Mike’s Blog - My Internet Life

Well after a week of searching I finally found a Toys R Us that had a few in stock. I woke up yesterday morning at 8:30 and first went to a small Gamestop in town, they were sold out. Then I went to a Best Buy near by, they didn’t get there 2nd shipment yet. Then to a Toys R Us about 15 mins away and they had 8 left by the time I got there. As I was paying for mine 3 more were taken, the 5 left were probably gone within 10 mins after that. I picked up Zelda (of course) and Madden 2007, but they were out of controllers so I only have 1.

So far my first impressions of the Wii are ok. Wii Sports is really fun to play, but Zelda and Madden are going to take some getting used to. Being a hardcore gamer (I should say former hardcore gamer) I am not crazy about having to move around the control to trigger moves. But like I said, Wii Sports is really fun. Im probably going to get a WaveBird to play games like Madden and Zelda cause in my opinion they don’t need motion sensors to play games like that.

I know, this isn’t a game review site, so I’ll update you on my sites. Wii Cheats is still doing good, traffic has flattened out at around 350 uniques/day, which will probably stay at around this level until Christmas. Then it should increase since thats when most people are getting there console. 3D-Tutorial.com has had a major explosion in traffic, from about 1,100 uniques/day to about 2,200. Its #1 in Google now for 3D Tutorials and 3D Tutorial which is where all this new traffic is coming from. Very happy about that. I also decided to link my Bluesfear forums at Totaltutorials.com and 3d-tutorial.com in the hopes of getting more active uses at my Bluesfear forums. The 2 sites are large enough where I’m sure some people visiting would probably want forums to join and I’d rather have 1 big active forum then 3 small inactive ones. Anyway we’ll see what happens. Thats it for now. Next post will be my November review.

The PS3 and Wii have finally launched and after the first weekend I’m seeing mixed results. The bad news is that my Playstation 3 cheats site has been completly bumped off of Googles search results, I think im on page 12 or something and I have seen no increase in traffic to the site. I also think that so few people were able to get a PS3 so I’m not expecting this site to become a factor until after Xmas once more people get one.

On the other hand, my Wii Cheats site has exploded in traffic only after 1 day of the release. It went from about 30 uniques/day to about 300 today and this should only increase as more people continue to get the Wii. People are also already signing up to the forums. Im very excite about how this site will perform in the upcoming weeks/months

On Wednesday I decided to check my adsense categories thouroughly to determine which sites were getting good CTR and which weren’t.  Most of my sites were doing pretty good, between 2-8% while a few were in the 0-2% ranges.  So I decided to play around with ad colors and positions.  On 3D-tutorial.com and Totaltutorials.com I simply added a border around the top ad and with just that little change, CTR has doubled.  Also on my Lost site I moved the skyscraper ad from the right to the left side and CTR has almost tripled.

I plan on playing around with the color/ads positions on some of my other sites as well.  Feels like I’ve been throwing away money this whole time.  Anyway, just goes to show you that simple changes to your ad colors/positions can really make a difference.

I’ve been noticing lately that on many other blogs, people have been using Feedburner to syndicate there blogs, so yesterday I decided to try it out. I signed up to Feedburner, which took about 10 sec, then about 10 mins to figure out how it worked. Setup a feed for my site and today got my first “reader”. I know your reading this, so thanks Thats about it for now, gotta do some work.

Its getting close to the launch of the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, so I decided to work on both sites this weekend. At Wiicheats.com, I decided to install forums in preparation to what I hope will be decent traffic. Although I got bumped to the #2 site on Google for Wii Cheats, but I’m hoping to be back at #1 by next week.

Over at Playstation3cheat.net, I’ve decided to redo the whole site. It came out pretty good, I tried to match PS darker theme they’ve been going for with the new console. Not sure about the ad colors yet, but we’ll see how it goes. I didn’t install forums here, mainly because Im on page 5 for my keywords and don’t expect high traffic right away. I’ll probably add forums later on it the site grows at a decent pace.

I still have a lot of work to do. I haven’t touched my new WordPress Theme site since I got it. I really should add more themes, maybe I’ll do it tonight if I have time. Also haven’t done anything with my Hosting affiliate site. Just not enough time in the day. I should quit my job and just do this full time. Maybe once I hit the 4k/month mark.

Site potential is a funny thing, some people think that potential is worth everything while others think its worth nothing. Everyone once in a long while I will purchase a website. I purchased www.lostshow.com some time ago and purchased it at a price that I believed was fair and not because it had the “potential” to earn more money. Although if it didn’t have potential I wouldn’t have bought it.

For me potential is worth next to nothing. I can’t count the times when browsing sites for sale that the sellers main selling point is “The site has huge potential!” Wow, really, your site has potential! Well as long as it has potential I might as well buy it for your rediculas price. Don’t get me wrong, a site has to have potential, if it didn’t it would be worthless, but I am certainly not going to pay double or trible for potential. I can create my own site in 30 mins that has plently of potential as long as I spend a few hrs a day working on it, which I don’t.

I saw one post today, site is making $250/month, minimum bid is $20,000. Wow, only 80 months for me to earn my money back, what a deal. But wait, “has a potential” to make more. Woohoo, its got potential, let me get my checkbook and fork over $20Gs. This is an extreme case here, but I’ve seen other sites make $50/month and asking for $1000.

Potential to me is worth about 10-20% of what your making. So for instance if I own a site making $100/month, then I would be willing to pay up to $1200 for the site, absolute tops. I would have to see some really good potential to pay that. But in actuality, I would only really like to pay $800-$1000 for such a site. PR would also come into play in my decision. Normally I take the months earnings and multiply by 10 months, then add 10-20% depending on what I think its potential is and what pagerank they have and that would be my limit. Purchasing at what is my limit prices to me is buying the site for exactly what its worth. Im not getting a good deal, but Im not getting ripped off. Of course we all want a good deal, so I usually don’t purchase a site if it gets too close to my limit.

Anyway, thats my little rant for today. I just couldn’t believe someone was asking for $20,000 while only making $250/month. If that was the case, I could sell my sites for $200,000. Potential baby, potential. Any takers?

Today I decided to purchase a wordpress theme script from a member at DigitalPoint. It was a free image gallery script that had been skinned and setup to display WordPress Themes. It cost me $100 to purchase it, which I don’t mind because it just saves me about 3-4 hrs of work, which is worth $100 to me since I don’t have an extra 3-4 hrs to create and customize my own WordPress site.

Its that time of the month again.

Earnings
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Google: $1055.15
Yahoo: $207.02
Intelli: $222.13
Tribal Fusion: $424.73
Commision Junction: $100.00
Misc Earning: $865.36

Total Earning: $2874.39
Advertising Spent: $223.33

Total Profit: $2651.06 (32.1% Increase)

Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
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Total Growth - 8.44% Increase (14,346 uniques)

Wow, huge month! Traffic growth was again strong this month, mainly because I had some very nice positions in the serps. Hopefully this will continue next month with the addition of 2 new sites. WiiCheats.com and Playstation3cheat.net. Earnings was crazy this month, 32% increase! From what I can tell Google was definetly paying out better this month then the whole summer, hopefully it will stick. Intelli and Tribal Fusion also bounced back this month with a big increase in earnings. Private ads as well increased due to the upgrade of my sites to PR 7 and 6. And I even made 1 affiliate sale on my new web hosting site for $100.

This brings my yearly total to $16397.73 which is on track to break the $20,000 mark by the end of the year. Only $3602.27 to go, which is $1801.13 for the remaining 2 months. Very happy with this month, if only all months were this good =D