Brian Vaughan

The (Re)Launch of ArcadeDog

Posted by Brian

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ArcadeDog is one of my oldest sites, I have had it since 2003 believe. The site used to be powerhouse for generating revenue. It came on the scene before all the arcade sites were popular all over the internet, and it reaped the benefits.

However I started to neglect the site, quit updating it. I let it fall into the deep dark regions of the internet. Well finally I am starting to revive it. It has been coming along quite well. Have a new script powering the site now, also have a new template in the works. One thing I have to say though, social media sucks.

Now some of you had a heart attack right there I’m sure. Let me explain since the relaunch of ArcadeDog.com a couple of the games have gotten “stumbled”. Now this has brought in HUGE amounts of traffic, this month already over 8k unique visitors. But the traffic is all mostly trash. Sure one or two people MAY actually come back but its mainly just a waist of bandwidth. It made my CTR go way down on my ads both from Adsense and from AdToll. I guess the traffic wouldn’t be as bad if all my ads were CPM based, but they are all CPC, so its just bad. Hopefully the flood gates will start to dry up there and things settle back down to normal.

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Free Reviews

Posted by Brian

Well, those of you that have stopped by will notice things look a bit different. I’m not done yet, I still have to do a little coding to enable widgets in the sidebar and a few other small things. I’m trying to pump some new life into the site and the main way to really do that is of course post.

To post though, I have to have things to write about, which isn’t all that hard but I also want to help out people that have been reading my site. Now how am I going to do this? Well there are at least 35 of you that were interested in this site and subscribed to the RSS feed, and stayed subscribed even when I wasn’t posting. So I am offering all of you a free review (not that I’m charging for reviews now anyways) of your website, or a service/product you offer.

If you are interested in getting a review done for you feel free to contact me and we can work out a review for you. If it is a product/service you want me to review I will need a free trial to be able to review it properly.

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Two Great New Programs

Posted by Brian

Lots of hype has been going on about the websites DealDotCom and BlogRush. Both of these sites have exploded into the blogosphere over the past week. I almost feel like I’ve missed my opportunity to really promote these two fantastic resources for bloggers, because by now most people that will be interested in joining those two programs that read this site have already joined through someone else.

DealDotCom is a website similar to Woot in that it offers one product per day until it sells out. Once that happens you will have to wait until the next day to get another product. So far the site has been a relative huge success with two great products for the first days. One great feature is, if you have a product you want to sell, you can try and get it listed on the site for sale. That is a great way to get your product out there to the masses. Now of course DealDotCom takes a cut of the profits from the sale but having them sale the product for you means your not having to put a lot of money into advertising yourself which is always good. They offer a great affiliate program for both tier 1 and tier 2 at 35% and 15% respectfully, just keep in mind what you get is based on the profit that DealDotCom makes not what the item is actually selling for.

The second program is BlogRush, which aims to “rushing” your blog with new visitors. Yes I know excuse the pun, but that is in fact what BlogRush is intended to do. In short, you earn impressions on other blogs by showing the BlogRush widget on your own site. For every impression you give, you earn one impression on the network. 1:1 ratio very nice, most exchanges like this are 2:1 or even 3:1, 1:1 is very nice indeed. I will admit I have been running it for awhile now, and haven’t really had great success with it, I have recieved one new visitor from BlogRush. One new person to my site for just sticking some code on my sidebar? Seems pretty good to me. One thing I have noticed is a lot of people have been complaining about poor performance with the network. Your headlines mean a lot with BlogRush, you have to have eye catching titles to entice people to click on them. So while writing your posts make sure you have good titles so people will notice them.

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Why Aren’t You Using Adsense Yet?

Posted by Brian

So you have been online a few months with your new amazing website. You receive a few hundred visitors a day, and a great community going on over there. However it is starting to take a toll on your bank account keeping the site online, with hosting feeds, domain registration, and some general advertising you have done for the site. So you start to wonder to yourself “Should I be using Google Adsense?”. Let me tell you right here and now, if you are wondering that, the answer is a resounding YES.

Now, you have heard that Adsense isn’t good for your site unless your receiving a bazillion visitors everyday. That simply isn’t true. Will your results be better with a bazillion visitors? Well of course they probably will be, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have success as well. Just because your site isn’t receiving a few thousand unique users every day doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a “nice” income with Adsense.

Now, yes this isn’t an amazing shot of showing a low traffic site making huge amounts of money, but I feel this is going to be more or less the average, if not even a little below it. The screenshot above is of the adsense stats for one of my mini content sites. Its a fan site for a small time band. Now is it making huge amounts of money? No, not really, but looking at the number of impressions its not doing bad. The stats are from July 1st-July17th. Thats a pretty good amount for one small site to make in that time period I feel, it pays for the domain registration and for most of the hosting costs. Isn’t that your goal at first anyways?

The site I used as my example is a site that I never even update, its totally static, so if you use it on your site with new content regularly, and with user participation your results should be much much better.

If you are not using Adsense, you are losing out on potential revenue for yourself, and your website. Think of all the new features you get ad to your site if you had the money? This is your way of making your site better. With the money, use it to make the site bigger, and better, more features for your users. As users are the most important part of any website.

So the question is now, “Why aren’t you already using website for your sites?”.

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Feeding the Cow

Posted by Brian

If you have visited the Mad Cow’s website over the past few days you might have noticed an ad running on his site, from me. Now some of you are probably thinking, “Why is he doing this?, What is the point?, Does it work?”. Well let me answer those questions for you.

1. “Why is he doing this”? — Well that is a great question, I over head the Mad Cow talking on another site, asking for ways that he could increase his AdSense earnings since the dairy ads weren’t all that great. So I thought to myself, I can help him out a little with advertising as well as bring a few visitors to mysite, So I went on over to my AdWords account and set up a site targeted ad and set it to target http://johncow.com.

If you don’t have an AdWord account sign up!

2. “What is the point”? — Well this is basically the same question as #1 I just wanted to make it a three question post. But basicly to show some appreciation for what he is doing, he is doing a bang up job. So hopefully it will encourage him to keep up the great work that he is doing.

3. “Does it work”? — Another great question, well the answer is simple.. maybe… Yes it works, Did I get a huge amount of traffic? No I didn’t, I did bring in 25 people that might otherwise not of visited my site. So was it worth it? Yes, yes it was. I killed two birds with one stone, I helped out the Mad Cow, and I got me some new visitors to my site.

All in all, it worked out great for both of us, I even picked up another link in one of his posts Blue Cow Down, so that was another added bonus for me. Here is an image of what the ad looked like on his site, I might in the future re-enable the ad when I have some new better content here, that I think his viewers might enjoy.

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