Well, Project Cars for Sale has been running for a little bit over a month, and has brought in a total of around $150.00, which isn’t bad at all considering the time I’ve put into it. This site doesn’t make as many consistent sales as my Honda Parts Store, but the commissions are WAY higher. I’ve had 2 $50 commission sales from this site (cars sold). The rest of the money has come from some “off niche” (unrelated items people have bought).

The real reason for this post is to show that with Google’s recent PageRank update, project-cars-for-sale.com now has a PR of 2. The great thing is, I did VERY little link building with this site. I put a link in my signature on ONE forum, and got a PR2. imagine if you put a little actual work into this?

On an unrelated note, Poll Factory has sold its 25th copy since its launch on CashTactics this past Friday. Thats $1400 or so in a 4-5 days. Looks like Mr. Graph needs an update! (by the way, i haven’t updated that since February. Its not that I “stopped” making money).

The reason i stopped blogging  is that  It started becoming  a little overwhelming with  School, my Job, affiliate marketing and my sad excuse for a “social life”.  This semester is drawing to a close soon, so i might pick up the blog again.

Let me tell you though, that over the past 2 months I have learned A LOT, and have also made a good amount of money.  I started really following Ruck’s “CPA Series” over at CashTactics.net and as soon as I did, realy money started to come in.

I have made close to $1500 over the last 2 months with ONLY email and zip submit offers on the content network. Everything Ruck posts about in his blog is just pure gold and it has helped me out tremendously.

My PPC to CPA has come a long way, but what I’m really excited about is my first attempt at product creation. As I have mentioned a couple times before here on the blog, I am a software engineer by profession. Since I love to code, I figured it was time to put my knowledge to work to make some cash.

I decided to combined my new found addiction to PPC marketing with my programming skills, and hence Poll Factory was born!

What is Poll Factory?

Well, I guess the best way to explain what Poll Factory does, is to show you an example! The basic concept is simple. Create a “Pop Culture” poll around a currently popular news story, TV show or whatever. Ask a question like …. “Will Britney Spears Go Back to Rehab? Vote now and enter your email for a free Mac Book!” and give the user the illusion they are casting a vote, like “Yes” or “No” and when they click on the link to vote, they are redirected to your Email zip submit offer.

Behind all of this would be a well structured, high keyword volume content network campaign. You CAN do this with search, but its a lot tougher to do. On my last content network campaign I was getting $0.04 clicks, which would be very difficult to get on the search network. And when you are getting 1,000,000 impressions  per day, the volume is  sometimes even higher than it would be on search.

Here is the example I said i would post. I am not kidding when i tell you I made $650 over a span of about 3 weeks with this exact page, all on content network, and this was generated by Poll Factory.

http://www.DigMyDeals.com/RockOfLove2 

Thats it…really simple. No magic tricks, no secrets. The only real trick to making money with these email/zip submits is to try as many as you can in as little time as possible. More often than not, your offer is going to be a dud, but if you can spend $10.00 on adwords and see that an offer has no hope, that is CHUMP CHANGE once you find one that really performs.

I designed Poll Factory to make this process as fast as possible. So that you can test out as many polls and email subits as you can. The more you try, the more likely you are to find success.

I look forward to getting back to blogging soon, so don’t clear me out of your RSS feed just yet, I’m armed with more great information than ever, and I’m always willing to share it.

[URL=http://www.ericmitz.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]

Some might consider this spam, or blackhat, but I don’t think anyone really gets harmed. The people in forums certainly don’t notice it (sometimes I can’t even find the damn pixel). More recently I have even used this multiple times in a single post to get backlinks to multiple sites at once.

[URL=http://www.ericmitz.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]

[URL=http://www.digmyhonda.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]

[URL=http://www.project-cars-for-sale.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]

[URL=http://www.online-dating-blogger.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]

The biggest problem with this method, as you might have guessed if you do any kind of SEO work, is that you cannot specify anchor text because you can’t add an “alt” tage to the image. Even so, this has worked well for me.

I have recently come accross another way to use forums for backlinks, and this one is even less intrusive, and gives you the ability to set your own anchor text. Here is the basic overview:

1. Find any forum without “nofollow” (preferably with PR4+)
2. Register as a new user
3. Fill out your profile details, and be sure to add your “homepage url” (just a bonus)
4. Create a signature with a keyword rich link to your affiliate site
5. View your member profile page and grab the URL. Your Signature will probably be displayed on this page.
6. Head on over to PingOMatic and ping your profile URL.
7. DO NOT POST! You can if you want, but many forums don’t allow commercial links in your sig. So just work off your profile page, and no one will ever know.

If that sounds confusing, I’ll take you through the process:

1. Find any forum without “nofollow” (preferably with PR4+)

Hmmm…Lets see. I wen’t on over to www.big-boards.com to see what some of the biggest forums on the internet are. Looking through the list, I noticed www.vwvortex.com, and since its run by the same people as www.honda-tech.com ,I know that it doesn’t use “nofollow”, and after a quick PageRank Check, I see that its a PR5. This looks like a good candidate.

2. Register as a New User

Well, If you can’t do this on your own, you’re probably in the wrong business. You might want to call up McDonalds.

3. Fill out your profile details, and be sure to add your “homepage url” (just a bonus)

Click on the link to change your profile

Enter your Home page URL (most forums have this). And click Save.

Again, You don’t have to do this part, its just 1 more link.

4. Create a signature with a keyword rich link to your affiliate site

Find the page that lets you edit your forum signature:

Enter a few URLs. They can be deep links if you want!

5. View your member profile page and grab the URL. Your Signature will probably be displayed on this page

Find the page which allows you to view your user profile:

Admire your page with links, and grab the URL:

6. Head on over to PingOMatic and ping your profile URL.

This will tell the search engines that your profile page exists. It will eventually find the page over time because most forums have a “member list”, but this will speed up the process.

7. DO NOT POST! You can if you want, but many forums don’t allow commercial links in your sig. So just work off your profile page, and no one will ever know.

Well, I don’t have a screenshot for this, but uh…just don’t post if you think it will get you banned…k?

You can multiply this method by using different forums, and/or creating new usernames. But its fairly simple to do, and can get you some pretty high PR back links without worrying about being a spammer. Now, obviously different forum software is going to be a little different, but most of the common forum platforms like Vbulletin, Invision, and phpbb all have the same kind of features.

• Fast, easy to setup
• Google QS bot loves them as much as the Googlebot web spider
• You can write FAKE comments/testimonials

This is great and all, but there is one thing you will find is very difficult to do using this method: Tracking keywords.

When you create your own static/HTML/PHP landing pages, you can include any kind of server side code in them you want. This is how many people track which keywords are converting and not converting. However, with wordpress, the software does not let you enter in PHP code directly into the posts, so its very difficult to track keywords using the /?keyword=example method. So whats an affiliate to do?

To solve this problem I started searching for a plugin that was made to specifically track keywords, and while I did find one, it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Eventually I decided to just search for a plugin that would let me write PHP code directly into my wordpress blog entries, and I found just that with the PHP-EXEC for Wordpress. This plugin lets you enter working PHP code, right in your posts.

What do I do with it?

I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption that you have never written a line of PHP in your life, so hopefully you can follow this if you ever decided to use Wordpress as a landing page anytime in the future.

• Install and activate the plugin. There is documentation on the plugin’s page to help you through this, its pretty simple.
• Turn off the visual wordpress editor. To do this:
  • In the Wordpress admin panel, click “Users”
  • Select the user you use to write blog posts
  • In the upper left corner, untick “Use Visual Editor When writing”

Write a New Post, and insert the following code:

<?

$keyword = $_GET[’keyword’];
if($keyword == “”){
$keyword = “none”;
}

?>
Now you can write your affiliate URLs like this:


http://www.myoffer.com/blah/blah/?subid=<? echo $keyword; ?>


Thats it! Now you can use your affiliate networks subid tracking to figure out exactly which keywords are converting, and get rid of the ons that aren’t. If you are confused as to what all of this means, please see an example of how I did this HERE. Take note of what the URL says when you hover over a link!

Bonus!

As a sweet little bonus, you can also use

echo $some_text;

anywhere in the post, which means your can insert dynamic content based on the keyword the user entered, right inside of a blog post. Score.

Thats right, I have met my $1000 goal in gross profit, and I couldn’t be happier. It all happened in less than three months too, which isn’t all that bad. If anyone has been following my progress, you might be wondering where all the extra dough came from, but ill be addressing that once I finish up my BANS from scratch series.

You may also notice that my net profit appeared to go down. The reason for that is because I decided to include my $98.00 hosting fee and $97.00 BANS software fee into the final equation, where I hadn’t been doing so previously.

The next Goal I’m setting is to obviously make $1000 in net profit using affiliate marketing, and I have a feeling that will not be all that far away. The lesson here is that I did it starting from nothing, and that means YOU can do it starting from nothing as well.

Here, I’ll start with my own pictures.

Me and Shoemoney!

 Me and John Chow!

It was hard to find them both together, but I did it.

Who have you seen at Affiliate Summit???!

It may seem fairly trivial when you think about tweaking your BANS template, but there are some things you can do to help with S.E.O. I also personally feel its important to spend a good amount of time tweaking and customizing your BANS template, if for nothing more than looking unique. Browsing the BANS member forums, I have seen store after store with the same old boring default white/gray template with a simple header graphic.

Lets start with a simple example by comparing two of my very own BANS stores. One of which is fairly successful, the other which was a complete flop. I won’t even tell you which one is the more successful store because if you can’t see it, I think you need to check your pulse.

• BANS Store #1
• BANS Store #2

So what do you think, which one is more successful? If you said number two, put the defibrillator machine away, because you’re right. It doesn’t take a rocket scientest to see that there was simply more time and effort put into the second store than the first, and the hard work as paid off pretty well. While I’m not going to retire on the $150/month I get from the store, its that much more money I have to support my growing PPC addiction, but thats besides the point.

Choosing the Right Template

BANS comes pre-loaded with three blank slate templates that you can use. They come in three different categories, with each category having three layout options. The layout options consist of “left”, “right” and “both”, which describes the location of the navigation sidebar. You might guess that the “left” layout puts it on the left, the “right layout puts it on the right, and the “both” layout puts a sidebar on both sides of the page.

I can’t say there is any real advantage to using any of these template styles over any other, its really just a matter of personal preference. Depending on your Niche, and how you plan to setup the site, you might want to have navigation bars on both sides to maximize ad real estate. I personally like the “right” aligned template for some reason. Whichever you choose, Im sure it will work great.

DISCLAIMER: I in no way claim to be an expert on web design. While I did do it for a living at one point, I never really considered myself good at the actual design part (i was better at coding!).

Getting Head…er

The header image at the top of your BANS store is going to be the first thing your visitors see, so make sure you make a good first impression. While this probably isn’t going to have a huge impact on your stores success, anything you can do to provide a sense of professionalism will help with conversions.

Getting images is a lot easier than you might think. For a while I used to try and either create my own images, or find a royalty free stock photo site. Anyone who is still doing this, however, is simply wasting time. Did you know you have the largest gallery of stock images on the internet available for FREE? Thats right, its a little site called Flickr, you may have heard about it?

What you may or may not know, however, is how to search for copyright free images that you can use and modify to your hearts content. Its pretty simple really, just head on over to www.flickr.com and click on the advanced search link.

This will bring you to the following page:

Enter some keywords for the type of image you want to search for. On the BANS site that I am working on, Project Cars For Sale, I did a search for something like “junk car”. The most important thing to look for is at the very bottom of the page, in the “Creative Commons” section. Make sure you check all three boxes. Any images that you find using this filter should be 100% legal to use and modify.

In Living Color

I don’t have a whole lot to say about color choices because I’m really not great at choosing color schemes myself. If you are as bad as me with color, try an automatic color scheme generator to help you out. It will generate colors that complement each other nicely. The way I chose the colors for my BANS store was by just using the color picker tool in the GIMP on different parts of my header image.

Ess E Ooooh!

This is obviously the most important part of modifying your BANS template. SEO should be on the top of your list for every decision you make. Luckily for you, the BANS developers have really done a great job of making BANS as SEO friendly as possible, right out of the box, but there are still some thing you need to think about.

H1 Tags

I am personally using a technique called “Keyword Sniping” with my BANS store. In short, the idea behind keyword sniping is to build an entire store around a single keyword. The keyword should be in the domain, titles, h1 tags, internal linking anchor text and more. One important thing to have on every page of your site if you are keyword sniping is a keyword rich H1 tag. Luckily, BANS lets you do this almost automatically. Here is how:

When you build a BANS store, you will notice that the name of the store is superimposed on top of your header image, as you can see in the example below:

This text is on every page of your BANS store, and is conveniently enough wrapped in an H1 tag for you. All you have to do is set it in the admin section, which is easy. To do so, just click on “setup” on the left hand side of the admin section, and enter your target keyword into the field labled “site name”

not only will this put your keyword in an H1 tag on every page, but it will also put an internal link to your homepage in the footer, with your keyword as the anchor text, sweet!

H2 Tags

H2 tags can also help in your SEO efforts if you put your keyword in them, and their are a couple of places you can change them in BANS. The first option is to simply use H2 tags in your content, but since this article isn’t about content, im not going to touch on that right now. Another place where H2 tags in BANS exist is in the navigation sidebar. The default headings which read “Site Navigation”, “Store Navigation” and “Sponsored Links” are all H2 tags, and you can change them. Unfortunately its not as easy to change these H2 tags as it is the main H1 tag, but its not all that hard.

To change the text, click on the “template” link on the left hand side of the BANS admin area. This will show you which of the 9 templates you are currently using, and provide you a link to edit each of the main files (header.php, footer.php,styles.css).

To edit the H2 tags in your navigation sidebar, click on the link that says “header.php”, and it will bring you to a text editor allowing you to edit the actual header.php file.

Note: Make sure header.php has write access on your server

Even if you arn’t familiar with HTML, you should be able to pull next part off. Look through the header.php file and locate the text that reads “Site navigation” and “Store Navigation”. Simple change one or both of these to a keyword rich title and click “update header”. Done.

Final Remarks

One last SEO effort that I personally tried to make template wise on this store was to make my navigation links as keyword rich as possible. I gave my nav links anchor text like “Project cars for sale”, “Project Trucks For Sale”, “Project Motorcycles for Sale” and things like that.

Editing your BANS template can be as simple, or as complicated as you want to make it, but just keep in mind that people like to feel like they are looking at a professional site. Try and spend at least a little bit of time making your BANS look different from all the others out there. If you really want to stand out, you could also make a complete BANS template from scratch, but I think that would be like re-inventing the wheel unless you had a good reason to do so.

Now that we have done a little bit of niche and keyword research, we (and by “we” I mean “I”) have a good idea of what we’re going to do for this brand spanky new BANS site. If you don’t feel like reading the last post, basically we used pulse.ebay.com in combination with freekeywords.wordtracker.com to find both our target niche and our target keyword. I made the word “keyword” bold, because I want to point that I am taking an approach known as “Keyword Sniping” to get this campaign ranked #1 for “Project cars for sale” (look at that, link building already!), it should prove to be interesting.

Playing the Domain Name Game

Ok, I admit it, I got really lucky with this domain name. www.project-cars-for-sale.com was as available as a fat kid on prom night, so I scooped it up. Chances are, your not going to find a domain name with your exact keyword available, so what do you do? Get as close as possible of course, just make sure you don’t make the mistake I did and register something generic like www.online-dating-blogger.com. You are going to want a laser targeted domain name if you are going to rank #1 in Google for your keyword. If your niche was “Tuxedos for fat kids”, dont register the domain name www.prom-tuxedos.com and use a subdomain or subfolder named “fat-kids”, just try and get the real deal.

Your domain name is going to play a huge role here, and could even mean the difference between success and failure with your store, so spend some time on this and try as many variations of your keyword as possible, like www.projectcarsforsale.com, or www.project-cars-forsale.com, or www.p-r-o-j-e-c…..ok, maybe thats a little overkill, but you get the idea.

Getting your BANS store setup

I am not going to take you through the installation of BANS itself, because that would be way outside the scope of this article, and there are plenty of resources available with the information already nicely written up with screen shots and such. What I am going to do, however, is take you through my thought process on setting up things like navigation, colors, SEO, etc.

Navigation

Before you even think about playing with things like colors and images, your first priority when you setup your BANS store should be to figure out what kind of navigation setup you want to have. If you think throwing up a BANS store with a high level ebay category and auto generated sub categories is going to bring you success, you might as well throw in the towel now. The whole idea behind BANS is to “Build a Niche Store”, and that means drilling down as tight as you can (within reason). Let’s take a look at the two different ways I could setup my Project Cars BANS site:

1. I could enter in category “6001″(thats the “cars and trucks for sale” category) as my high level category and let the BANS software generate about 14,978 sub categories for every freaking make and model of car ever produced on the face of the earth. Tell BANS to use “Project” as a keyword, and be on with my life.
2. I could build a custom store by still specifying category “6001″, but instead of having 14,978 sub categories, I could create my own 5-10 targeted categories. I could also specify a search filter that reads something like “(project,restore,needs work) truck” in order to get a “project trucks for sale” page.

I think I’ll go with option number 2, what do you think?

But how do I narrow all those ebay categories down into 5-10? Well lets just go through a real quick brainstorming session here. Aside from cars, people like to work on other kinds of automotive projects. There is a big difference between a restoration project car, a drag racing (or any kind of racing) project car, an import project car, a project truck, or even a project motorcycle. This is where building a store around something you are passionate about really comes in handy. Because I’ve been so involved in “project cars” myself, I really have a feel for what people might be looking for when they enter “project cars for sale” into Google.

Ok, I got the idea, how do I do that?

If there was a difficult part to setting up a BANS store, this would probably be it. Getting your store pages to display exactly the items you want is almost an art, and is an ever changing process. As not to drag this post out to long, I’ll take you through the process of how I set up my “Project Trucks for Sale” page. If you want to do something like this, I would highly recommend you brush up on your advanced ebay query knowledge. This can REALLY help you out with BANS.

The first thing you will want to do aside from the normal setup options, is to tell BANS you are building a “Custom store”. You can do this from the BANS admin panel, under the “setup” link by entering in the number “2″ into the category # box. Scroll down to the bottom and click “setup store” to save your changes.(click to enlarge)

If you wanted to let BANS generate a crap load of sub categories autotragicly, you could click on the link that says “build a custom store” and enter in as many ebay category numbers as you want, but we’re not going to do that.

Create your store pages

Now that we have that out of the way, its time to setup our actual store page. Like I said previously, I’m going to show you how I setup my “project trucks for sale” page. In the BANS admin panel, click on “store pages”, and this will bring you to a list of all the store pages you have created thus far.

You are going to want to click the link that says “create store page”, which I have so conveniently circled in a glorious lime green color in the image above. This is where all the magic happens. Your going to want to get your SEO cap on and start thinking about title tags, meta, description, and content. Here is where you enter your dreaded content into BANS, but we’re going to cover that in a subsequent entry, not today. What I do want to direct your attention to, however, is that you need to make sure your target keyword is in the HTML title tags on every page of your BANS store. It doesn’t have to be the only word/phrase in the title, but it should be there none-the-less. The text boxes you see in the following screen shot directly coincide with the HTML tags that will be on this store page.

When you scroll down to the bottom of that same page, you will see a few option boxes that are going to be of interest to you. The first box you see is the category number. For this particular store page I am going to use the “cars and trucks for sale” category, which is #6001. Next is the “search query” box, and this is where you can fine tune the ebay listings that are shown on your page by using advanced ebay search queries. The example you see below is VERY simple, but its just for demonstration purposes. The search queries on my Honda Parts Store has about 20 negative keywords, “ands”, “ors” and all kinds of other search gold, which gives me a lot of control over what shows up on my store pages.

I usually just leave the “parent category” as the default, but you can play around with that later on. What you want to pay attention to right now is the box labeled “Page name”. Whatever you enter here is going to to be the anchor text used in your navigation sidebar for this partular page, so think SEO, and choose wisely.

Finally, you can set the file name of the page to anything you want. This is whats going to show up in the address bar, so again, think SEO here. I would suggest not using spaces, because this might add those ugly “%20″ characters into your URL. Use things like hyphens instead.

I think thats about it for that, you can see the final product by clicking on my niche keyword rich link here: “Project Trucks For Sale”

More tomorrow…or the day after

This post actually went way longer than I had planned, and I didn’t even get to half of what I wanted to talk about, so I’ll leave it for the next entry. Ill talk about things like images, colors, and other template related stuff.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to get the latest updates on my BANS from scratch series!

This is going to be my second serious build a niche store attempt, inspired by the great success of my first build a niche store project. I have made a couple of other “thrown together” BANS stores, none of which have really even paid for the domain names (but its ok, because the successful one more than makes up for it!).

Lets get started

With this new BANS store I am starting, I will be taking a more planned approach. My First store was just kind of thrown together, and thrived off the existing traffic of another site I had until it started ranking on its own. Now it brings in more money with its own organic traffic! The problem though, is that I never chose an actual keyword(s) to target, it was just kind of “lets put this up and see what happens”. Luckily it worked out!

So the first thing I need to do on this new BANS store is to laser target a keyword I want to rank #1 for in Google. This sounds hard to do, but I have recently read a great article over at Court’s Internet Marking School about “Keyword snipping”. The idea behind keyword sniping is to choose a single keyword, and build an entire site around it. This is very well suited to BANS because you can make a new store in very little time! The keyword should be in your domain name, in your navigation links, in your H1 tags, in the footer, etc etc. Courtney has been able to rank #1 for some pretty good keywords! Read about keyword sniping here. Thanks to Tevin over at bankruptcytomillionaire.com for referring me to that article!

What Niche to Pick?

This is actually my first attempt niche research, I’ve never really done it before. But anyway, here goes!

BANS appears to work best in two ways:

• Selling big dollar items ($500+)
• Selling to people who aren’t tech savvy.

The first one is pretty self explanatory, high dollar items generate bigger commission, simple. The second one is a little more subtle. Anyone who runs a BANS store might know that a good portion of your profit doesn’t come from individual sales, it comes from the “new signup” bonus. Whenever someone signs up for eBay and buys/wins an auction through your affiliate link, you get a cool $25.00. So targeting people who aren’t as familiar with computers gives you a little better chance of getting those new sign ups because they are less likely to have an existing eBay account.

Well, since I have had some success in the automotive niche, I decided I was going to stick with it for now. I have found that people who are really into cars, aren’t quite as computer literate as someone who writes software for a living (I just happen to do both!). This is obviously not always true, but the statistics do sway in that direction.

The first thing I did was head over to pulse.ebay.com to check out what is selling on ebay right now. Pulse lets you see what some of the most searched items are on ebay in each category. I chose “eBay Motors” from the drop down to see what the hot items were.

Well, I am not really sure what a “Rat Rod” is, but apparently they are pretty popular! Im not going to choose that as a niche though. No reason really, it just doesn’t interest me much. Maybe its a good niche for you to try!

“Mustang” and “Camaro”are a little to generic for what I want to do, so we’re going to skip past those. The next two are really interesting. “Salvage” and “Project” are both pretty close to the same thing. Lots of people are interested in project cars and restoring salvage vehicles, this might be a good niche! Lets find out..

Let’s get some keywords

Now that I have an idea of what kind of site I want to set up, I head on over to trusty old freekeywords.wordtracker.com and start some keyword research. Lets try “salvage cars” and see what we get:

177 isn’t bad and would definitely be worth setting up a quick store for. But Courtney says to try and find a keyword with 200 daily searches per day at minimum, so lets try “project cars” and see what we get:

Thats not bad either! There is a little more search activity for “project cars for sale” than there are for “Salvage cars for sale”, so why don’t we try and go for that one? Another great thing to notice is that the keyword is actually “Project cars for sale“, so people are ready to spend some money. This should be a good start.

Tomorrow I’ll take you through the Domain name search and BANS setup, but you can catch a sneak preview at http://www.project-cars-for-sale.com (please keep in mind its not nearly finished yet!

In some of my previous posts I have alluded to the fact that I just started back at school full time for the spring semester. Being a computer science major, there are a ton of technical electives to choose from, and last semester I choose computer graphics. I really enjoyed that class, so I decided to take the follow up course entitled “Computer Game Design”, which being a long time gamer, should prove to be interesting.

Today we had a special guest lecturer from Harmonix music systems. You may not have heard of them, but I’m sure you have all heard of ‘Karaoke Revolution’, ‘Guitar Hero I’, ‘Guitar Hero II’ and ‘Rock Band’…yep, that was those guys. Our guest lecturer was one of the designers of all these games, and he was there not to tell us how to design a video game, but rather how not to design a video game. As I sat there listening, all I could think about was how much everything he said could apply to internet marketing, so I made up this quick list. Enjoy.

Keeping it simple

We have all played those video games that no matter how long you play, you just can’t seem to really figure out what the point is. A good video game will be challenging, but simple to understand. As a developer you may know a game inside and out, but your players have no idea that your level 8 mega sword can only be used after you launch the loompa doompa over chaos canyon, but not before saving Princess Kantara from the evil zarloonian dragon.

This same concept goes for any web site you might want to develop. Most of us are at least average computer and internet users, but there is still a huge demographic of users who really don’t know a whole lot about computers or the internet. If someone can’t figure out how your site works in the first 6.2 seconds, they’re gone. End of story. Your site needs to be powerful, but as simple as possible.

I can give you a great example of this very mistake that I made myself. My biggest traffic site, www.DigMyHonda.com sounded like an amazing idea when I first thought of the concept. It was simple, people would submit their car or a DIY article, and other people would vote on it. What I failed to realize is that I was an active Digg user, and pretty web2.0 savvy, so the idea was easy for me comprehend. The problem is that 95% of my traffic is car enthusiasts, who are normally blue collar citizens who work with their hands, not with computers. The “digg” concept is completely foreign to them, and no one understood what the hell was going on. Because of that, I get some organic google traffic from the content alone, but no one ever registers, and no one ever submits any content. Live and learn.

Don’t Mash every Idea you have.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the last concept, so I’ll keep it short. One big mistake that video game designers make is that they want to implement every idea they have floating around in their head into one game.

I want to create an awesome Halo style first person shooter, but it needs dancing…lots of dancing. Maybe I can throw in some frogger style action as well, and have the player solve a rubix cube before they can beat the game.

You can imagine how crappy a game that would be! Who wants to play Dance Dance Revolution while they are frying robots with a flamethrower and hopping through traffic at the same time? The game would have no focus, and people would most likely end up loosing interest in it pretty quickly.

Another problem with this is that every feature you add, no matter how small, can take a huge amount of time and effort to implement. The example he gave was to imagine you are developing a racing game, and you have this great idea that you should be able to jump out of the car, pick something up and jump back in. Its pretty simple on paper, but to actually implement that you would need to have animations for your character jumping out of the car, another animation for what happens when the character jumps out of the car too close to a wall, or while the vehicle is moving too fast. Next you need to implement a grabbing system so the character can pick something up, and finally you need more animations for the character getting back into the car. That simple idea turned into a month of work!

The same things apply to web sites. Swiss army knife websites not only take a huge amount of time to develop, but they end up loosing focus, and the users have a hard time trying to figure out what exactly the main theme of the site is. Sure you might have an idea  that looks simple at first, but you really need to think about just how much time and effort would be needed to implement that idea fully. The lesson here is to keep things simple and focused.

Use success to fund future success. Repeat

Did you know that many video games that are released are really just auditions for larger funding for bigger, better games? That was something I found interesting. Apparently many of the smaller companies develop and release games in order to impress the bigger companies, in hope of getting a development contract for a bigger game. This also holds true to sequals for games. Guitar Hero 1 did well, but the development team was able to use the revenue from Guitar Hero 1 to make Guitar Hero 2 bigger and better. They also had a lot more money to play with in terms of advertising.

This is especially true in Internet marking. Its really important when you are starting out to re-invest most of what you make online, in order to make even more money. You can start out with $8.00 like Paul from UberAffiliate.com, grow it to $28.00, then scale that to $60, and keep doubling your profit. This eventually creates an exponential increase in profits, and exponents get big fast. Obviously I can’t speak from experience on this point, but I would imagine you reach a point where you can start banking a good portion of what you make for things like retirement. Hopefully I’ll reach that point someday!

Work in milestone mode

This was a great tip that I picked up from our guest lecturer. He advised that you should have a high level plan for what you are going to do, and then set milestones in both time and budget during development. He gave the example of another game Harmonix developed a while back for the PS2 “Eye Toy”. The Game was called ‘Eye Toy: AntiGrav’, and the idea was that you were standing on a virtual hoverboard, and had to lean to the left and right to turn. The Camera would follow your eye and hand movements, and move your hovercraft accordingly.

Some of the milestones for development were to first see if the camera could track your eye movement. Next was to make sure it could track both your eyes and hands at the same time. Finally was the check that the game created a realistic feeling of riding on a hoverboard. This was done before any of the actual game development took place!

I personally work this same way on my programming projects. I like to start small and see if something works. If the proof of concept appears to show some promise, I’ll move onto the next step and write more code, and then tweak and move on again. What this allows you to do is to get rid of bad ideas early, and not spend time and money developing them.

You can’t beat Blizzard at Warcraft

For those who arn’t up to date on their computer games, Blizzard is the company who produces the game ‘World of Warcraft’, which has become one of the highest grosing video games of all time. In 2007 it brought in billions of dollars.

As a video game developer you may think you can produce a better game than warcraft. Maybe you will add more characters, weapons, or worlds, but the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has about 5 years of experience, and billions of dollars in revenue more than you do that they can use to create the next big War Craft style game.

Instead of trying to go head to head with Blizzard in a war craft war, why not take a little detour? Instead of  making your MMORPG in a magical medieval style setting, why not trying to make a game that is set in outer space, or some other planet? (oh wait, Blizzard has StarCraft too ). The idea is to deviate a little bit from the main course.

Does this sound familiar to you? Does the phrase “Niche Marketing” ring a bell? This is exactly what we as Internet marketers (’wannabe’ internet marketers, actually) do to try and make money! Lets face it, it would be pretty difficult to compete directly with eBay, but there is no reason we can’t break down their inventory and create smaller, niche stores to target a smaller, but very specific audience. This is one of the biggest secrets to success I have learned thus far.

Grab your hook and Go fishing

Of all the things I learned today for Chris at Harmonix, the most profound had to be the idea of a hook. A ‘hook’ is something that your game has that no one elses does. I used to be a huge fan of StarCraft, and one of the things that really made the game stand out was the fact that you could play online against millions of other people. The example of a hook Chris gave was in relation to Guitar Hero. There have been games like Guitar hero before Guitar Hero was created, but Guitar Hero has something no other game has…a physical, realistic looking plastic guitar. How crappy would Guitar Hero be without that little plastic guitar? I would probably be bored or frustrated with it in a matter of minutes.

There is nothing more important in Internet Marketing that having something no one else has. This is the Holy Grail of marketing, and should be something everyone strives for. Some famous online hooks I can think of off the top of my head:

• Google’s “Im Feeling Lucky” button (not useful, but fun).
• Gmail’s 6Gigs of online storage
• Yahoo Answers’ Rating system
• Facebook’s “Friend Feed” (not sure of the official name for that)

The list can go on and on, but you get the idea. If you want success, you need to have something that can’t be found anywhere else. Period.