More Spammers...

Today's been one of my busiest days since that surge of 100 visitors to my site a couple of weeks ago. I achieved 36 visitors. Only 14 under my target! I might still make my target if I really push some articles on digg and reddit. Once I hit the 50 visitors a day mark i have to make sure that I start getting a minimum of 50 visitors everyday. Then I can build my way up to 100 a day!

Over the last 7 days I have delivered just under 2k ad impressions and been rewarded with $.25 which doesn't seem like much but it is growing. I should hopefully start earning a dollar a week really soon. As I just put ads up on my forums I am expecting to more than double that $0.25 this week. But today has been pretty good as far as things go. I got another 4 members on my forums, bringing me up to 18. Although 3 were spammers and 1 I am unsure about. Hopefully that 1 guy will start posting. That would be really encouraging. My first true poster apart from my friends.

But I am going to continually add 10 posts a day until my forums start picking up momentum! Hopefully I will start to receive some more members from January's prospected increase in internet traffic which a couple of people have mentioned to me.

But with the new year just around the corner I want to start setting out some plans for my website that I will have hoped to achieve by the end of 2010.

1. get to around 1000 visitors a day
2. Gain several hundred active posters on forums.
3. earn up to $10 a day
4. Find a way of getting back into favor with adsense!
5. Start gaining subscribers on youtube so that I can start a small revenue stream from that!

If I want to achieve 1000 visitors a day then I will have to continue to build backlinks and post on my forums and add quality, original content to my website. Hopefully then I will start to reap the benefits of a lot of hard work!

Anyway its late so I better get to bed. I have a whole day of work to do tomorrow!

A competition to attract new users!

So guys I have decided to host a little competition to try and encourage more and more members to register on the forums. The prize is that of a video game of the winners choice! You might be thinking that this is quite a lot of money to be putting into this but if it gets my forums up and going then its worth it.

Now I am not expecting miracles from this competition, but if it gets me 10-20 active users then it will be more than worth it! The forums after all will more than bring my money back if I get them started. I mean, if I place 1 ad group so that it is always visible then I will be earning lots of page impressions from 1 person alone. So then if I get 100 active users on the site then I will hopefully be starting to make some of my goals that I have laid out. For instance - 100 visitors a day and the $1/day goal.

I have been looking at other peoples success with forums and they seem to just grow and grow and grow once they are started. This could essentially mean big things for my website!

I am also planning more competitions. But the prizes wont cost me anything at the moment. It will be like a higher ranking on the forum system etc..

Anyway I need to get back to work!

Change of plans

Recently I have felt that I haven't being doing enough programming and to be honest I rather miss it. So I am thinking of using this as a way of generating some serious traffic to my website. I offer free games which people can download and play and hopefully enjoy enough to come back for more! This will also be a good talking point for my forums. I can ask what type of games my visitors would like and set to work trying to create these games. Right now I am just starting my first game which will be fully coded by myself although I might have to outsource the art work. Because programmer art in my case is rubbish. Hopefully I will be able to create fun games which will generate me a large community. The larger the community the more people that will regularly come back to my site.

Anyway I need to get back to work with my programming I have gotten the basic layout of my game up and running. Follow me on my game programming blog which you can find in my link list at the side.

More updates soon

Slow down :(

Things have been a bit slow lately. I have not made any money! Although I have learned something very valuable. Remember knowledge is very powerful. I just found out about a google/webmasters. This looks great as it shows me errors and things like that as well as what keywords I rank for and where I rank for them. This gives me an indication of how hard I need to work in order to start ranking for certain keywords. When I start getting number 1 on most of my keywords that I want then I will really be reeling in the traffic. I just need more content.

Anyway I need to get back to writing keyword rich content which will get me a million pounds a day!

Update soon!

Good day :D

So today has been a very good day! I have earned a total of $0.16 so far which is great! Hopefully this will continue to increase and I will soon be seeing like $16 a day :D But you never know. Also I have now got 3 members on my forums. I am trying to get my friends to join up and start a conversation so that it will attract more people. Anyway I need to study for my computing exam tomorrow. I am going to do a quick half hour then work on a new feature for my website. Then early night because I have football tomorrow! :D

Overall earnings : $0.49
today's earnings : $0.16

God I hope I get more days like these then I can start paying for advertising again!

Using a Server

So I am thinking of putting my old computer to use as a server for my website. Which means I will be able to put thousands of reviews and downloads onto my site. Although I will have to have my server computer on all the time. That shouldn't be a problem if I have it in the loft but I will have to have all my info backed up as well as a secondary power supply in case  the old one goes. This should be worth it though as I wont have to pay for web hosting and I can control how much data I put onto my site.

Today is the second full day without advertising on Yahoo and I only received 4 uniques although I did add quite a lot more content today which should be good. I am hoping that I can put up about 5-10 reviews a week as well as a couple of features.

I did however get 92 ad impressions for adbrite for which I got the grand total of $0.01 not much but its something. Once I get my server up and running I can really push the music download front and hopefully generate a couple hundred uniques a day. But for now I am just going to create a lot more reviews for my visitors to feast their eyes on. I am trying to just gain organic traffic from google at the moment but how hard that will be to do is yet to be seen. Having organic traffic to my site will mean I can rest on my laurels a bit with out having to heavily advertise my site.

Anyway another day another couple reviews.

Tomorrow I will add a couple of features which will hopefully be quite interesting reads.

Bye for now!

I need more content!

So guys you remember the phrase content is king? yeah? well it is. And guess what, my content isn't that high and mighty at the moment. I really need to start writing better/longer reviews. This is a case of both quality and quantity if I want my website to succeed. I really need to up my game. Today though I managed to put up a few reviews. But they are no where near the standard that I want them to be. Tomorrow I am going to review at minimum 2 games again and this time I will write A LOT more about them. This means that if someone gets interested in my review then they read it through. Which means more time is spent on my site and I get a higher ranking for certain keywords. This is great because my short and long term goal right now is to start generating enough organic traffic so that I am making at least a Dollar/Day. This may not seem a hell of a lot to ordinary people but to me it will be great! It will be something to build on and remember - We all learned to walk before we could run.

Taking my website off yahoo advertising has shown me how little traffic I generate by myself. Although today I did manage to earn a cent. Hopefully by Christmas I will be generating a lot of organic traffic from better keywords and I will have a lot more content on my site

Anyway time to hit the hay. I need my rest for all the work I will be doing tomorrow.

Baby Steps!

Not yet ready for advertising!

So guys I have decided to stop using yahoo as an advertiser. I want to try and achieve traffic without any help from advertising and things like that. I think that it will give me more incentive to add more content that will bring people to my site. I will hopefully add about 5-10 reviews/previews today as well as some new trailers and more for my tech shop. It will be hard but worth it when I start getting visitors.

yesterday's earnings were : $0.01
Overall earnings : $0.31

The reason I stopped the advertising was because I felt that if I was spending a dollar a day and not seeing the traffic I was expecting then I should stop until I have content good enough to keep more and more of these people. Using the advertising I was receiving about 20-35 visits a day which is about 15-20 uniques. For such a low conversion rate for visitors into forum members I just don't think it was worth it.

One of my initial ideas on building a successful website was to put a forum on it and hope people would sign up and start chatting. Although this naive idea could work, I had yet to realize that I need something interesting on my site for people to sign up.

So right now I am just adding more content. Content is king after all!

Making money of my website

For those that have just started reading ill give you a quick brief:

I am a young internet entrepreneur named Elliot. I have recently started my own website. Http://www.gamercity.co.uk and am currently working on it so that I can start to make a bit of money out of it. Plus I really enjoy writing about my favorite games and doing videos. So far I have been making a couple of cents a day using Adbrite which is an ad network. They do all the hard stuff like finding companies whom want to put their ads on my site. 

My current earnings to date from adbrite are : $0.30 which is pretty poor I know but it just shows that it has potential. I am pretty happy if I get a few cents a day but I am putting a lot of work into my site so that hopefully it will start to make a couple dollars a day.

So anyway, yesterday I received 32 visitors which is my new record. I also received about 120 page views which is great! I am just hoping that soon I will have content on my site that will bring people back again and again. I have put the basic structure of my site up and right now I am working on creating A LOT of content for my site so that I will start to receive more organic traffic which means I wont have to pay for things like advertising to get people to come to my site.

I tried out chitika on my website yesterday my earnings however are yet to be seen. 

Sorry for not updating in a while I have been busy working on the new structure for my site. I use visual web developer for those that want to know. I am pretty happy with the work I have put it. I have put everything into sub folders and its a lot easier to add new content now. For instance I have an index page per game. I have sub folders for that game containing things like reviews, trailers... Which I really like. 

So yesterday's earnings : $0.03

overall earnings : $0.30

Update

Hi guys so recently I added some music downloads onto my site. Just a couple to see how they would fare. It seems to be going well. I have yet to tell my friends that I can get them free music, hopefully that will help my site a lot more. Also I uploaded a few video trailers of certain games and they have been taken with good reception.

My forums went down though :( I had to re upload them and get it all back up and running although I have lost all my members and will have to repost a couple of things. Hopefully people will register to ask for some music and then talk about new games in the other forums. Generating more traffic for me and more revenue.

My plan to make money of the downloads is that I will get people go onto the download page(1 ad impression) and then chose the song they want(3-4 ad impressions) so that way I am getting quite a few impressions per visitor. They then download the song. Like the music and come back for some more songs. Therefor I get residual traffic.

I have already achieved more than 50% of the ad impressions I received yesterday and they are still coming. And I have gotten 12 Visitors already today. Hopefully I will hit 30 today and set a new record. I am definitely on track to earning my $0.01 a day today and you never know I might manage more than that. My goal right now is to get $0.02 a day and hopefully I will get that by the end of October. Then $0.04 a day by the end of November and so on... Keep doubling it every month and soon I will be raking it in :D

I wont post today's earnings up yet as there is still half a day left. So I will post them later tonight.

Bye for now

update

I have been busy today doing various things so I haven't had that much time to work on my website Although I have managed to upload a Modern Warfare 2 Video for people. I have to put the Assassin's Creed video I uploaded somewhere. Hopefully I this will be the start of a huge game trailer library that many people will enjoy.

Right now though I am trying to sign up to official game websites. So that I get a newsletter of the latest game trailers and things like that. That way my site will be a bit more up to date. 

My forums are starting to get a bit lively hopefully I will see a large increase in the amount of people posting on them. I am hoping the forums will bring back a lot of regular users to the site. This will mean that I will get continued revenue from these visitors and it will also make my site more attractive to other visitors. Hopefully so much so that they register. 

My aim by Christmas is to have about 50 active members on my forums. This will hopefully mean 50 people that come back nearly everyday. Which means I will be able to start building a larger community and then hopefully I will be making enough to cover my advertising. 

My goal by the end of the month is to get into the top 1000 for games reviews searches and maybe get into the top 1000 for specific game review keywords. Like "Modern Warfare 2 Review" that means that I am starting to get somewhere and then every time I upload a new review I will be higher and higher in the keyword rankings.

Today's Earnings: $0.01

Overall Earnings: $0.19

Today's Visitors: 14

Update

So today I have installed Chitika at the top of this blog. I want to see if it will be worth it to put it on my website. Although later tonight I might just go ahead and put it on my index page of my website just to see how it works. It looks as though it will earn me a lot more money than adbrite who's earnings were... kind of poor. One good thing I like about Chitika is that if people come to my site directly it will not show ads. But I don't know if I can afford to do that at the moment. Maybe I will just keep the adbrite up there for when it is direct traffic but I am hoping to see and increase in the amount of money I make.

However for my website it has been a good day. I have equalled my highest uniques/day record already and there are still a couple hours left of the day. Hopefully I will beat it tonight. If not though, I will just have to beat it tomorrow :D

Anyway today's earnings are : $0.01
total earnings : $0.18

Kinda small... but hopefully that will change! :D anyway need to practice my piano and then write up another review :D bye for now!

Update

Quite an early update here but I am going to be pretty busy tonight. today has been a good day so far I have had quite a few visits to my site. Its averaging about 10-15 uniques a day and about 20-25 visits a day. Hopefully I will be able to increase that up to around 40-50 by the end of this month. But only time will tell. I am dead chuffed about today though. I managed to pull in $0.11 already today and there is still about 7 hours of the day left. You never know I might make a bit more.

Today's earnings: $0.11
overall earnings: $0.17

my goal is to make a dollar and build it up from there. The traffic I am quite happy with so far but I am hoping the latest reviews I have put onto my site will bring in a couple more

Please feel free to check out my site at http://www.gamercity.co.uk and tell me what you think

Update

So the yahoo advertising works. I managed to pull in a couple of people. Exactly how many is unknown as we did not have the google analytics code installed on our new web page design. I did see an increase in the amount of ad impressions though and although it is costing me a dollar a day I think in the end it will be worth it as I am hoping that people will come back again and again. I am not expecting to see great instantaneous results from advertising although I am looking for a good increase.

Today has been a good day so far. Lots of people have already visited my site. I now have over 10 uniques already and america/canada traffic has not even started to come through. This may not seem a lot to you seasoned professional webmasters but for me it is good. After all I only started this website about a month ago.

Hopefully though I will be able to increase my average daily ad revenue up to around $0.10 a day by the end of this month. That would be nice.

Anyway overall today has been good.

Today's earnings : $0.03
overall earnings: $0.06

update

I am going to start giving you the stats for how much I am earning per week on the internet so that I can compare what I am currently earning to what I have been earning in the past.

This weeks grand total: $0.03
Overall total: $0.03

I am using adbrite and I just started putting a banner on the bottom of every page so hopefully I should start getting $0.01 a day. After getting that it means I am 1% closer to my goal of $1 a day. So I can start to pay for adwords and things like that to boost traffic. Getting this also means that I will have something to show for my hard work and this will become my benchmark. After hopefully reaching $1/day I will then up my targets to $2/day and then so on until I reach $10/day after which I think I will start to look for other people to write reviews and things like that for me. Although I am hoping that the forums I have up are going to take off as they will hopefully bring back a handful of traffic every day

Latest news

I recently purchased a new website layout which everyone I have asked has said looks professional and stylish. My own opinion is that it is great. Hopefully though I will have interesting content on all of my pages so that people will hopefully come back for updates every now and again. But I am not to worried about visitors at the moment as I really want to concentrate on content. Once I get content up and running I can start to take it a bit easier and publish a new review/preview/video/whatever every now and again and still see lots of traffic.

Also on the money making side of things. I have made 2 cents from advertising on adbrite so far. Currently I think its ok for the amount of traffic I am currently getting in but hopefully that will increase with the amount of traffic I am hoping to get. 

But I appealed to adsense as I liked the way they showed me the info and how they better index my site if I have adsense on it. Also it would mean I get checks from google every now and again and that would be pretty sweet. 

I am planning on getting all the website content up this weekend. Although it will take a hell of a lot of work. But it will be worth it and I wont have to do any big changes in a while. This is so I can start studying more, my grades are average but I want to be secure in the knowledge that in the run up to the exams I know most things and will probably get A's in my subjects.

Anyway please check out how my site is coming on and register on the forums!

http://www.gamercity.co.uk

Please tell me what you think of it and what I could do to make it better.

Bye for now- Lots of work to do.

Disaster

So I was trying to log onto adsense when I got in from school the other day but it wouldn't allow me. So I checked my emails and...

I found the account termination message from google. I had lost all my £2.00 pounds :( lol. Anyway I am busy trying to get direct right media's adds up and running. They seem to be the best and by the looks of things they will give me a good return.

I also had to find a new website tracker. That took a while but I finally chose getclicky.com I uploaded the code from the site and it is working fine.

I will have to put up more quality content for my website though if I want to start getting anywhere near the amount of views I would like. Right now I am putting up a few level walkthroughs of some games. Although these games are quite old and I don't expect to generate much traffic for them. I am however going to start doing reviews of new high class games like fifa 10 and assassins creed 2. But for now I will have to wait and try to put ever more interesting content onto my site!

Bye for now!

Hello

Hi guys I am starting this blog just to talk about all my business pursuits and just to tell you my business plans and what not.

anyway my current business idea is my website. I plan to program games which I can then put on my site as free downloads. If they are good I may even charge some money for them and their updates. Anyway I also hope to provide people with written and video reviews of the latest games. Although my primary source of traffic will be my games that I create. This will also be a good way for me to learn how to program games and a place for my portfolio. This will be good when I want to try and get a job in game programming. One of my previous businesses was a very small buying and selling thing business in which i bought and sold computer components on ebay. I made about £20 quid all in all although for the time put in on every sale and the risk factor corresponding with the reselling of these components I quickly decided it wasn't worth it.

Anyway my current business plan is as I have explained above. Currently I have earned £1.95 from this business and although this doesn't seem to be a lot it is proof that this might work. Anyway I have recently uploaded a new style to my website which is called http://www.gamercity.co.uk please check it out and tell me what you think! I am currently in the process of adding new pages and things like that. I am trying to find a decent editor for my website so that I can easily add new pages and links and things like that.

anyway I need to get back to work.

More updates soon!