About
Hallo All
My name is Saad and I’m the chief author of this blog. I have an undergraduate degree in Business Information Systems (with Minor in Ecommerce & Web Technologies) from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
I have been actively using the Internet for blogging and other online ventures for over 4 years. I have authored and co-authored several blogs in past as ‘writing’ is something that I really enjoy.
Even though I’m residing in Malaysia – Sarawak region, my day job involves working online for a Canadian SEO Company based in Toronto.
How it All Started?
When I first started blogging, I preferred to stay anonymous, thus I can share whatever that I wanted to share back then without having to think of its consequences. My main interests were –life style, Tech & gadgets, cats, computer games & celebrities etc. Since I had no source of income back then, I used free blogging platform like- Blogger & typepad to setup my blogs.
Even though I didn’t actually know what I was doing, my blog was ranking pretty high in the Search Engines for various terms. I would often setup a blog about a particular subject and try to make it rank well in the search engine. Soon it all became like a competition between me and my friends. We had setup numerous blogs on some niche topics and after every 2 weeks we compared our rankings; the blog with the highest ranking was the winner.
How did I get to know SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
After few months of trying Google’s Adsense and failing miserably, I noticed how people were promoting products on their blogs/websites for commission (Which I later figured was known as “Affiliate Marketing”). So for testing purpose, I took off all my adsense ad blocks and signed up with few companies as their affiliate and started promoting their products on some of my blogs. It took me only 4 days to get to my first $50, 1 week to get to $200 and a month to cross the 5 digit figure! Being the citizen of a 3rd Word Country, I was very pumped up by my achievement online. Slowly I signed up with more affiliate companies, and replaced all adsense code with my affiliate links/banners. In some cases, I even removed my “original content” to make room for the banners!
And that is when “IT” happened. I lost my rankings, and slowly started losing visitors and earnings. In order to figure out what I did wrong and how to improve my rankings again, I started researching online – day and night. Finally I came across this nice article which basically gave me the basic idea of Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a – SEO). The article helped me to clear out some of my doubts – basically even though I didn’t know about SEO back then, whatever I did was basically ‘right’ and has helped my sites to rank better in the search engines. For instance –
- I always set the title of the blog to be what I was trying to rank for.
- I used different heading tags (H1, H2) and Bold Tag (
, now known as strong) to highlight the important section of the content. - I wrote lots and lots of unique content for the blog.
- I used the term that I want to rank for ‘repetitively’ within the content. (This isn’t the best SEO practice today, but worked well back then).
Soon, I became really interested in SEO and joined several Webmaster forums, and purchased handful of online eBooks on that topic, out of which 50% was all BS and low quality content by the shady “Internet Marketers”, but the rest was real useful materials.
How did I Become an Expert?
Well, after three years of practical hands-on experience with SEO, PPC & Internet Marketing in general, and also working with a handful of clients, I still don’t want to make any outrageous claim that I’m an expert in SEO. Because nowadays everyone is claiming to be an ‘expert’, so I guess I just want to stay away from that term to avoid being classified into the same category.
I believe SEO is more of an ‘art’ than science. Many of the experts may ‘disagree’ with me but I do strongly believe in that. You can’t learn “SEO” by reading a book or going through a video tutorial – Well yes, probably you will be able to get the basics of SEO; However you need to implement & experiment all the methodologies that you learn in order to find out what works best for you.
The reason I call SEO an art is because, the steps/methods that is involved to rank a website for a set of keywords is rather simple and straightforward, However in order to be really successful, you really need to know the drill well and also come up with unique ideas. Otherwise your knowledge will be limited to what everyone else already knows in this industry.
Why did I start this Blog?
There are primarily four reasons:
- I wanted a place where I’ll be able to share my experience.
- I am tired of people who are trying to rip of webmasters by selling them ‘Information’ that is already available for FREE elsewhere.
- I noticed how Asia is far behind in Search Marketing. Every expert and the major SEM companies are primarily focusing on US and European markets. But none of them really bothered to look into ‘Asia’! Even though Asia produces most of the world’s goods today, we are still unable to market our products to our end customer. Which explains why, we always need to go under different corporate umbrellas in order to sustain in this economy.
- The amount of dedicated Bloggers and Small Internet Business has simply blasted in Asia. But still majority of them are nowhere to be seen in the Search Engine. In the blogosphere, you will always hear success stories of people earning $XX,XXX amount through blogging and so on. But if you notice closely, none of them are Asian. Why don’t we hear about Asian bloggers making thousands? Why don’t we run across picture of an Asian face with a big check?
After analyzing some of the top Asian blogs, I noticed majority of them has lots of traffic (10-20k per day), however they are earning only between USD 500-1500/month. Some of them are not even earning anything (even though they are actually trying to).
WHY? – Because, firstly they don’t know how to monetize the traffic and they have very limited experience with Search Marketing. (Some of them haven’t even heard of it!)
There are tons of A+ freelance designers, coders, and writers in Asia who are just sitting idle because they don’t know how and where to sell their service online. There are thousands of Asian startups that are failing miserably due to ineffective means of online marketing & promotion and lack of experience understanding the Pay-Per-Click game.
Mission of This Blog
My main mission would be to help bloggers and Small Business Owners to understand Search Marketing & Social Media to help them become successful in their respective areas of online ventures.
Contact - Saad Kamal
If you wish to contact me, feel free to use the Contact Form or write to me directly–
Email: me [at] saadkamal.com
Please feel free to sign up for my FREE SEM Newsletter if you wish to learn Search Marketing and stay up-to-date with the latest news and happening of this industry.
Regards
Saad Kamal
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