Saturday, September 09, 2006
Doubling My Income
Currently my website generates between $300 and $400 per month through direct sales of my games, I plan to increase that to $600-$800 before the end of this year. You're probably wondering how I'm going to pull this off...
Well it's simple really, I'm going to milk the site to it's absolute fullest potential. I played with advertising a few months ago but didn't like the way it made my site look, so gave up on them after just over a month. That month and a half generated $210. Of that $210, $200 was made by 2 small adsense boxes, the other $10 by a skycraper ad and various pop unders. Of all of those it was the skyscraper ad and pop unders that did the most damage to jaggedbladesoft.com's appearence. No thank you, I don't want a giant flashing image saying 'push the fart button' taking up half my site.
This time around I've brung back the 2 small adsense boxes. This should give me an extra $150 per month.
My site's width is 800 pixels, however more than 80% of my visitors have 1024x768 or higher screen resolution, so without a skycraper ad the site simply isn't making the best use of it's space. I had hoped to get some other indie's to show relevent and nice looking banners, but despite offering a fairly good rate no one seemed to be interested. So instead I've decided to make use of the space with a mix of Reflexive affiliate links and links to download my own top 3 games. I'm hoping this will not only generate me extra affiliate income, but also boost the visitor to download rate of my own games a little. The great thing about Reflexive is that the affiliate demos have no links away to other sites, which means I'm less likely to 'loose' that visitor. It's hard to estimate how much this is likely to bring me, only time will tell.
I've had a newsletter since I started and up until a few months ago it was still very small at around 400 subscribers. Those 400 subscribers bought 15 copies of Mighty Rodent when I sent out the release newsletter. Since then my subscriber list has grown to almost 4000 (Click here to find out how I did it). Up until now I've only sent out an email when I make a new game, this has got to be a massive waste of potential, since these people are going to need games to play during the 6 months it takes to create the next one.
At lot of those 4000 will be fake addresses or people who just aren't all that intested, so let's assume 2000 of those are actually of any worth. This means sending out a newsletter now has the potential of 75 sales. Mighty Rodent's non-newsletter coversion rate was terrible, a pretty lame 0.15% (my games normally do around 0.35%). So I think it's fairly safe to assume another game would do at least that well. The plan is to send a newsletter every 2 weeks advertising a carefully chosen affiliate title, prefably a shooter. I'm going to be pesimistic guesstimate 15 sales per newsletter. This should work out at about an extra $240 per month. I could go nuts and send out one every week, but that could get annoying and turn some of my users away. Plus I'd find it hard to find enough good shooters to sell. I've sent off my first one of these newsletters. I'll post the number of sales generated in a week or so.
So with AdSense and my new newsletter campaign it should add up to near enough $400, this would effectively double my income. Of course I'm secretly hoping I will end up with a bit more than this since it doesn't take into account the Reflexive affiliate downloads added to the main site.
On top of all this I have some pretty good ideas on how to increase my site's traffic. My aim is to also double that by the end of year, thus quadrupling my income. But more on that another day.
All this is stuff I should have been doing from the start, but didn't from fear of losing my oh so precious visitors. Of course just because someone visits my site doesn't mean I own them, they will visit 1000s of sites on their internet travels. To get further I'm going to have to pack the 'mine all mine' approach and make more money, even if it means selling other people's games and services to my users. Of course I will to use most of this extra income on advertising the site, so it will probably be a gain overall. But as with everything only time will tell.
Well it's simple really, I'm going to milk the site to it's absolute fullest potential. I played with advertising a few months ago but didn't like the way it made my site look, so gave up on them after just over a month. That month and a half generated $210. Of that $210, $200 was made by 2 small adsense boxes, the other $10 by a skycraper ad and various pop unders. Of all of those it was the skyscraper ad and pop unders that did the most damage to jaggedbladesoft.com's appearence. No thank you, I don't want a giant flashing image saying 'push the fart button' taking up half my site.
This time around I've brung back the 2 small adsense boxes. This should give me an extra $150 per month.
My site's width is 800 pixels, however more than 80% of my visitors have 1024x768 or higher screen resolution, so without a skycraper ad the site simply isn't making the best use of it's space. I had hoped to get some other indie's to show relevent and nice looking banners, but despite offering a fairly good rate no one seemed to be interested. So instead I've decided to make use of the space with a mix of Reflexive affiliate links and links to download my own top 3 games. I'm hoping this will not only generate me extra affiliate income, but also boost the visitor to download rate of my own games a little. The great thing about Reflexive is that the affiliate demos have no links away to other sites, which means I'm less likely to 'loose' that visitor. It's hard to estimate how much this is likely to bring me, only time will tell.
I've had a newsletter since I started and up until a few months ago it was still very small at around 400 subscribers. Those 400 subscribers bought 15 copies of Mighty Rodent when I sent out the release newsletter. Since then my subscriber list has grown to almost 4000 (Click here to find out how I did it). Up until now I've only sent out an email when I make a new game, this has got to be a massive waste of potential, since these people are going to need games to play during the 6 months it takes to create the next one.
At lot of those 4000 will be fake addresses or people who just aren't all that intested, so let's assume 2000 of those are actually of any worth. This means sending out a newsletter now has the potential of 75 sales. Mighty Rodent's non-newsletter coversion rate was terrible, a pretty lame 0.15% (my games normally do around 0.35%). So I think it's fairly safe to assume another game would do at least that well. The plan is to send a newsletter every 2 weeks advertising a carefully chosen affiliate title, prefably a shooter. I'm going to be pesimistic guesstimate 15 sales per newsletter. This should work out at about an extra $240 per month. I could go nuts and send out one every week, but that could get annoying and turn some of my users away. Plus I'd find it hard to find enough good shooters to sell. I've sent off my first one of these newsletters. I'll post the number of sales generated in a week or so.
So with AdSense and my new newsletter campaign it should add up to near enough $400, this would effectively double my income. Of course I'm secretly hoping I will end up with a bit more than this since it doesn't take into account the Reflexive affiliate downloads added to the main site.
On top of all this I have some pretty good ideas on how to increase my site's traffic. My aim is to also double that by the end of year, thus quadrupling my income. But more on that another day.
All this is stuff I should have been doing from the start, but didn't from fear of losing my oh so precious visitors. Of course just because someone visits my site doesn't mean I own them, they will visit 1000s of sites on their internet travels. To get further I'm going to have to pack the 'mine all mine' approach and make more money, even if it means selling other people's games and services to my users. Of course I will to use most of this extra income on advertising the site, so it will probably be a gain overall. But as with everything only time will tell.
# posted by Neil Yates @ 5:12 PM 
Comments:
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Maybe you could have a little web game section on your site where you hand pick the best Flash shooters you can find. You could get some Ad revenue from that.
Personally, I've been careful about placing Ads on my main site but I have no qualms with putting Ads around free content.
Anyway it's great hearing you think of ways to double your site's income. People like to bash Steve Pavilina but very few people follow through with what he said. He tried various methods to increase his direct sales over a period of 6-9 months. Most of things he tried missed (or took a long time to show results), but the things that hit made it all worthwhile. Most new Indies nowadays try for one month (if that) and then turn running to the portals when they don't hit their initial sales expectations (I was guilty of it too). I think with the popularity of portals, people just don't have the patience for slow/moderate growth... - especially when they see some of their peers with top ten hits across all the portals. You don't feel like you're making a lot of progress when in comparison your game is only selling 10-30 copies month.
But I'm really curious to see who will be the Indie all-star developers in 2 years time. Who will be considered the success stories? Who's story will be tragic? I think the people who are concentrating on their site today will be in a good position tomorrow.
Personally, I've been careful about placing Ads on my main site but I have no qualms with putting Ads around free content.
Anyway it's great hearing you think of ways to double your site's income. People like to bash Steve Pavilina but very few people follow through with what he said. He tried various methods to increase his direct sales over a period of 6-9 months. Most of things he tried missed (or took a long time to show results), but the things that hit made it all worthwhile. Most new Indies nowadays try for one month (if that) and then turn running to the portals when they don't hit their initial sales expectations (I was guilty of it too). I think with the popularity of portals, people just don't have the patience for slow/moderate growth... - especially when they see some of their peers with top ten hits across all the portals. You don't feel like you're making a lot of progress when in comparison your game is only selling 10-30 copies month.
But I'm really curious to see who will be the Indie all-star developers in 2 years time. Who will be considered the success stories? Who's story will be tragic? I think the people who are concentrating on their site today will be in a good position tomorrow.
# posted by 
: 1:04 AM
: 1:04 AM
That's a pretty good idea about the flash games section, one which I've been thinking about myself for a while. I think I'll give it a shot.
I'm guilty of the one month attempt thing. Thing is every so often I'd spend a week on my site and I'd almost always see some decent results each time (higher search engine rankings etc). But then I would forgot about it in favour of concetratiing on a game. I think the trick may be to set aside the weekend to just focus on traffic/income building for my website.
I'm guilty of the one month attempt thing. Thing is every so often I'd spend a week on my site and I'd almost always see some decent results each time (higher search engine rankings etc). But then I would forgot about it in favour of concetratiing on a game. I think the trick may be to set aside the weekend to just focus on traffic/income building for my website.
Can you get some numbers about how many visits / pageviews your site got? (When you made the bucks from adsense)
# posted by : 11:18 PM
: 11:18 PM
Thanks for the posts Neil, they make very interesting reading. I am currently juggling my website(s) around a bit and have integrated more affiliate stuff and ADs (not live yet). The problem I faced was "decoupling" the affilate games and the adds/banners from my own content/Site. I fixed this by basically having two sites. While I have been working on my first game (which could have been "dead time") I have actually got some traffic, return visitors and experience of testing different things before it really counts (when my own games are out).
Your info has provided some useful pointers from the 'field of battle' so thanks!
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Your info has provided some useful pointers from the 'field of battle' so thanks!
# posted by : 11:31 AM
: 11:31 AM << Home
