Today we started our offline promotion campaign for our Speeltijd website. We printed a couple of A4 page ads, and 100’s of small flyers, all stating our URL, logo and short description of the site.

The flyers will be distributed at a neighbourhood kids party and BBQ today, visited by 100’s of people in our target audience. The bigger ads will be displayed there too. I think the flyers will be more effective, since people tend to forget URL’s (I know I do ). But when they see the flyer at home, they will be much more likely to check out the site!

I hope this campaign will have a measurable effect on the visitor stats, which has almost doubled again compared to last month. And I also hope this will get word of mouth started!

My girlfriend will also distribute the flyers at her job, an after-school childcare. We’re still thinking about ways to promote the site to schools, which will start again in september.

The goal for this website is to reach 1000 visitors a day by the end of the year, which should be possible if we can keep the current growth rate!

Yep, I did it! I made a clone… of the old Memory card game! So no flame wars please

My girlfriend has a website for kids, on which she wrote an article on how to make your own Memory card game. The real thing, with paper and such. And to accompany this article, I had the idea to quickly make an online Memory game, as a java applet. I used the art of her paintings, so the whole game took less then a day to make, including art! And it actually looks quite nice

The whole point is of course to make visitors return to her site, to play the game, and then check out new articles. So, if you have a minute to spare, give it a try! And give my girlfriend a chance to brag about the number of visitors to her site

As you may have noticed, I’ve updated the look of this blog a bit. I have added the images at the top, which link to the corresponding categories of this blog, and the author description on the left side.

But another maybe surprising change, is that I have removed the Google Adsense ads! They were here for almost 3 months, and they haven’t made me a single cent. The main reason is that the ads did not really correspond with the contents of this blog. And as a consequence, nobody clicked on them.

I was considering to remove them for a while now, but I finally did it after reading this post on Entrepreneur’s Journey (which is a really great blog on internet marketing and online revenue btw).

It made me think again about the purpose of this blog, and I came up with the following:

• A marketing vehicle for my games and my music.
• A place with extra information for people playing my games, like the Bubblomania tips and tricks.
• A place to write about my creative projects and experiments as a beginning indie game producer and online entrepreneur, like the Smiley Puzzle Project.
• A place that might contain useful information for other game producers, online entrepreneurs, fans and freaks…

Cluttering the place with ads leading away from my site, obviously doesn’t fit this purpose. The only reason for having these ads was to help fund my web hosting expenses, but it clearly failed that goal. Maybe some day, when I have loads of visitors, I will probably add some form of advertising again. But for the moment there’s no point in doing so.

I’m still in doubt about the advertising on my main games site, so any comments on the subject are welcome!

This weekend, I released a minor update of my arcade game Bubblomania X, with 2 important changes.

The first change is actually a change to the price of the game. There has been some talk about micropricing recently among indie game developers. But this blog post on GameProducer, and the comments on that post, convinced me to change my price from 14.95$ to 9.95$.

I’m doing this mostly as an experiment to find out what the optimal price is for Bubblomania X. I think that 9.95$ is a price that will encourage impulse buyers, while 14.95$ is a bit of a weird price, that makes you think twice. Also, I changed the in-game price for European customers to 7.95 euro. After adding the VAT, around 20% in most countries, this becomes a price point of about 10 euro. Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out!

The other change I made was as a result of user feedback and a review: I made the small bubbles more transparent to make it clearer that they are decoration. Some people tried to pop them, and quickly got frustrated with the game. This is also mentioned in the Tips & Tricks I recently posted.

I plan to let this new version float for a while, and concentrate on my new game now…

If you’re an (aspiring) indie game developer, this is a topic you should be interested in! I know I am!

Although some indie developers say that sales data from others is irrelevant, I think it’s interesting to see how others are doing. And it can be motivating to see what the possibilities are!

Recently, GameProducer.net, a very interesting blog for game developers, started publishing sales statistics for several games, including Cactus Bruce and the Corporate Monkeys, Xmas Bonus and Democracy.

But, although these games seem to be doing very well, keep in mind that there are a lot more games doing a lot worse! I’m experiencing this first hand, with less then stellar results.

Other sources for sales data are forums, like the excellent IndieGamer forum, and the iDevGames forum. The latter has a thread in which several Mac game developers disclose their download and sales stats!

And maybe some day, when I have decent sales to show, I’ll put my own sales stats in this blog also…

About 2 years ago, I made a puzzle game for Nokia series 40 mobile phones, called Enigmatica. It’s a mobile adaptation of my game Enigmatic Movements for the mac.

I tried to sell this game through Sharewire and Handango, but I only made a few sales. And since Sharewire keeps the first 25$ each month, I never actually received any money
I also contacted publishers and other distributors, but they didn’t like the fact that the game was only for the nokia series 40.

So since it never really got anywhere, I decided to make the game freeware! It’s available for download over WAP and web from GetJar. It already got quite a few downloads over there, so at least there’s now a bunch of people enjoying the game!

After reading Steve Pavlina’s article about Adsense revenue, I decided to add Google Adsense advertisements to this blog. These are the ads you can see on the left of this page. I tried to make them as non-intrusive as possible, since I’m not really fond of big flashing banners.

A few months ago, I already added adsense to my shareware games site. Up till now, it made me about 10$. So it’s a start…
If you’re interested in adding adsense to your own site, you can click on the Google Adsense button on the left, halfway down this page!

I realize this blog still has very little content, and as a consequence, very low traffic. But I plan to grow these, and it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment. My hope is to eventually be able to pay my web hosting with it! My current host is Canaca, and I’m rather happy with them. Their cheapest offer is 3.95$ per month, for 20GB of web space and 500GB monthly bandwidth! So it’s ideal for hosting shareware and music!

Woohoo!

Bubblomania X is currently the game of the week at the German games site Games4Mac!
With a 5 hearts out of 5 rating no less! Very nice to see some positive news about the game.