… and not much gets done. Not on the games programming front anyway.

I’ve been incredibly busy with my job. I had to finish an important project, before I leave after next week. Yes yes, only 1 week to go! Last week I was in Paris (Versailles to be exact) to integrate my last project with the client’s system. It was hard work, coding every day and then some more in the evenings at my hotel room. But at the end the client seemed happy, so I left with a good feeling!

As a result, I was not able to do any blogging at all. But this will improve massively the coming month! As my journey as an online entrepreneur and game producer begins, I expect I’ll have lots of experiences to write about

A while ago, I discovered the Earner’s Forum, an very popular forum with a massive amount of information for people who want ot make, or are currently making, money online. An interesting place to hang out… It pointed me to an interesting interview with Patrick Gavin, president of Text Link Ads, the system I use to monetize this blog.

Anyway, more stuff coming up the following days, including the Speeltijd website stats for September, and some stories about 10 years of Bubblomania, including sales stats!

Another Text-Link-Ads sponsor appeared on my blog: Get Latest Game News & Review. The site, called SyncGaming, features game news, reviews and previews, and has a community forum.

This is my third sponsor already, and it brings my Text Link Ads revenue for september to more than $33! So this seems to be a better than expected extra revenue source, which will come in very handy when I will be a full time indie, in a month!

The months before my first product release will be very tough, with zero income. So, if you want to help me out, you can do so by becoming a sponsor too! You will not only get a link under the Sponsors header on the left, but also a permanent link and a little site description in this blog!

How to become a sponsor?

1. Sign up with Text Link Ads, if you haven’t done so already.
2. Once successfully signed up, search for my blog, by typing “Dark Moon Blog” in the search box, or go directly to my blog details.
3. Click the Add To Cart button.
4. Enter the necessary info to buy the link. A link will cost $25 per month. If you’re new to Text Link Ads, they will give you $100 for free to spend on ads! So it’s a great opportunity either way.

This blog is slowly growing, and will continue doing so when I’m independent, and have more time available to post. So it’s a good investment!

Alternatively, if you own a mac, you can also sponsor me by buying my game Bubblomania X, for only $9.95.

I finally did it! Earlier this week, I quit my well paid full time job as a software engineer. I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while, and decided it’s the only way to go. The goal is to become an independent games producer, and an online entrepreneur in general!

It’s not official yet, and I’ll probably have to stay at my current job until the first week of october. After that, I’m on my own. Complete freedom to go my own way, build my own business, design and create my own games, make my own mistakes and maybe fall flat on my own face But I believe it’s worth it!

I expect it will be a great journey, whether I succeed or fail miserably. I want to learn a lot, and have lots of fun! Fortunately, I have saved some money, so I can survive the first year, even if I don’t make a cent. I want to be in this for the long run. So my goal is to create intellectual property, and set up some websites and systems which I can leverage for years to come.

My biggest inspiration is Steve Pavlina, who’s article “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job” pushed me over the edge and gave me the courage to actually do it! And of course all the successful and less successful indie game developers, who can be found on the IndieGamer forums, are also a great inspiration.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be developing and refining my initial business plans and my ideas in general. And of course keep you in the loop on this blog!

So this is the very beginning… My girlfriend is freaking out, but she’s supportive. Some call me crazy, others are encouraging. But I strongly feel this is the way to go for me. And it seems the universe agrees, since I just sold my second Text Link Ad to Cell Phone Covers!

So wish me luck!

Yay! I sold my first Text Link Ad today! So a big thanks to my first sponsor: Mortgage Lender!

A while ago, I signed up with Text Link Ads, a link selling service that sells short text links on your site at a fixed price, and for the duration of 1 month. You can see mine at the left under the Sponsors header. I made $12.5 from this link, half of the $25 the advertiser paid. Since there are 8 spots for links available, I could make as much as $100 per month from these! That’s a lot more than I could possibly make with Google Adsense. They also have an affiliate program, which offers you $25 for referring a publisher or an advertiser.

At first, I was a bit sceptical, because my blog is still rather low traffic (but growing!). But since I like to experiment with ways to make money online, I went ahead with it. Signing up is free, so all it took was half an hour to set up…

It took a while before I got my first ad though, mainly because my site description was quite poor. But recently I read these tips on how to write a better site description. And less then a week after applying them, my first ad sale is a fact! Offering a permanent link by mentioning your sponsors in your blog, is a great help.

There are a lot of blogs using and praising Text Link Ads. But I have experienced some cons of their system. First of all, they seem to be picky about which sites they accept. They didn’t accept my Speeltijd website, although it has more visitors than this blog. And secondly, they choose the price for the links on your site, and you can not directly influence it.

But still, if you want to monetize your site with advertising, this is my top choice!

The Speeltijd (playtime) website, a project by me and my girlfriend, is a blog with articles for children and people attending children, about creative things to do and games to play in groups.

A bit over a month ago, I moved this site from a subdomain of darkmoonsw.com to it’s own domain: www.speeltijd.net. And in july, our traffic tripled compared to june! This resulted in an average of 45 visitors a day. Which is not bad, given the fact that the site is in Dutch, it’s partly intended for children and we have done no marketing yet (besides some link swapping). We plan to do some marketing at the end of this month, during the back to school period.

During the last months, I have been adding features like a contact form, a tell-a-friend form, a newsletter, donations and a Memory java game. We also made some extra categories, like quizzes for kids. I expect these things will help the site to keep growing, and eventually make us some cash with google adsense, donations, and maybe other ways…

Also of note is the fact that I bought new web hosting for this site, namely at Dreamhost. I’m super happy with their Crazy Domain Insane plan, which gives me 1TB of bandwidth, 20GB of space, and most importantly: unlimited domains! I’m already using it for hosting 2 of my domains, and I will also move my Dark Moon website there. And if you use a promo code, like DMS75, you’ll get a $75 discount, making it super cheap! I think it’s one of the best deals currently available.

Recently I read a very interesting post on GameProducer.Net: 7 Witty Tactics for Funding Your Game Production. One of the ideas presented there is to sell merchandise based on game art through CafePress.

Years ago, when I created the backgrounds for Bubblomania X, I already had the idea that it would be cool to use them for things like mousepads and clocks etc. But I never got around to investigating this option.

But now I discovered that you can actually set up a gift shop for free at CafePress! So there’s no reason anymore not to try! It took only a minimal amount of time to set up my two shops. Why 2? Simply because the free shop does not allow more than 1 product of the same type, and I have used 2 Bubblomania X backgrounds for use on a mousepad and a clock.

So I proudly present…

I have no idea whether people will actually buy these items, but I think they look quite nice. Especially if you like psychedelic computer art like I do

These items are also for sale in my games shop. If there’s some interest then I’ll probably add more stuff, and use some of the other artwork. And if not, than at least I’ll know the answer to the question in the title! And I’ll probably buy them myself just to show off…

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on 2 websites: one for my mother and one for my girlfriend. It was also quite busy at my day job, so as a consequence, I hardly made any progress with the Smiley Puzzle Project…

My mother’s website is meant for her small business: she’s running a one-person beauty-parlour. This website can be visited at www.vivianetilley.be. It’s still under development: a lot of content should still be added. The look & feel of the site should be more or less final. The background is actually a scan of a painting my mother made! She’s very creative, the curtains you can see on the picture are also hand-made by her. In the future we might use this site to sell some of her work.

The other site is my girlfriend’s blog: Speeltijd. I’ve set up a WordPress blog for her, and she’s going to provide the content. For her job, she’s working a lot with kids aged between 4 and 12, and she has collected a large number of child game ideas to entertain these kids. These are not computer games, but games that can be played outside with a group of kids, or at parties. This site is thus meant both for children and people taking care of children or organising parties for children.

She’s just starting out with this site, but over time it should collect quite some useful content. And we hope it will also attract quite some visitors, as one of the long-term goals is to monetize this site. The content will always remain free of course.

Both sites are in dutch, so they’re meant for a local audience. They are also both located on my webspace with Canaca, since I have a huge amount of webspace and bandwidth there. More than enough to host a dozen more sites if I want to! It’s cheaper to just buy a domain name and a forwarding DNS entry, than to buy new hosting for each site. And this way I can experiment with some ideas…

My ultimate indie dream is of course to have a number of websites providing a basic stream of passive income for me, so I can work almost full time on designing and developing games!

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!