I bought PHPGalleria.com on Flippa about a year ago for $1500. I’ve improved the site’s design and on-site SEO factors quite a bit but the profit has stayed at about $150 a month which is mainly due to lack of decent search engine ranking. Today I updated the site a little more.

Social Sharing: Using ShareThis I added a number of social sharing buttons (Twitter, Digg, Share, Google Plus). I thought about creating a Twitter account and FB page for the site too but I don’t really have time to maintain any more social pages.

PayPal Buy It Now: I added a PayPal buy now button so that visitors can buy the product right away without having to sign up for an account with the site or go through the checkout process. I hope this will cause a noticeable raise in conversion rates.

SEOMoz Diagnostics: Running SEOMoz diagnostics I realized I had two homepages (phpgalleria.com and phpgalleria.com/index.php). I 301 redirected the index.php page using the following .htaccess code.

# Redirect aliases of home page to the root website
rewriteRule ^index\.(html|php) http://www.phpgalleria.com/ [R=permanent,L]

SEOMoz flagged a number of 302 redirect pages which I fixed by making them 301. There were also few pages without title which now have titles.

Link Building: Next step is to do some link building and gradually increase the search engine ranking of the site also. I plan to just submit the site to few paid directories every month and maybe get other bloggers to review the scripts.

This post was written by my good friend Abrahim Nadimi. Thanks Abrahim.

As you are reading this there are probably 14 emails, 2 magazines, 5 booklets filled with less-than-thrilling “save now!” offers, and 13 text messages being typed with your name on them. Yet it’s not just the marketers that are competing for your immediate attention – your tire is probably going flat and the food you ate two hours ago is about to make you run to the store for some medicine. Not particularly surprising in the world where “complexity” is the name of the game and multitasking is the only acceptable modus operandi.

I will not reveal any secrets when I say that with success comes resistance. Like a rock flying through air experiences more resistance the faster it moves, you too will find new and more challenging obstacles each step you move. I’ve experienced this time and time again. I’ve also figured out that I’m excellent at inviting new obstacles into my life. More stress is a good thing because it means I’m accomplishing things. Right?

While you might be accustomed to existing in perpetual chaos, it might be working against you. Just like an army going into battle, you have to have a well-organized base camp if you want to stand a chance to succeed. I’m talking about your castle and safe haven from the craziness of the outside word – your home. Like most of us, you probably spend the majority of your time at work and home. While painting the walls of your cubicle might be frowned upon, you have total control over the environment of your dwelling.

My friends can attest to the persistent “in progress” status of my house. I usually know the areas of the house I can’t stand and immediately start to tear them apart only to find that I have no clear idea of “what’s next”. Sometimes I figure out what I want to do and then decide I do not want to dedicate the funds to that project. Whatever the reason might be, I somehow ended up living in a half-finished house for years.

It wasn’t until I got new tile installed on the 1st floor over the summer (ending years of sexy unfinished concrete floors), that I realized how important the condition of my castle is to my mental well-being. Even though I’m still not nearly done with all my self-imposed “honey-do projects,” I enjoy my nest so much more. It makes me feel good to walk in and see the way the house looks now. I didn’t realize what a drag the mess was on my mood until the flooring project was complete. Now that my house is much easier on the eyes it has become a relaxing and welcoming place that I love to come home to. The mess, clutter and the general non-cohesiveness of different elements within my house were contributing to my general unhappiness.

First Step

Your first step should be clean-up: literal and figurative. Enlisting an interior decorator would be ideal, but who can afford them, amiright? So what to do? Give up? Of course not! Roll up your sleeves!

Forget complexity. Go for simple and uncluttered. Like a funny motivational poster says, “Aim Low. Achieve your goals. And avoid disappointment”.

DO NOT attempt to pull off a complicated design style like Baroque, Tuscan, or Old World. Leave fanciness to the professionals and embrace clean lines and fewer colors.

DO part with random objects that have no room in your new safe haven. That cool
talking Bass wall plaque is just as tacky as those fake flowers with four-year-old dust on them.

Declutter! This is the first must do if you are hoping to make HUGE difference.

• Get rid of ALL stacks of reading material. If you’re *actually* going to read it, put it in a book shelf. If not, then donate, sell or recycle.
• Do not invite another piece of paper into your house unless it has a purpose. Organize the bills and paper trails you need to keep in a file, or better yet – scan and save on your laptop/hard drive/cloud.
• Throw or give away all the useless mementos you bought at roadside stand or received from some cousin’s trip to Cancun. Unless it holds a special, dear memory, its better off in a trash can.
• Everything placed around your house on shelves, counters, and coffee tables must have a purpose. Collecting dust is not a purpose.
• Take down all wall decor that’s not unique, personal, or functional.
• Put away everything from your counters.
• Clean out your pantry. Throw away all the expired food and donate what you can to food banks.
• It’s better to not have pillows on the couch than worn out or dirty ones.

Step 2

After a thorough decluttering and some thorough cleaning you’ll have a simplified, clean, and peaceful home that is now ready to decorate.

Instead of typical art work you might see in Wal-Mart, buy or create a work of art that people will talk about. Enlist your artistic friends or scout antique shops. Unusual pieces of art or furniture make great conversation starters. It’s amazing how often I hear about my club door turn coffee table, which cost me less than most commercially produced pieces.

Involve friends with style. I was lucky to have been able to enlist my creative girlfriend as an awesome (free) resource, but I would have used another friend if she too was clueless. (Be careful who you ask for help because NOT all girls are good at decorating and NOT all guys are handymen.)

For ideas, check out contemporary home design magazines like Dwell or Google image terms like “Contemporary living rooms.”

Before you get started learn from my mistakes and make sure you:

1. DO NOT start a project you can’t finish
2. DO bite off only as much as you can chew at one time
3. DO research costs and set aside a specific budget for a project

Before you go away thinking I’m being unrealistic or unreasonable, I want to make sure I unequivocally state that I know giving away stuff isn’t easy and that you’ve probably developed a personal attachment to the things in your home. I’m actually very sentimental so I hear you loud and clear, but it’s so important that we know our limitations and don’t get in our own way. Remember that you own things – don’t let the things own you. Do something different and remember that Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It’s your life…remove the obstacles that are preventing you from kicking ass.

I’ve been in the hookah website business for over 6 years now. Started HookahLounge.net as a simple blog, turned it into a blog plus forum community, then added a directory, and eventually an eCommerce store. I continued modifying and improving the site with the online store for about 3 years and along the way moved the site to BuyHookah.com.

Last month (August) I completely re-designed the site and took it back to its roots. It now has a blog, forums, gallery, directory, and most importantly a hookah wiki section. It’s (IMO) the most complete hookah website online.

The response from users on the site has been overwhelmingly good and I’m super excited about it. Right now we have a blogger from LA, one from Dallas, one from NY City and soon few international bloggers.

Here are some things that I paid attention to when creating the new version of the site:

• User friendliness: I spent hours and hours watching users actually use the website, took surveys from them and tweaked every detail of the design.
• On-site optimization: all SEO stuff, site speed, compatibility, etc.
• Fast site speed (CSS spirites, expire header, images, and JavaScripts optimized, etc)
• Clean coding
• Social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), blog, aweber
• Unified user account and login across the whole site (Forums, Wiki, Blog, etc).
• Facebook login/connect feature
• iPhone and Android hookah app
• Google custom search (premium)
• And honestly a lot more that i can’t remember.

I can now say that BuyHookah.com has truly matured. It’s a true community website with a large number of visitors and enjoys great search engine ranking for it. Only if I could make more websites like this.

My Friend, Tony, has just started his first blog: Android Cowboy. He’ll be reviewing and posting about Android tablet apps. He is definitely one of the smartest people I know. He has a PhD AND studying for Postdoc in science now.

Check his site out and subscribe to his RSS.

It took over 6 months, over 1000 hours of programming, over $15,000, and a lot of late nights. It is finally completed.  The business idea that I’ve been working on is Heritage Law Marketing (HLM). It is an online marketing service focused on lawyers of specific heritage background or those with specific language skills. For example, Iranian Lawyers, Spanish Lawyers, Arab Lawyers, Korean Lawyers, Hebrew Lawyers, … . It is a series of sites each geared to a specific country/language.

I had owned IranianLawyers.net for over 5 years and almost always had listed lawyers for free. I started receiving great feedback on how the listed lawyers were actually receiving few customers  a month from their listing (that’s a lot from one source by lawyer’s marketing standards). After thinking about it for a while I decided to work on the idea and make something out of it.

Since then I’ve bought IranianLawyers.com and moved the site over to the new domain – Side note: more than half of the investments went toward the domain name purchases -

Site Features

From beginning I was dead set on implementing absolutely every good web practices that I knew, get a lot of feedback, and find the best programming solutions (not always the cheapest either). An0n, from DP forums, did most of the programming. He is an absolutely gifted programmer and the only one I trust with access to my servers. Here is a shortened list of features on the website(s):

• Site Speed: Almost all YSLow suggestions taken into effect. Largest page size on the sites < 150 kb
• Simple clean design with large fonts. I just don’t like crowded websites.
• Totally bad ass copyrighted jQuery for lawyer’s practice filtering. (Ex. click on any of the law practices in Iranian lawyers in California page).
• Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Unique title tags written for each page, carefully picked H1, H2, H3 tags, unique content pages on each site
• All images compressed (also goes towards site speed)

 What’s Next?

I completely believe in this business so this is just the beginning. I’m going to improve the sites and business for another few months and then go after investment. For now, it’s too early for outside investors.

Leave a comment, let me know what you think of Heritage Law Marketing and any suggestions that you might have.

In February, I decided to start my largest website project yet. So far I have

• Written a business plan for it
• Hired 3 independent contractors
• Had the website designed

I’ve written three updates so far

1. This Will Change Everything
2. Finding The Right Team
3. Design Completed

Following are the latest updates:

Team Members (Updated)

Team members are the same for the most except that I’ve now brought on board a new member working on market research and data entry. This week I will find someone to write about 10 to 20 pages of content in our niche, and a person in charge of international marketing campaigns.

I have also created an organization chart outlining the main positions within the company including C level officer positions as well as part time positions. Even though this will certainly change within a few months, it helps with better assigning tasks and responsibilities to all the team members.

Web Design / Programming (Updated)

Website’s graphic design is completed. Now Rob, our genius programmer, is working on implementing the new theme and all the features on the website. The amount of software customization for this project is absolutely insane which will hopefully make it unique from all its competitors.

The  current goal for launching the full features website is May 16th which is about two weeks behind our original deadline.

Business Incorporated

Today (May 1st, 2011) I’ve filed the paperwork to incorporate the business in the state of Texas. It is being incorporated as a Limited Liability Company. Here is a good guide on how to start a business in Texas.

As soon as I have the approval paperwork for the business I will open a bank account (most likely with Chase), get a merchant account with them (to process credit cards), and print the business cards.

Costs (So Far)

Following is a list of our main costs so far. This of course doesn’t include the countless number of hours spend by the partners on the project.

• Website Graphic Design: $1000
• Programming (Estimated): $1500 – $2500
• Business Incorporation: $300
• Domain Registration: Over $1000 for registering  (a wide range of) new domain names and buying already registered domain names for protecting and building our brand.
• Hosting (Semi Dedicated): $80 / month
• Aweber (Email Marketing Tool): $30 /month
• Other Expenses: $500 which includes job opening listing costs (Craigslist), business travel costs, and initial marketing efforts.

This puts the total cost so far at about $5000 which is not too bad. However I do need to keep costs down as the main cost of this business will be its marketing which is yet to really start.

Social Media Pages

So far, I’ve also created LinkedIn page and group, Facebook page, and Twitter account for the new business. We’ve actually created quality graphics for each of them according to the image size and resolutions they accept.

Next Step

Next step is to complete the website programming and launch the marketing campaign. However while the website is being programmed we will be working tirelessly on adding quality content to the site and make our database larger.

I will also release more details about the new project including its name, nature of service(s), and more as soon as the website is completed.

I announced the start of my latest project on February 14th, and posted an update on finding the right team on Feb 21st. Project has been going forward and now (while about 2 weeks behind schedule) the graphic design is completed.

I still can’t release the information on what the business/website is yet. The anticipated launch date at this time is May 1st after which I will talk about the business and our strategy in detail.

Team Members (Updated)

At the time of the last update I posted here I only had one team member and was looking for a few more. We’re one step closer to having all needed members on board. Here is a list of current team members:

• Rob (Programmer): Have been working with him for years. The fact that he is on our team is a peace of mind. He is so good that I am confident that the only thing limiting the features on the website is our imagination and not technical issues.
• Jason (Designer): I was lucky to find Jason through a Craigslist ad that I posted. I wanted to find someone that is a good designer, lives in Dallas area so we can meet often, and is trust worthy. Jason is all of that and more.
• Anonymous (Marketing Guru): I think I’ve found the marketing guru that I’ve been looking for. Her projects at her current job are very similar to the type of project that we are working on. I’ve met with her twice already and she seems interested in working with us. I’ll introduce her once I know for sure she will be part of our team.
• Babak (Advisor): Babak is my cousin. His work makes him precisely our customer target market. That make him extremely valuable to have on our board of advisors. I am lucky and grateful that he accepted this position at no cost to us.
• Myself: I (try to) coordinate the works of all team members, constantly improve the business plan, make sure we are on budget, and do most of market research and advertising management. I’m hoping I can pass on the  marketing & advertising responsibilities to our new team member (that I will announce in the next business update post).

Design Completed

Today, April 15th, we finished the graphic design of the website after about three weeks of improvements. Our goal were to create a website that

• is (very) clean, simple, and inviting
• will NOT win any unique design awards
• non of its elements would take attention away from the main content
• its features and functionalities are idiot proof. In other words anyone can use the website right away.

I think we’ve accomplished all of the above. Our design is very clean, easy to navigate, and yet a lot of attention has been given to details.

Next Step

The next step is to get the design and all the features programmed into the website which will be Rob’s responsibility. Our original deadline for completion of the website was end of April. Given the fact that we are two weeks behind on the design part we might being a little late on coding as well.

I just finished listening to “The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” by Michael E. Gerber. This book is one of the most recommended business books out there and for good reason.

Many businesses are started by owners who used to do the job for someone else and decide to go into business for themselves. More often than not these business owners are great at what they do too. However they don’t realize that once they are a business owner their responsibilities change dramatically. They don’t realize that they are not the plumber, chef, or carpenter anymore. They are now  business owners. While they were great at being the technician in their previous position they don’t know how to run and expand a business. This will inevitably cause them to have to work twice as much and their business is doomed to fail sooner or later.

Gerber believes all business owners have three personalities in them:

• The Technician
• The Manager
• The Entrepreneur

These personalities fight to take over each other at all times. The myth to running a successful business is to find a balance among all three. This doesn’t mean equal responsibilities should be allocated to all three personalities. In fact the new business owner should focus less and less on the Technician personality as the business evolves.

One of the most interesting parts of the book (for me) was the part where Gerber discusses the necessity to run your business as if it is a franchise. This

• Eliminates the need for the business owner to be there at all time.
• Allows for almost all tasks to be allocated to employees with clear instructions.
• Reduces the amount of training needed for each new employee.
• Provides the organization needed to grow the business.
• Makes the business appealing to be bought out since its the business that works not the owner and therefore the owner can be replaced.
• (most importantly) Allows the owner to enjoy a less stressful job which was the reason he/she started the business in the beginning.

I’ve been looking into Iranian websites lately and couldn’t find a good list of Persian forums and communities online so here it is:

Persian Hub

PersianHub is home to the largest community of Iranians online. They have over 200,000 members. Most of their members sign up for an account to download Iranian music and movies (for free) but the forums are very active too.

Iran Proud

Similar to PersianHub, Iran Proud has a large database of Iranian music and movies to download as well as an active forum community.

Bia 2

Bia2 is one of the most popular Iranian websites online for their Farsi radio, jokes, pictures, and now their forums. With more than 8000 members and over 300,000 posts you can always be sure to get a reply to your threads.

New Persia

New Persia is an online community website where users have their own very customizable profile. They can chat with each other and communicate through the forums.  New Persia has been online since 1999.  New Persia is in some sense the MySpace of Iran.

Today, on our hookah blog I noticed that the blog homepage was being redirected to one of the recent posts. After a little digging I found out that a redirect plugin that I had installed (Redirection) was doing that on its own.

I hadn’t changed any settings on it either so I don’t know what was causing it. I deactivated it and installed a new one called Simple 301 Redirect.