BloggerVenue

It is Sad news indeed. Bloggervenue.com is for sale on sitepoint!

I have been thinking about this in the past month. I no longer have the conditions to give the attention this blog reserves. I will soon start my career abroad as a nurse and i wouldn’t be able to update as i should.

So this is the main reason i decided to sell Bloggervenue. It is sad for me because i really like this blog, but no longer can maintain it. So i am hoping that a serious blogger take’s this opportunity to bring bloggervenue.com to the next level.

I put the auction on sitepoint with an initial bid of $100. All the necessary info is on the auction page.

The sale will last for 15 days.

If you are interested in bidding or have a friend that might be interested please lead him to this post or to the auction directly.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get an established blog.

Visit the auction page.

Well, last Friday was one hell of a day!!! Negative temperatures in the majority of Portugal, wind and snow!

I was heading to my parents house when weather conditions worsened. I was in the highway traveling at about 20km/h. It was dark as hell, the road was icy and very dangerous.

After a few hours travelling in these conditions, i reached a traffic jam zone. The trucks and buses had a terrible time and were forced to stop on the highway. But with the ice they couln’d pull over efficiently to let the other drivers to pass, making some impressive traffic jam.

Meanwhile, there i was… Inside my car, waiting… but enjoying the snow falling, listening music… After all…There wasn’t much more i could do… lol.

After 5 hours i managed to arrive home, barely feeling my ass and thinking i had enough snow for 10 years!!!  lool

Have you ever had a similar experience like this?

P.S - I noticed that my RSS subscriber count as reached 101 readers! This is a new record high!

Today’s topic is about making money with massively multiplayer online games or MMOG for short. There are several kinds of MMOG’s: Role Playing games (RPG), strategy, sports and so on, but the games im focusing on are Browser Based Games. Who doesn’t know Travian? Or Tribalwars? Planetarion, ogame? These are very successful browser games.

Every month a new game launches, and with the proper marketing they achieve thousands of players in few days. So, there is a lot of money to make here.

I like to play these games, specially MMORTS games like tribalwars or thecolonies (a RTS space game with a small community) and i have been playing these type of games for about 6 years now. And along this time the desire to have my own game increased, and so, i did some research on some game scripts and i have to admit i have found several dozens (if not more) of open source browser games.

Along the years i have used some of them and managed to get some success, but the majority were private, only to play with friends.

Ok. Probably you are also interested in getting your own MMOG, but there are several factors to take into consideration.

1- Do i want to have a small membership base or will i want to have thousands of players?

IF you only want a few dozes to a couple of hundred members then your basic shared hosting will handle the load if your script is light on the server. If you are planning to get more than that, then you need to see if your server can handle the work load. IF not, be sure you have funds to support a private server because you won’t be making money from one day to another.

2 - Do i have time for such project?

Again, like the previous answer, you will have to think if you have a small membership number then you probably won’t need to work much. Just setup the script, edit the configurations to your desire, create a forum for your community and enjoy…. If you have a big membership base then prepare to work… Specially in support area.

Off course, a project like this will need you to test several scripts to see which one is the best in your opinion, and this can take time. Then you need to find if the script is in continuous development and if there is support, because you probably will need it.

How to make money from these games?

Most of you will try to monetise it with PPC ads obviously. Ads in these type of games can reach high CTR. I admit, when i am in one of these games i usually click around 2 times a week because i frequently find ads that interest me.

But one great way to monetise the games is through vip accounts. Look at tribalwars or travian. They use VIP accounts to make money, and they are a huge success. Why because it is easy to get one, besides the usual payment methods (paypal, credit card, moneybookers…), most professional games allow the player to pay with an SMS. Even 6 year old kids have cell phones nowadays so this is a gold mine. Unfortunately, free scripts with this possibility are rare and so far i have found only one.

Where can i get these games scripts?

Sourceforge is the number one site to find these script. A simple search will return you thousands of results. You can refine your search with “free broser based game”, “browser-based strategy game”, “browser-based RPG game”.

Free MMOG script

These are just a few, but i have tried them and ejoyed them. But in the end, it is up to you to find more and test them to see which one will fit your needs.

Games that i recommend:

Solar-Empires:  A multiplayer space game;

Medieval Battles: A free medieval fantasy game

Legend of the Green Dragon: An RPG game

Xnova (it is in spanish, but available in other languages) and Ugamella (i couldn’t find an official download): An ogame clone. A space strategy game.

World of Phaos: An rpg game.

And there are dozens more too choose

FInal Considerations

This can be a very fun thing to do, but it can also give too much work for your patience. If you are serious about this, then you need to do some research. Probably an ogame clone is a bit saturated in overal, but perhaps in your country there’s no competition for an ogame clone, so there is your chance to grab that opportunity. Just research your market and have fun

Today i received an email about an advertising offer that i was negotiating in the past days, and in the mail the sender alerted me for the fact that Bloggervenue.com lost its Page Rank! I said “what the hell!?!?” and immediately checked my page rank and it was true!!!! Holy crap!

Many of you don’t give a damn about page rank but i learned to value my page rank 3 (at first) and the page rank 2 until recently.

I really don’t know why i lost my PR…. well, maybe i do know, but there is no way to prove what was the reason. Perhaps google bot detected link ads? i really don’t know.

Well, i lost the page rank, but i investigated a little more and saw that i lost almost half of my backlinks! Bloggervenue.com had almost 10,000 backlinks but now it is little more than 5,000 backlinks! This is a major difference!

This never happened to me so i am a bit lost. How can i loose almost 5000 backlinks so fast? Does any one have an explanation for this?

Have this happened to you before? How did you get through all of this?

Hello fellow blogger! It has been a while since my last post. I’m not back yet. I still have another month of hard work at the emergency room.

Today’s post is a short one and is kind of a complain to google. If you haven’t known, google seems to be on a quest to bring down Bans sites. Every day we see someone complaining that google has de indexed their BANS stores, even when they have developed the site with tons of original content. People kind of freaked out and started to develop Wordpress + Bans Stores. This seems to be the right path (?). So i hope.

Personally my experience with bans had better days. In august i had a website that was making me some good money, but google de indexed it. Since then i have been trying to get my site back to google index. I have changed the site to a wordpress platform with a store and still, it remains de indexed…. Then i decided to create a new site with a wordpress+bans site. I made the content first, edited everything i needed to do first before making the site available to google. A week has passed and not a single page was indexed. On the other hand, a simple wordpress site i have made at the same time the wordpress+bans site was indexed…

We all know that google penalizes bans stores, but is it possible it is starting to penalyze Wordpress+BANS sites?  I really hope not. I will give some more time to google index my new site before i take measures.

Another thing that pisses me off is that i have a couple of bans stores that i created with the sole purpose of testing and get to know the script. Oddly enough 2 of those stores bring me revenue… I say oddly enough because i haven’t done anything to improve them, they are just like any other bans store, with no meta tag, description optimization…. Nothing!!! But still they are indexed, they bring me visitors,they bring me money!! And this pisses me off because the other 2 stores where i spent hours of my time doing everything that is needed to make the store successful, fail to get indexed at google or simply were deindexed…

What is your experience lately with BANS Sites and google?