As you might have noticed I didn’t post anything here for an entire week. Thats a long time in the blogosphere and I want to make that up again.
But let me start out by explaining why you had to miss my input for an entire week.
- It was my vacation
- The video game Bioshock was released
- I was busy writing on my FIFA 08 blog
- Lack of inspiration/motivation (*shiver*)
- I bought a Nintendo Wii
Fear not, my loyal readers, I’m back again. The decline in the traffic clearly shows that you have to blog almost every day to keep the readers coming back (!) Apparently there are other blogs out there too…
What I wanted to share with you is my huge success with my other blog, FIFA 2008 News, which features the latest news about EA Sports’ soccer or football video game FIFA 08 (FIFA Soccer 08 in the US). Almost every day was a new record in both visitors and earnings.
Looking back I’ve learned a lot from the experience.
- Viral marketing, you just can’t buy that stuff. I registered on a lot of boards and shamelessly promoted my site. I’m still getting traffic from those sites. Participating in discussions on forums is a great way to generate traffic, but you probably already knew that.
- Commenting on blogs and video game related sites, again viral marketing. Get out there and spread the word with insightful comments and of course mention your site.
- Be the first. I was the first to blog about FIFA 2008. If you Google “FIFA 2008″ or “FIFA 08 Demo, I’m at the top.
- Niche - I’m glad that I found a niche. I’m trying to do the same with Football Manager 2008. I’m not sure it will be the same success, but I’ll give it a shot. Now I just need to find the next niche to blog about.
- I’ll try to work on a direct advertising package, that will let an advertiser advertise on several blogs at once.
- For the first time I got over the magical $100 from Google Adsense in one month. I made $300 from Adsense alone in August. I’m also running a lot of Chitika ads on the page, but unfortunately they aren’t paying much, but I’m still tweaking those. The text-links from Kontera also paid a bit.
- I’m using a theme from Dosh Dosh that is optimised towards Adsense. I tried out with a few others, but I returned to ProSense.
- I found out that it is very important to “feed” Adsense ads with keywords in your posts. Especially on a niche site like FIFA2008news.com it’s imperative to have the right ads on all posts. My readers aren’t very interested in “Foreign Exchange Rates” and “Fix demo.exe”, so I’m constantly trying to improve my posts. I learned that from writing on Connected Internet.
- I was thrilled the day I got an email from a EA Sports representative about my site. I was glad to see that they endorsed my content and could confirm several of my posts. I’m still getting mails from them.
- Now the final thing I learned… NEVER host a demo to a popular video game unless you have a dedicated or virtual server. Shared hosting is configured for that kind of load. I gave it some serious consideration before I hosted the PC demo for FIFA 08. I took the chance and after about 5 hours my site was down.
Now I know how to get the traffic back to The Beta News (and how to monetize it). Oh yeah…I nearly forgot. I bought a Nintendo Wii from my first Adsense money ever and it was a great feeling!
Tue, Sep 4, 2007
Blogging