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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

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

By this time, we all know that if we want to create mini sites, we need to do some keyword research to find a niche where it is possible to easily compete with other existing sites. (if you don’t know how to do keyword research then you should read my mini site creation series Part 2).

But where do you get ideas for keywords to research?

Sure it is easy to find a word. You just pick the first word that comes to your head, write it on a tool that gives you long tail keywords, and do a little study to see the competition and searches these long tail keywords have.

I personally, don’t do this often. 95% of the keywords i research using this method turn out worthless, and this is a time consuming method, although patience pays off. Just pick an afternoon or any part of the day where you have a few hours to research and create your list. Right now i have around 15 keyword lists ready to be studied, but i lack time…

From time to time, and now im heading to the point of this post, a keyword just “pops” in my head! i usually don’t carry some paper to write down the keyword, but i really don’t need it because i use my cell phone notepad for that. Hehe.

Keywords “popping” from your head tend to be better than researching a massive amount of keywords, based on my experience. But we must not forget what surrounds us, or what we see or hear.

The best keyword so far to me, was found while watching a comedy movie! I took note of that keyword and then when i arrived at home, searched for long tail keywords related to that main word. Did a research on number of searches and competition and manage to select some keyword phrases. Did the mini site, and i can say to you that in 10 clicks in 2 weeks, it managed to make 4-5 times more than 50 or more clicks from several other mini-sites in months!

So, don’t forget, pay attention to the “inspiration of the moment” that may appear at any time, and the tips your surroundings are giving to you… you’ll never know when a gold mine is right beneath your nose.

And you? how did you found your best keyword so far?

when i visited the blog i noticed a drop on RSS readers. Although i don’t have many RSS readers the drop was considerable.

I logged in to my account at feedburner to check what was wrong. And with no surprise, the google feed readers where not being counted. Again!!!!! This is not new. It happened sometimes before. I don’t know the reason this happens, but for bloggers like me, with few rss readers it will look bad. Yesterday i had 30 readers and now it is 19. That means a drop of 37%. Ouch! lol

Anyway, it will get back to normal any time soon, but in the mean time feel free to subscribe my Rss feed, or preferably, subscribe by email (down right of the page).

Oh. Btw. For the mini site lovers, i have made a new one.

Well, time to dinner, and then i’ll go to a bar, if in the meantime, i don’t fall asleep….

I decided to write again about the mini site i created. Now that it is 1 month old i can give you more solid results.

According to google analytics the mini site had in one month:

283 visitors

569 page views

49% rejection

1.41 minutes average time on site

and 34% comes from search engine traffic.

As for the keywords researched, the search engine rankings are:

wii finder in store: 12

“where to buy wii”: 19

wii finder locator: 12

wii availability checker: 16

guitar hero wii finder: 6

and i could tell you more searched terms but the volume is irrelevant.

Now, enough this boring talk, and let’s head for the gold… well… pennies is more accurate… lol

In one month the mini site have earned me an exact total of $6. This means that i have “doubled” my investment on this mini site in a month.

With this, i proved that 19pages works pretty well, and in the hands of someone better skilled in marketing than me, the results could be 10 times more than this.

Now, for the challenge.

I invite you to create a mini site with 19pages, create a series of posts on your progress, and i will give you a guest post on this blog.

This is a test that can bring you easy money…. Think about it.