Today I woke up, realizing it’s already March! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re having fun! It’s that time again to ponder a bit about my business and what happened during the last month. Checking my blog, I noticed I only published 3 articles last month…

On the other hand, this blog is getting more visitors again, thanks to the article To Flash Or Not To Flash, which was included in the second Carnival of Game Production on GameProducer.net! I’ll follow up on that article soon, when I have some screenshots of the first Flash game I’m currently developing.

It’s also still doing good with Text-Link-Ads, thanks to these sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and Skill games.

Our Speeltijd.net site has had a little fallback again, with 6792 visitors last month (15% down). Of course february was a couple of days shorter than january As a consequence, Google Adsense income also dropped. But the good news is that I received my money from Google for the first time since I started using Adsense, little over a year ago. I had let the money pile up a bit, so it was already over $250!

I’ve been thinking about my business model last month, and decided to change it a bit. More precisely, I’m going to move from the shareware model to a combined model: webgames with advertising and a deluxe shareware version for the popular webgames. This is also the main reason I’m partly moving to Flash.

There’s a huge audience for free online games, and there are an increasing number of possibilities for developers to monetize on them, using advertising. Of course, it’s also a great method to make more people aware of the deluxe shareware version, although the conversion rate with this audience will be pretty low. I’ll write more about this as my plans develop!

A couple of days ago, I posted about the Google pagerank and Alexa rank increases of my Bubblomania and Speeltijd websites. Now it’s time for some traffic stats of january, beginning with the Speeltijd site.

The second week was really good, we broke another record, with 381 visits on 1 day! Total visits was 7965, 47% more than last month. Google Adsense revenue was only 7% higher, for some reason, the CPM was significantly lower last month…

Traffic for this blog remained more or less the same from last month. It’s still making some nice money with these 3 Text-Link-Ads sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers and Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s.

The Bubblomania site has seen a serious traffic increase, thanks to StumbleUpon, a couple of banner exchange programs and Project Wonderful.

A few weeks ago, I started using Project Wonderful for advertising and selling advertising space. They use an “infinite auction” system, where you bid on an advertising place in CPD, which stands for Cost Per Day. The advantage of their system is that eliminates click fraud, so it’s an interesting change from the usual cost per click (CPC) or cost per impressions (CPM) advertising. All bids start at $0, which means you can do free advertising!

I’m also using them to sell advertising space on my 3 websites. This brings in a bit of money, which I use again to advertise through them. Sites with higher traffic quickly run out of free advertising spots, and paying a few cents a day makes sure you have a good spot.

The only drawback for me is that a lot of the sites advertising and publishing at Project Wonderful are from the comics community. It could use an influx of game related sites! But apart from that, I’m happy with the results up till now.

Recently we added a phpBB forum to our Speeltijd website, to start a community where people can discuss the articles posted on the site.

The website itself is a WordPress blog, and I wanted to do some integration between the blog and the forum. When making a blog post, I want a forum thread to be created automatically, where the blog post can be discussed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any plugin which does this.

So, I devised my own solution I found some PHP code by netclectic on the phpBB forum, that allows you to insert a post in your forum with a single funtion call. The code can be downloaded here. Then I started to write a WordPress plugin to call this code when a blog post is published.

This, of course, was the tricky part… It turned out that it’s not possible to call phpBB code from WordPress code, because both have several functions with the same name. This resulted in PHP errors about function redeclarations!

So I did the following: I wrote some PHP code that uses this insert post function to create a thread in the forum, for a blog post with a given title and URL, passed as GET parameters. And then I wrote a very simple WordPress plugin that calls this PHP script through a socket, with the blog post’s title and link. This solution turns out to work very nicely!

The code for this is currently very specific for my situation, that’s why I don’t make it available yet. But if I can find the time, and there’s enough interest, I will publish a decent customizable solution here!

A new year has started, so, Happy New Year to all my readers!

For me, this will be the year to take things seriously, and to make my business work! It will be tough, but I hope to come out at the end of 2007 with a lot more assets, and a lot more knowledge! And preferably with a couple of extra income streams

As per usual, I’ll give a quick rundown of my website stats for the past month, starting with the Speeltijd site.

As you can see on the Google Analytics chart, the site had 5409 visitors, which is down 10% from last month. As a result, Adsense revenue also dropped about 16%. This little dip was to be expected, because of the Christmas holidays, and the school exams period before. We expect traffic to pick up again, and increase when we launch the forum this month.

Traffic for this blog and the Dark Moon Software site also decreased a bit, again caused by the holidays, and a lower blog update frequency. Both traffic and blog posts will increase again, when I’ll be writing about my indie business plans for the coming year. I’ll be doing some experiments with my Bubblomania webgame, and start again with the Smiley Puzzle Project.

This blog also had a new sponsor through Text Link Ads this month, bringing it’s revenue for december to over $50! A nice way to pay for hosting All 5 sponsors will continue sponsoring next month, so I want to thank them all again: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s, MaraPets Games and Be The Dealer!

I also added the Performancing Partners program to this blog last month, through which you can advertise here for only $20 a month! You’ll get the same deal as when buying a text link ad: a small review of your site on this blog! This means you’ll get a permanent link on a this PR4 site for free! The same applies when you buy a Performancing ad on our dutch Speeltijd site.

Have a great year!

Ok, this sounds more impressive than it really is, but our dutch website Speeltijd is named website of the month by the site Het Knutselhuis, a dutch online shop for hobby and crafts products!

So this means we’ll be on their front page for the month of December. I expect this to bring in some extra traffic!

My girlfriend, who creates the content for that site, is really happy with this. It seems our efforts really are appreciated!

Another month has passed, so it’s statistics time again! Yay, I love statistics!

Our Speeltijd website reached 6000 visitors, representing a growth of 24%. Exactly the same growthrate as last month! With almost 28000 pageviews, we’re maintaining a nice average of 4.6 pageviews per visitor. On our best day, we had 281 visitors!

The adsense revenue of the site grew by 57% this month, which is very interesting considering the fact that pageviews only grew by 22% and I did not change the ad layout at all! So it seems to be true that ad revenue grows at a faster rate than traffic.

The site still has no other revenue streams besides adsense, which is a bit disappointing. I have yet to see the first Performancing link, and AdEngage declined the site. On the bright side, there have been early talks with a major brand about a possible cooperation! But I can’t say anything about this yet…

Traffic on this blog and the Dark Moon Software site in general grew by 22% this month, despite moving the page for my Bubblomania X downloadable game to the new Bubblomania website. Adsense revenue for this site is negligable, but since traffic has been growing for several months, I re-introduced the Google ads on the blog today.

On the other hand, the Text-Link-Ads on this blog are still going strong! Big thanks to the 4 current sponsors, who will continue sponsoring for the whole month of december: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and MaraPets Games! I still have 4 spots available for sponsors, click here to buy a link, including a blog post with permanent link!

The beta version of my new Bubblomania website has been launched a few weeks ago, and it already has a number of repeat visitors. So it looks promising, although there’s quite some work left on both the webgame and the site. I’m currently thinking hard about possible marketing and monetization options.

Ok, this was a longer than usual post, time to shut up

It’s time again for the monthly Speeltijd site statistics!

There was a slowdown in growth this month. The number of visitors grew with 24%, with a peak of 205 visitors on a single day at the beginning of the month! But after that the traffic declined a bit. The Google Analytics chart says it all:

What was unexpected, was that the site’s revenue more than doubled! It grew with 141% actually! And this is still from Google Adsense alone. I removed the CPA (click per action) ads from CJ, since they proved to be useless for this site.

Yesterday I signed up with 2 text link ad brokers: AdEngage and the relatively new partner program from Performancing. With AdEngage, advertisers can buy a text link with an small description for $5 per week, while Performancing has still to determine a price per month.

I hope these programs will be as succesful as Text Link Ads has been on this blog. I’m also considering selling text link and banner ads directly. So if you have a site that suits our audience (Dutch kids, parents and educators), contact me so we can work something out! Or use one of the above ad brokers…

A new month has begun, so I’m back again with some website statistics!

Our Speeltijd website keeps growing nicely, with a 50% traffic increase compared to August. We’re still receiving 60% of our visitors from google, about the same as previous months. Search engine traffic increased because of the growing number of articles, covering new topics. And referral traffic increased due to addition of several new backlinks.

As last month, here’s the Google Analytics chart:

The number of visits totals 3.941 and pageviews increased to 18.784! Again, we have a good pageviews per visitor ratio of 4.77. I was able to double the site’s adsense revenue, by following the advice posted by a reader last month.

But the site’s revenue is still rather pathetic. I dropped the linki.nl ads because they were very unsuccesful. Also the site is still not accepted by Text Link Ads, which is unfortunate because TLA has already made me about $65 for this blog up till now.

On the bright side, the website finally received a google pagerank, but currently it’s only PR2. I’ll need to spend some time on this. Still no alexa ranking though…

I also started experimenting with CPA (click per action) ads. But it’s hard to find relevant ads, so click through rate is very low. Suggestions are welcome!