In addition to these two methods I have been gaining traffic from search engines from people who are looking for the things I’ve been writing about. From what I can gather so far, as I’m writing one blog post per day the search engines bump my rankings up for specific search terms so the blog is getting new visitors all the time. My next idea to expand the blog is to slowly build up relationships with some more established bloggers in the same (or similar) area to what I write about and hopefully get link exchanges with them.

If you try to start your own blog up and want to get a massive influx of visitors you can also look at the option of paid traffic in the form of targeted ads or just paid links or banners on other sites. Though this option is one only if you have something to sell on your site, or if you’re sure that the money you will make from each visitor will be worth more than what you pay for them.

My next post will be discussing further progress on the Dragon Struggle game that is being made. As always, thanks for reading!

I’m just heading over there for a brief holiday, and as I’ve said before, the great thing about working for yourself and running websites is that you can maintain them from anywhere and at any time. So while I’m over there I can check up on everything, make sure it’s all running smoothly, and also continue to blog daily where possible.

Sorry for the short post today and it’s lack of relevance to making money or the internet in general, but I’m heading out for a mate’s birthday shortly which is when I usually write my blog post.

As usual, thanks for reading, and I hope the rest of my posts have been helpful in any way to you

So exactly when did I make the big decision to take my online activities from a simple hobby to a full fledged business? Leading up to my year 12 final exams, when I had to choose a few university courses to apply for, I could not think of a single job or course that I really wanted to do for the next X amount of years.

It was at this point when I seriously started considering the internet as a serious business path. As I was basically going to neglect any further formal education and a ‘regular’ job, my parents tried to sway me to either go straight into university or get accepted into uni and defer for a year while I try out my business. The first option wasn’t really much of an option for me as in high school I absolutely hated doing homework and having to learn about things that were uninteresting or irrelevant to me.

The second option was more viable, but I still thought to myself, “If I don’t have uni to fall back on, I’m going to HAVE to make my business work, otherwise I’m pretty much screwed!” Now hadn’t it worked, I wouldn’t have actually been screwed, I would have had no problems (and still don’t) going into a manual labour job, or even an office job. My main goal has always been to get myself a nice house and then anything else on top of that is just a bonus, so a regular job would only delay that dream by a few years if I saved and managed my money properly.

For me, my decision not to have uni as a backup and not to go into a regular job, it worked out excellently. I worked hard and in turn the money started flowing in and was more than enough to live off of and allowed me to save the vast majority of it.

However, not giving yourself such an easy exit strategy may not be for you. I was able to do it because I live at home and if I wasn’t able to make the money, I’d at least always have a roof over my head and food on the table. If you have a family of your own to support, or even if you’re living on your own and have bills to pay and obligations to meet, then you can stil turn your hobby into a business, but a business that you run part time.

So there you have it, that’s basically when and why I decided to take my online presence from a hobby to a business.

If there’s anything specific you would like to know, or want me to cover in a post, feel free to leave a comment if you’re not too shy!

For today’s post I’ll be discussing why I love expired (and expiring) domains and why you should look at them, too.

While most people will use a drop-catch service to look at a list of domains that are soon to expire, they will generally only look at the domain itself rather than what the domain has been used for and what backlinks or indexed pages it may have. Now, this isn’t a bad thing to be doing if you’re going after a premium domain, for example if something like ‘Poker.com’ were to drop, the domain in itself is extremely valuable.

If you only have a small budget then finding out a domains history is something you should definitely look at. For one reason or another some site owners will let their site stagnate and will forget about them only to let them die when the domain expires. Depending on the site, they may have hundreds or thousands of pages indexed in the search engines, they may have 5 backlinks, they may have 500 backlinks. If you’re able to pick up an expired domain with 50 indexed pages and 500 backlinks for registration-fee or even for something like $20-30 using a drop-catch service, you can build a new site on the domain and capitalise on the existing backlinks and search engine standings.

Sometimes you may come across a domain that has been de-indexed from Google but when you check for backlinks it has a substantial amount still floating about, in these cases I find it’s an excellent idea to go on to Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and take a look at the last available cache of the site. From there, you should be able to come up with the site’s page/url structure and create a new site with the same structure. Your new site will be quickly re-indexed and if you make sure to keep each page related to what has been cached then you will benefit from all of the backlinks that are still floating about.

Catching expired domains is not only good if you’re looking to build up a network of your own sites quicker than starting from scratch, but if you’re looking to flip the domain/website for some quick cash, the domain’s history will already pump up the price for you. Whenever I look to grab an expired domain I am looking to build on it to add to my existing network of sites so I can send traffic from site to site or simply make money by placing some ads on the sites.

In its current stages the following are working:

• Registration
• Login
• Stats/information display on home page
• Quests are functional
• Referrals
• Refer link click reward
• Logout

To have the referral page show each of your referred players progress I had to come up with the level experience formula. I set the formula up in such a way that each level you go up is slightly harder than the last and so that at certain levels the experience required jumps more than usual.

The slight increase in experience required is so that the user has to work hard to go up each and every level and the jumps at certain levels are to make sure that every so often the user has to work that little bit harder to get past the level.

Below is the graph of the experience required (click the graph to visit the page)

Upgrade Page

I have come up with a rough concept for the Upgrade page which can be seen below:

As you can see the Membership upgrade section comprises of three columns– the first which is dull and colourless describes what features come with a free membership to the game. The second describes the gold membership and it details what features come with that membership and any feature that is superior to the free membership is highlighted in a different colour. The last column is for the platinum membership and attracts the most attention to itself.

Ideally, the platinum membership is what we want our players upgrading to as it is the most premium membership that we will be offering and because of this we the section for platinum membership is the most eye catching. All features list have the advantages over both gold and free memberships highlighted in a bold and bright red and the text on the ‘BUY NOW’ button is larger and its background is more vibrant.

Under the membership section is the one-off upgrades section (which in most games is where the majority of money is made from) which includes things such as crystal buys and other novel upgrades. Even though they generally bring in the bulk of money to a game, we place them below membership upgrades as the money is generally made by a very small portion of the players and we also want to try and sell to players who aren’t looking to spend as much. The players who aren’t looking to spend as much will see the membership upgrades first and hopefully go for one of those, whereas those who want major advantages in the game will grab a premium membership then keep looking at the rest of the options on the page.

You will notice that as you buy more crystals in a pack the price per crystal reduces fairly dramatically so as to encourage users to spend more each time they buy, the exact amount of crystals in each package and their costs may vary as I work out what crystals to charge for in-game activities such as refilling quests.

That’s all for today’s post, hope you’ve enjoyed them all so far!

This is actually an excellent idea in that, in addition to the standard rewards for referrals, players will have extra incentive to try and get their friends or just anyone to play. A similar concept can be seen in games on Facebook like in Farmville where in order to advance in certain areas you must have at least X amount of your friends also playing the game.

The system on Facebook is a lot easier to entice your friends over as the games are hooked directly to your account so you can post things on your friends walls, in your status update, or on your own walls helping to promote the game. It also helps in that if your friends see that you’re playing a game they will likely assume that it is a decent quality game and might even sign up just to take a look.

For tomorrow’s post I will be uploading the current progress of the game for everyone to see, and I will be going over some brief design ideas for the paid upgrades page.

Thanks for reading!

If during that week the user signs up for an account, it will recheck the referrer, does some basic error checking, then will link the new account to the referrer’s account. To complete the referral system I need to work on the level system to make it so that when a referred account hits a certain level (which I’ll likely set to 5 or 10) the referrer will get a large bonus.

Making it so the large bonus isn’t instant will help to ensure against people sending the links to their friends, getting them to make an account, then leaving the account inactive. This way if people do get their friends to sign up, the friend will have to play at least long enough to level up a few times, and hopefully this will get some of them interested in the game and becoming a returning player!

As you can see in the above screenshot, I have also included a section called “Your Stats” which will give users a ranking based on how well they’ve been using their referral links. Under this section I will also be making a list of all users you have referred and what level they are up to so that you will be able to see just how close you are to getting your referral bonus from each person who has signed up under you.

That’s all for tonight’s post, now I think it’s time to head out and have a little time to relax ! I hope you’ve enjoyed the series of posts so far.

I decided to continue on as I am. I figure that even if one of the day’s posts is only small compared to usual it’s better to have a little something there rather than nothing. It’s also better for me in terms of being consistent in writing a post every single day rather than every few days or just when I feel like it. Just so I have some more content to post on slow days with my public experiments, I’m thinking of documenting the SEO and growth efforts of one of my smaller sites or even an experiment in building a new site from scratch and showing how to get some decent traffic to it.

A new site to experiment on could be an excellent example to show people new to the internet just how simple it can be to make a site, get people to it, and make some beer money from it.

Dragon Struggle

On Monday I will be uploading the current progress of Dragon Struggle to the site so you can all take a look at it’s registration and login system and how the basic quest system works. As it’s now the weekend, I may not get too much work done on Dragon Struggle as I hope to be spending a bit of time relaxing some!

Quests will only ever be displayed to you six at a time. The same six quests will show to you unless you attempt one of the available quests, this is to prevent people from constantly refreshing the page in hopes of finding the best possible quest every single time. It will keep some variety with what’s available and hopefully I will be able to come up with upwards of a few hundred quests to keep in rotation.

More quests, even if it’s just their name or details varied, will make the player more keen to try and find all available quests to them and will be better than just having the same few quests you can complete. Fewer options will mean less variety and more chance that a user will get bored with it.

In terms of Quest related work, the only thing left is the ability to refill/get more quests for any given day and I will be doing this when I work on the Shop page as it will tie in with crystal use. Another, less important at this stage, thing left to do is basically for me to draw up some more images to use for quests as I’ve only made seven so far, and I’m hoping to have about 20 or so to keep some variety with it. However, these can be done whenever I have a free moment as I draw them at 500×500 but scale them down to 80×80, so the quality and detail in them does not need to be that high.

Just a note though, if I were to be making this game in a less casual way, I would be outsourcing both the code and the artwork and focusing mainly on the game play and game design, but as I know some code and have a tiny bit of creativity I can handle both of these tasks for the purpose of this example!

I hope you’ve been enjoying the posts so far!

Below is a screenshot of what it looks like in it’s current stage:

As you can see, the simple text list that was in the mock-up has been replaced with individual quest boxes containing an image for the quest, the quest name, and it’s details. Clicking on a quest will display a message above saying “Would you like to embark upon this quest? [YES] [no]”

Quests will only be displayed to users for a certain amount of levels then they will be replaced with different quests as they progress through the levels. To keep it simple, many of these quests will retain the same name and image and will only have their details changed.

Images for quests will also be reused for other quests to keep it easy to add new ones and I’ll be making up anywhere between 10-20 images for use.

Sorry for the short length of these last couple of posts, I’ve been busy with my main projects and I’ve only had a little time to devote to the simple game development and blog writing!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the posts so far, and I’ll try to finish up some more of the game and get it up soon so you can all take a peak at it’s workings thus far.