work from our development office in India. Much of the US staff is part-time / interns. Wages and running expenses of 5K sites are 2.5K a day. How do we know it - Well we are in almost same business since last 5 years and even currently we have a staff of 100 people doing various projects for our clients and for us as well

2) How to manage a team this big

Each and everyone may have different ideas, but here is the way we manage our team. As I mentioned even currently we have a team of 100 people, which in itself is a sizable team. We always have very small teams running their shows independently. That gives them a sense of freedom and even working for a bigger organization, they still have their independence. We have a Technical Leader in every 10 to 15 staff, which assists them in case team needs technical assistance. We have project managers who are from non-software backgrounds. The PMs are strictly admin people and they take care of admin related issues of teams assigned to them. We have made our corporate culture in a way so that everyone takes care of their own stuff. All Team Members send their daily status to Technical Leader, Project Manager and to me. Before assigning project to team, I myself create huge documentation mentioning each and every single minutest of the detail. PM’s role is to make sure that the documentation is being followed.

In the current project each slot of 50 sites is allocated to a team of 3 people. A few slots of 100 sites will be allocated to a team of 4 people. Overall 6 PMs will be there. Every Team will have at least one experienced person who has worked in similar projects with us for at least 3 months. Each site will be updated with fresh articles / content at least once a week. Each web-site will be given 2 hours a week time by team. Server maintenance, reporting, configuration etc will be taken care by Technical Leaders.

3) Why not build a few sites with huge content

Yes why not. We have done it in the past and we may do that in the future. I am not saying no to it. However the current project that I am talking about is building 5K small sites Building small number of sites with huge content and building huge number of sites with huge content, both have their merits and demerits. I just love the merits of both of them. But again the current project is about building 5K small sites.

4) What happens if Internet changes and revenue model for sites get changed?

I haven’t yet disclosed our revenue generation model. But overall it won’t be dependant upon just a single stream of revenue. It will be a mixture of Content specific ads, CPA ads, selling our own Programming/support services, selling our own products / contents etc. So even if Internet dies down, at least we will have clients using our services.

5) Isn’t it link farming

Link farming is very relational term and everyone can define it to suit their own benefit. My definition of link farming is Wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm).  No, none of our sites will link to each other. None of our sites will specifically be made to benefit other sites owned by us / others. No, none of these sites will have just links. Again all these sites will be content sites and sure they may have a small related link sections of may be 20 links max.

I do agree with comment of Keith. If sites that we make will be spam, they will sure enough die down. You can never build a sustainable business model out of spam (though indeed you can make quick bucks). If at all I have to build 5K spam sites, I can build 5K sites each with 1M crapper content in 2 weeks. I don’t have to work for a year with a team of 300 people.

Nitin Tripathi

Try for yourself at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/  I used that tool almost on a daily basis and if it is trully dead (like the overture bid amount tool they killed off long ago) I will be pissed and sad to see it go. Well lets just hope for the best and hope its just a tech issue…….

 Barry

First off, thank you all for your comments, criticism and appreciation. I will quickly answer a few questions. Having a few sites with more content or have more sites with niche content is always debatable topic. I personally had success in past with both strategies, so am not against either of them. However for this specific project, our strategy is plain and simple. Build 5 K site with niche content. We had mega content rich sites that used to make 1 K a day and we had our success with highly SEOed keyword oriented small sites (which most of visitors will term as crap) as well. However this project is different. It is to build 5 K sites with original content mostly. Indeed a few sites may eventually do even 100$ a day. But I had set a very realistic target of just 1 $. It is because of my personal belief that you should never miss any target at all. With good content site, it is hard to miss 1$ a day target. Isn’t it. Sure more money, more happy I am. So anyway, here is the official start of project 5K.

To begin with, we have divided the project in different phases. First phase of the project is called 5KAlpha. This phase will involve building, maintaining and managing 100 sites. By the end of September the development phase will be over. Then the site will be handled to maintenance team that will include One Content writer and two part time webmasters. In the development phase, I am working sixteen hours a day along with a web designer. Each and every single strategy user id/ passwords are well documented and backup taken.

Alpha phase is further divided into Ten sub-modules. First submodule is 5KAlpha1. This module consists of building Ten blogs. The blogs is specifically targeting niche segmented area in mortgage market. Here is a sample time-line for phase 5KAlpha1.

- Day 1: Ordering dedicated server for 5KALpha phase, find out 100 niche sectors, register 10 domain names for 5KAlpha1, configure and setup domain names. Responsibility - Nitin
- Day 2: Build 5 sites for 5KAlpha1. While building the site, along with graphic keep on writing one article so that blog has at least some presence. Responsibility – Nitin and web designer
- Day 3: Build 5 more sites for 5KAlpha1. While building the site, along with graphic keep on writing one article so that blog has at least some presence. Responsibility – Nitin and web designer
- Day 4: Content writer start writing Article for all 10 sites of 5KAlpha1.
- Day 5,6,7,8,9,10 : Content Writer keep on adding the content.
- Day 11: Two webmasters handed over the responsibility of adding features to site and start building the links for the site.
- Day 12,-19: Content writer, webmasters work on the 10 sites of 5KAlpha1.
- Day 20: Add content specific advertisement to sites. Responsibility: Nitin / Webmaster
- Day 21-365: 5KAlpha1 being managed and maintained by two webmasters and one content writer.

Today we are running into Day 2 of 5KAlpha1. 5 sites already have been completed. On Day 4, development team is going to start another batch of 10 sites for next phase of project.

Nitin Tripathi

Disclaimer: By making this post, I am not saying that only Ugly stuff sells. All I m trying to do is give a few examples where Ugly looking websites / communications did better than beautifully worded / looking content.

I always shared the opinion that professional communication, professional look and professional talks are the key to success. However in my experience of running a web company for 4 years, I have realized that at times ugly sells more than beautiful. Here are a few examples:

> We were running some PPC for ringtones. Landing page was very beautiful highly graphic oriented page. We achieved 50% click through rate on those pages. However those pages were really not scoring very high on Google QS and PPC was typically higher than our high content very ugly looking pages. Those pages were real ugly looking; all they had were extreme garbage text and an image to save the page. Big G loved it, QS was higher and PPC was less. Consumers, when they come to that landing page, probably they were provoked to click on image, because page was so ugly. We achieved a Click through Rate of 75% – 80% in these ugly landing pages.
>In other case, one of our friends was engaged in bulk emailing. He was trying to sell a service and his email was full of CAPS, slang and type Os. He was getting tremendous response from his mailing. However later he realized that may be he should be more professional, so he started emailing a well crafted email. He tried this fancy email for a week or so and didn’t get even a single positive response. Later he moved back to ugly email and he was back in business.

What these experiences tell is in cases where repeat customers are really not the key, at times being ugly can be helpful. It provokes consumers to take an action. Once consumer takes action, if you can capitalize the response of consumer, it can be indeed an excellent strategy.

Nitin Tripathi

Target 5 K a Day Feedback and answers

Monday is fast approaching, when I will enter in actual implementation of what is going to be one of the biggest project of my life so far.

Before I go into my preparations, I will quickly cover feedback I received so far. A few people expressed shock that I will litter the web with 5000 sites. The people whose shock was genuine, my answer is no I am not building 5000 scrapper sites. I am building 5000 unique content sites that will be maintained and managed by 300 people. Its not littering instead it is contributing to web. The people who just express shock because of jealously for them here is my middle finger. Also I got suggestions from many people including some very talented and famous people on the net. Almost all the people opined that instead of huge number of sites; build lesser number of sites with more content. It is a debatable issue always. However my line of thinking is if a person is looking for “Reverse Mortgage” or looking for information related to HELOC, a big Finance portal probably won’t give him the right answer. Go to Bankrates.com and try to find out information about HELOC, it will be almost impossible to even find out the definition of HELOC. However if you have a small web-site that does not talk about refinance, that does not talk about Home equity, all it talks about HELOC, it better serves the purpose.

Indeed the way web is going (that is google driven), most of the strategies are being made keeping in mind likes and dislikes of Big G. Even considering that case, may be building lot many smaller sites is a better idea. It may happen down the road, no one has seen the future, if I build a big enough site and some of jealous people find out the site name (like a few people mentioned in phase 1). They may start doing blog spam for the site and then complaint to big G accusing us of doing blog spam. Big G will ban my mega site and I will be left with liability of 300 people who are dependant upon me for their bread and butter. It had happened to me in past and so am being extra careful this time.

A few people emailed me criticizing about me so obsessed in making money. Heck I am not communist. I am a thorough capitalist and any given point of day I would love to die with billion bucks below my mattresses instead dying penniless on street.:)

Hope it answers all the questions. Again everyone’s feedback is very vital for our mission and I will keep my level best to share the information with all readers. Closing the post with Barry’s favorite dialog “SHOW ME DA MONEY”

Nitin Tripathi

I well remember good Ole days, when you put in anything on the net, give a few links from here and there, make google crawl your page and you will rule the SERPs. Eventually time changed for black hat people and it moved on to next level. Now the ranking become tougher. Still it was all game of links, links and links. You make a scrapper site, purchase 100 links from authority sites and you will rule the SERPs. Even that went into the history. Came the third phase of black hat SEO where links did matter but only in huge amount. Came in blog spamming and guestbook spamming. Black hat spammers started spamming every blog possible through every possible means. Eventually Blog software become smarter as well as SEs moved on to next level. At this point of time at SEs none of the stuff works as easily. Indeed all four above mentioned techniques are still well and valid but to make a respectable position doing black hat you really need to deal in volume these a days. And volume means say 1 Million links and not all black hat spammers can afford the expense / effort. So seems like black hat is history for good.

But wait, what will happen to the ever starving community of black hat spammers who with their hacking hat roam around and live in their own world of glory. Sure you can never take that evil spirit out of them. So now what’s the future? Seems like everyone has migrated to Spam 2.0 Social networking spam lately had caught big time fire. Seems like half of the world is trying to create fake profile at myspace, digg, delicious, facebook etc. Indeed to me it never makes sense how anyone can make money out of myspace visitors, but seems like people who are doing in bulk are making tons of money.

The white hat people always frown at these spammers, but hate them or more hate them, they are here to stay. They will always try to find out a way to spam. Key is to learn how to avoid the spam. Instead of hurling abuses (which most of the white hat people do for spam), may be better idea can be if they become civil reporter, like myspace snitcher. If you see any fake profile, take some pain. Report it to the myspace or the site. Do follow up, try to do your job to make world clean, instead to just do a generic rambling.

Nitin Tripathi

I will admit to the fact that a few years back we were making good dough through unique content. Later we lost our niche and lost most of our recurring revenue stream. However moving forward, I am setting my goal of making 5 K a day from 09/01/2008, which is 1 year from now.

I will keep on writing a weekly blog to update all of you with my progress and success so far. I am not going to write a new youtube, nor am gonna re-invent the wheel. All I will do is generate the revenue and traffic the way most of the webmaster generates, that is through unique and better highly targeted content.  The overall grand plan is build 5000 unique content sites, keep on updating them, keep on getting links for them and do everything under the sun to make each of the site making at least 1 $ a day. If I achieve this target, then even 100 K a day is easily doable.

I will start a pilot testing phase in this week. To begin with I have identified 50 niche sectors. We are going to build blogs for these 50 niche sectors this week. By the end of next week, the target is come out with 50 working blogs on 50 brand new domains. I am also recruiting a mini team to manage this set of 50 sites. The mini team will include a web designer, a content writer and a link builder. Once I am done with setting up 50 sites, this team will take the blogs from there to next level by adding new content and by making the blog visible at other places. My target is making 50$ a day from the pilot sites by October 30.

So gathering all my energy to move towards building 5000 unique target sites with a staff of 300. I wish myself Best Of Luck?

Nitin Tripathi