Here I am again with the visitor stats for our Speeltijd website. I’m happy to announce that the growth from July continued: our traffic doubled in August!

Halfway in August, we did some offline website promotion, by distributing some flyers at a neighbourhood kids party. In the second half of August, we experienced some noticable growth. But I think the contribution of the flyers was only marginal. There was a small increase in direct hits, and 1 newsletter signup as a result.

Anyway, in the style of the Seeking Revenue site, here’s the Google Analytics charts for August:

For those not familiar with Google Analytics charts or the Dutch language: the blue graph represents the number of visits (2,698 total), and the orange one represents pageviews (12,436). There’s a pattern of drops on Friday/Saturday, followed by a spike on Sunday/Monday. The overall traffic is increasing nicely, and continues to do so for September.

The value of the site is in the content, which keeps growing at a rate of about 8 articles a month. This can also be seen by the fact that we get 4.6 pageviews per visit on average!

On the downside, it turns out to be a hard site to monetize. Our audience is clearly more interested in our own content, than in the Adsense ads. I tried a new program a few months ago: www.linki.nl, which as an adsense variant, but only for dutch ads. The good thing about linki is that they pay some money for banner views, but on the downside, their CPC is very low, unless you have a very high CTR…

So, any ideas are welcome!

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!

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.

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

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!