There is a growing interest in ownership of firearms in the United States. Belleville Indoor Shooting Range has experienced growth and their customers come from all walks of life. The one thing they all have in common is the need to be trained in the proper use and care of guns. This is where Belleville Indoor Shooting Range steps in. Owner Steven King is a certified NRA shooting instructor and well versed in all aspects of shooting.

The NRA certified instructors offer classes in pistol, shot gun, basic handgun and basic shotgun use. Additionally, Belleville Indoor Shooting Range offers a First Step program for handgun, rifle and shotgun interests. These combined classes offer the ability for an individual to move smoothly through the learning process and conclude the process fully educated in all aspects of firearms.

Offering private and group lessons for both beginners and advanced sport enthusiasts, Belleville Indoor Shooting Range has a class that is right for everyone. Belleville Indoor Shooting Range offers lessons by appointment only and you can get more information on pricing and availability by calling (314) 368-4867. Belleville Indoor Shooting Range offers one of the only indoor shooting ranges in southern Illinois and services the St. Louis metropolitan area as well. Belleville Indoor Shooting Range is conveniently located in Belleville, Illinois.

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!

]]> http://bloggervenue.com/stuck-in-the-snow/feed/ 6 http://bloggervenue.com/make-money-with-massively-multiplayer-online-games/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=make-money-with-massively-multiplayer-online-games http://bloggervenue.com/make-money-with-massively-multiplayer-online-games/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:52:42 +0000 admin http://bloggervenue.com/?p=648

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

]]> http://bloggervenue.com/make-money-with-massively-multiplayer-online-games/feed/ 14 http://bloggervenue.com/did-i-just-got-slapped-by-google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=did-i-just-got-slapped-by-google http://bloggervenue.com/did-i-just-got-slapped-by-google/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:01:34 +0000 admin http://bloggervenue.com/?p=639

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?

This is probably one of the “creating a forum” series post that may interest you the most.

We are always seeking ways to monetize our sites, and perhaps the majority of us know how to monetize a blog, but when trying to do it in forums, they often stumble with some doubts and difficulties.

Making money with blogs is easier

One point you need to take in consideration is that blogs are easier to monetize. You will get some revenue after a few days of work, but with forums it is a completly different thing. The process is more demanding and will require more attention from you. The process can sometimes be frustrating to us, so be patient.

Analyse your options

You need to think how do you want to make money from your forum. There are several options out there, some may result very well, others may not. What works well for your blogs may not work for a forum.

So let’s see what options we have:

1. Pay per click ads: This is the obvious option for the majority of webmasters. PPC ads can work pretty well on forums, but to achieve that you will need try several types of ads and spots.
2. CPM ads: this is an option that ALL webmasters should take in consideration. CPM ads are a great way to monetize your forum, but they are only good if you have some decent traffic. Take my example (dahh.net) I have CPM ads, every new visit brings me money. It isn’t much but it add’s up. As a bonus, from time to time i have conversions that bring me an extra buck or five . CPM ads, in my opinion should be only used as a secondary source of income.
3. Pop Ups: these type of ads usually pays on a CPM base, and they pay better than the ordinay cpm ad, but it will annoy your visitor, so this is a type of ad that i don’t recommend, unless you have a more “obscure” forum.
4. Paid subscriptions: You may charge your members for special access to certain foruns or to change their rights. This is a good option if you offer some services like PPC training, secret tips, special content like many adult foruns have.  SMF 2.0 is able to do this easily.
5. Email Marketing: This can bring you more profit than all others combined. Imagine the value that email marketing can have in your life. Gathering an email database that you can control is priceless. If you can have a couple of thousand users in your forum, you will have a gold mine! You just need to select the right “pay per lead” campaigns to send in a mass email. Imagine the potential! This is by far my favourite one. You just need to remind that you need to disclose that you will send advertising offers from time to time directly to their email.

Ad Management

This is all very pretty to talk about, but not if we don’t have an easy way to implement the ads. Doing Email marketing and paid subscriptions is easy because those features are already present in SMF. but placing banner ads in the forum is a different issue. You need to edit the code to insert your banners. But fortunately there is a mod called “Ad Management” that will make your life really easy.

You can get ad management mod on SMF mod site. Just upload and activate it through the package manager. If you are using the Default theme then you don’t need to edit the template files.

In your admin panel go to “Ad management” inside “Forum Configuration” section. Click on Add Ads and insert the code. Then just choose where you want the ads to appear. It is that simple.

I have not told everything about Forum monetization. There are several useful tips that i can share with you, but i will leave that to the e-book i will write after completing this series of posts. It will be Free for Rss subscribers.

Final Considerations

As i have said, monetizing a blog is easier than a forum. In fact, forum monetization can be a challenge. It took me some time to monetize dahh.net, but my patience paid off.

There are some factors that could potentially make this easier. I recommend you to make a forum in English. The potential of users is incredibly big, and it will be more likely to bring you new users, specially users from US, that usually convert very well.

Look for valid alternative. Don’t bee afraid to try new advertising companies. Some may result better than others. For example, if you have a tech forum probably tech related ads (like widgetbucks) will generate more revenue.

Be patient. You won’t make a decent buck in a week, or in a month (unless you are a particularly skillful lucky marketeer). It took me two years to successfully monetize my forum, but to reach that level i had to do many mistakes, some very stupid…. But i was learning from scratch and monetizing the forum wasn’t my main objective. And it still isn’t.

Finally i am back, after a really bad week.. I just recovered fully last friday, but i was able to attend school in wednesday.

I just had a gastroenteritis + vomiting + fever. This lead me to some degree of dehydration, and surprise or not i didn’t went to the doctor. lol That is my problem, i don’t run to see the doctor when im sick (well, im a future nurse, and we are, along with doctors, known to be the worst patients that can exist lol). I just knew what i had to do, drink water and get eletrolites from salt from the small amount of food that i could ingest. The next day i was better, so no need for the doctor happily

To worst things up, i had an exam friday, so i had to make a choice, and left the blog a bit alone.

No link love?

Sorry guys, there is no link love. I haven’t had the time to read a single post yet, so i prefer to skip this weeks link love post. sorry guys.

Plans for the week

Ok, im not making any plan for the week, because every time i do plans, something comes up to screw them. But im thinking to do 2-3 posts (the usual), hopefully to i can finish the create a forum series.

I need to catch up with the comments on the blog. I have a few dozens to respond

One thing that can mess my blogging week is friday. I have an exam (again), that will hopefully be the last before i graduate

Again for the second time in a row im giving the link love on Monday instead of Sunday. I can’t make a habit out of this lol

Week In Review

I started the past week by giving you a simple tip to make your posts look better. Followed by a post about wordpress themes. This time, it was about themes that we should runaway from. 7 themes were mentioned but some more were mentioned on the comments.

And finally, i ended the week by showing you how to create unique content in seconds. This post created some unexpected buzz on a social media site. More about that below.

Link Love of the week:

Sadly, this was a week that i haven’t had the pleasure of reading as many posts from blogs i visit, as i wanted. But still i managed to read some cool articles. Here is my selection:

Sire from Wassupblog made a useful post to all the blogger community that uses comment love plugin. The author of Comment Love, as made a new cool feature to his plugin. Visit sire’s blog to see what it is.

Syed from Balkhis made a case study to find Which Blog Posts get the most traffic?

This i had to mention. lol The Tragedy stroke Johncow TV. The cow was “cownapped”!  Pretty funny! hehe now serious…. poor cow… it must be terrified!

Yan from Thoushallblog made a list of 20 things we should do after installing wordpress.

The Buzz about Create Unique content post

On the first paragraph i said that the “create  unique content in seconds” post generated some unexpected buzz around it. Unexpected and negative buzz.

I have submitted that post as i usually do, to several social media sites. One of the sites was sphinn. After a few hours i started to see traffic arriving from sphinn to that post.

I logged in, and saw the post was “desphunned” 6 times, and a discussion started.

A few comments were made (some very ironic) such as:

well, it’s sucky advice, a sucky attitude. if i need 50 more characters, i thought it sucked.

Let’s make scraped and copied content OK by moving around words and “giving credit.”

this made me throw up in my mouth a little. it’s this sort of thing that ruins the internet for all.

Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.

If you want to take part in this discussion, sphunn or desphunn the topic, by all means feel free to do it

Conclusion

If there are users who don’t agree with this method, then it is up to them. I can understand, but first they should think a bit about it before saying something. They have read the words “create” “unique” “content” “translate” and assumed that it was a really bad advice… They should understand that i condone the use fo this technique to take an article as their own (i thought i cleared this in the post!). But in the end. What one of my readers do with this, is completly out of my hands. It is their responsability to act in the right way…

I don’t really care that i got a negative buzz out of this. Really. I don’t care. In fact, im loving it. The reason? im getting some exposure and traffic to my blog, and has many say good or bad, what matter’s is they talk about us. lol

Sony is one of the most commited companies to eradicate piracy of the world, but it is also on of the major creators of CD-R and DVD-R, used in a large percentage to record pirated products. Ironic? (Santos, 2008)

P.S. – Santos it is my surname in case you are wandering who the hell is santos. And don’t get me wrong about this quote. It is just a little thought to take the right conclusions….

We all know that to succeed in getting traffic from search engines, and specially from google, unique content is the gold ticket for it.

So, webmasters in general, and bloggers in particular spend hours writing unique content  for their sites/blogs to get some traffic from search engines.

The process is long and tedious, and some simply don’t have the patience to do this. If there is money available, then hiring someone to write for you is an option. After all, it isn’t that expensive, and the results are good (if you hire a good writer).

What if, there is a way to get unique content the easy, fast way? And specially free?

Interested?

Unique Content in less than a minute

We will achieve this using translators. But how?

First lets get our hands on an article we are interested.

Second we use a translation site/software that we like. (I would recommend to stay away from babelfish. It sucks big time. I prefer the google translation tool).

What we are going to do is to paste the article into one of these tools and translate it to several languages and finally translate it back to English.

An example of translation cycle could be this: English->Portuguese->French->German->English

After the cycle is over you should confirm the final text is original.

Confirm the uniqueness of your text

A tool that i like to use from time to time is Copyscape. This site will crawl the web to find any text that matches yours. It will even highlight pieces of text that are the same. Do this and decide if it is unique enough for your, or do the translation cycle again.

After all this, congratulations. You have your unique content in less than a minute!

I often find articles that are duplicated on thousands of sites. Yesterday i came across a website that was selling already established sites with more than 1000 articles. Did a check on the examples and no article was original!

Optimize your content

This is a mandatory step, and will take you some time to do (not that much).

Copyscape may have said that your content was unique but if you read it there are some parts that don’t make any sense!! This is very truth if you used BabelFish.

This was something to be expected. But relax. Now is up to you. Just change some words to make the wrong phrases to make some sense, and since you are doing that, why not reinforce the keywords you want?

Conclusion

Unique content is not that hard to have using this “technique”. Copyscape say its unique and i believe it.But if you do this i just ask that you give credit to the original author. You can just write something like:

“Based on Hugo Santos article. Available at: http://bloggervenue.com”

It gives credit to the right person, he will be happy, and you are happy :p.

Since i have said this, i must say that i have learned this from Scot at Revvenue.com