David Makes Cents .com

Well its been about a month and a half now since I purchased my online arcade and things aren’t going quite as planned. Two months ago I had envisioned having a ready made game site that I could have loaded onto the server along with my blog and another website of mine: www.experiencenewthings.com (blog turned game directory). I also thought that after a month or two the site would be full of gamers and have already paid for itself a couple times over. To my chagrin this has not proven to be the case. While things aren’t going bad they just aren’t like I expected.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Right now the numbers don’t look good, but I am still optimistic that I can turn them around. The expenses significantly outweigh the income that I am currently receiving. While the game script was a one time expense I have yet to recoup that and am currently not making enough on it to pay the $105 annual cost of the domain name and hosting service.

The costs:
Game site script -         $250
Domain Name -             $10
Web Hosting Service - $ 95
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Total Costs:                    $355 (first year)
+$105 (subsequent years)

Last month I made a little over $2.00 in adsense advertising on my game site. This month I am projecting just under $4.00. Yea thats two dollars and four dollars not two hundred or four hundred. One thing that I didn’t count on when adding adsense to this site was how cheap the pay is for the ads that my site attracts. I average less than $0.05 per click and a lot of patrons are not going to click your banners so that means that I need a ton of traffic if I expect to make any real money using adsense. I am considering looking into other means of advertising on my site.

Traffic

So if it takes 20 clicks on my site to earn me 1 dollar and one in two hundred people click on one of my banners, then it would require my site to get 4000 visitors just to earn a dollar. Right now I am averaging 200 visitors a day. Those 200 visitors play an average of 2.5 games each for a daily total of about 500 games played per day. At the end of last month I hit my first milestone 10k games played. This month the sites on schedule to have 25k games played which is a 50% increase from last month to this month.

Currently my game site is still not ranked by google’s page ranking system. This makes it a little hard to exchange links and improve traffic. Also once I am ranked I hope to improve my search engine result status. So I look forward to getting my page ranked as it should help boost traffic. I’m hoping for a high page rank, 3-5 would be awesome.

I am also looking into other methods of boosting traffic. Some possibilities include: directory submissions, link exchanges, and social networking ( word of mouth is great advertising!)

Site Maintenance/ Upgrades

While the game script I bought was pre-made and ready to go from day one (which saved me a lot of time and effort) there is still significant work to make enhancements to the site that will distinguish my site from all the other game sites out there. So far I haven’t gotten around to any of the heavy lifting as far as enhancements go. I have added several new games and continue to add games daily. Major work that I have slated for the near future include redoing the entire theme of the site including background, graphics and logos (possibly music?). And the other major task is rewriting a couple of the methods in the game site script to perform a few extra functions that I think are really important such as sorting the games by top ranked or most played.

Then there is always the constant maintenance of adding games, checking out and fixing user reported errors, responding to user email and requests to exchange links or promotional offerings. All of this stuff takes time, but as I mentioned earlier I am still optimistic that I can really turn my game site into something special.

Future Plans

As I stated above I still have a lot of work cut out for me in regards to building traffic, enhancing the website, and becoming established. At the top of my agenda are the site enhancements including revamping the site theme. I think it is important to get this done before I have a large customer base, people often don’t like change. As soon as that gets done I will dedicate the majority of my time to just increasing traffic. Customers are the driving force for any business, so its important that I get the word out. After that I will re-evaluate how everything is doing and see if I can identify what I am doing well and what needs improvement and work from there.

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Filed under: Investing, business by David - 3 Comments →

I basically took last week off blogging because it was starting to get overwhelming. I am on summer vacation but you would never know it. I am working between 30-40 hours a week, working on this blog, and working on the other two businesses I have been writing about for a while now. All this with slow results was starting to get to me so I had to take a break. Sorry guys :). I will try to start posting a little more frequently. Over this break, I figured something out:

Blogging is not passive

Before I started blogging, I read a bunch of those make money online blogging sites. All of them seemed to say that blogging was easy and you can make lots of money doing it. Well maybe I still believe that you can make lots of money (even though I haven’t done it yet),but I don’t believe its easy.

I admire all other bloggers who post everyday or even more often than that. I find it tough to post once a week. The fact is, it takes lots of time to write articles and promote your site.

Why is it hard?

For me the hard part is coming up with ideas to post about. I enjoy reading other personal finance blogs and writing my own if I have good ideas. The thing is, coming up with fresh, good content is much harder than it sounds. Before I started, I could easily come up with dozens of ideas. Now that it has come time to write about them, it ain’t so easy.

Well I guess the whole point of this post was to tell anyone out there who was considering starting a blog to think it though. Try writing 20 posts before you even start blogging that way you can see if you enjoy doing it. Blogging will probably take at least twice as much time as you anticipated and you won’t earn anything for the first few months. So just know that when you are getting into it. Make sure you choose a topic you love. I did and thats the reason I think I have lasted this long. I hated English in high school (mainly b/c I didn’t like to write). Yet I chose to blog anyway. Real smart eh?

Filed under: Investing by David - 5 Comments →

The best things in life are free! So why do we have to spend a fortune to have a fun family vacation. Well, the answer is you don’t! With gas prices at $4 dollars a gallon, the price of groceries up nearly 10% this year, and the value of your home and stock portfolio dragging, many families just don’t have the disposable income required to take a fancy vacation. The theme this past memorial day weekend has been “staycationing” : staying close to home rather than taking long trips for your vacation. And with no positive outlook for the economy in the near future the theme will continue throughout the summer. So how do you make the most out of your vacation without shelling out a small fortune?

Here is a list of some of the most popular activities to entertain you on your vacation for little or no cost:

Zoos – Zoos are a cheap way to spend your day. It can be a lot of fun for kids and grown-ups too. This is a good way to teach little children about different animals, you may even learn something yourself. Often there are some animals that you can pet and feed.

Museums – Museums are a great way to bring education into your family vacation. Museums are often free or cheap and they provide a fun way to learn about the past. A lot of times museums host special exhibits that are truly fascinating once in a lifetime experience.

Picnicking – A day at the park can be a lot of fun too. Some of my best vacation memories are family trips to the park. Parks offer playgrounds for kids, walking/hiking trails, and picnic areas. If you bring some food from home, this is a cheap way to spend the day and get some fresh air.

Water Recreation – You don’t have to drive all the way to the beach to have fun in the water. There are lakes, ponds, and swimming holes all over. Try taking the kids fishing. Not only is it great fun, but with a little luck it can be a free meal too!

Hiking – Americans are getting more and more overweight. This is because they are not getting enough exercise. The biggest problem with gyms are that they are boring. People get tired of them. Try finding a nice trail that you can hike in the woods. Try looking online for local trails, most cities have them people just don’t search them out.

Movie/Game Night - Having a movie night or game night is a lot of fun for the whole family and its cheap too. Head over to the video store and pickup a couple movies the family can enjoy. Redboxes are all the craze now, you can get videos from your local grocery store for just $1. Plus if you look online, you can find codes to get your first night FREE.

Bookstore or Library – Spend the evening at your local bookstore. Find a relaxing chair and sit down with a good book. Sometimes bookstores and libraries will have live entertainment too. Or if you prefer to read on-line you can checkout your favorite blogs.

Plan ahead if you do go anywhere. Always check for coupons and ask if they are running any promotional offers. Remember what makes a vacation great is not where you go or what you do, its who you do it with! I was able to spend the weekend with my family, relaxing, playing outside, and enjoying the wonderful weather; and that made for a terrific holiday break.

Filed under: Frugal, Gas prices, How to Save by David - 3 Comments →