My online success story Intro These days it seems everybody is trying to sell you some phony success story or the same old get rich quick scheme. Well, I have a real success story and I'd love to tell you how I achieved that success. This is a simple story of how I made $1,200/month in online recurring revenue with a lot of hard work and very little investment money. I decided to start an online role playing game site. I began brainstorming a good domain name for my game and after doing some research I decided to host on a small VPS, found a satisfactory game script to build on, and got to work. The Plan The script I had picked already had a trivial in game payment system. The players that signed up had the ability to buy in game items that boosted their stats and gave them an edge over non paying customers. This was a gold mine. When I made my first $10 sale for an item in the game I controlled my mind went wild. Immediately I knew this was the revenue source I wanted. To hell with google ads and the other ugly banners in my game. I myself am an intermediate php/mysql programmer and though I could fix a few bugs here and there, I did not have time to promote the game, fix bugs, and add features to the game. I sat down and thought long and hard about my next move. It was then that I made the best decision possible. I worked out a deal with a veteran php/mysql programmer to work on the game for around 40 hours a week for a 30% cut of net profits. At this point the game was making roughly $300 a month in net revenue. This was just from people referring each other to the site, listing my site on the top100 voting sites, etc. It seemed obvious that it was very much worth it to find a partner. The game runs 24 hours with or without you, so it's best to find someone to help fix bugs as they arise, whatever time they occur. Promotion Having previously owned flash game arcade sites I thought advertising for a game of this nature would be a breeze. I assumed I could pay for traffic from other arcade banner exchanges and get thousands of unique hits to my site, and probably get around a 10% signup conversion rate. I was dead wrong. Though I paid for the hits and the visitors came to the site no one signed up for my game. I thought I could solve the problem by paying a professional designer to make up a new front page that looked great. That didn't help with my sign up problems either. Nobody was signing up for my great little game, and I had no idea why. When I created this site I felt confident I could advertise it the same way I advertised my old flash game arcade sites. Because of my immediate failure I wanted to give it up. One night however I stumbled upon a new website, http://www.game-advertising-online.com. After doing a bit of research on this advertising agency I uploaded my banners, got them approved, and funded my account with $50. Through their intuitive control panel, I placed my 468x60 banners on several related mafia game sites, and placed my advertising bid a few cents higher than the competition so I could get a lot of instant traffic. I remember being on the game, seeing around 6 players online and active, then refreshing after around 2 minutes after I started the ad campaign. 18 players online! To make a long story short, I found that advertising your mafia game on other mafia sites yields around a 75% or better visitor signup. It was the breakthrough I had needed to continue the rapid expansion of my small business venture. I experimented with advertising my mafia game on other browser based games. These games, such as imperia online, and a few other strategy games. While these people came and signed up, they typically didn't stick around. The reason I found behind this is because I was pulling in a completely different type of gamer to my simple mafia game site. Take my advice, and stick with advertising your site on other related sites. After spending $50 for around 300 unique signups to the game I started expanding my mind a bit in terms of promotion. We created a script that rewarded players with in-game cash for voting for our game on the top voting sites. This was and still is a great additional source of free traffic to the site. With spending money for typical promotion, and then having those players vote for rewards, it's like snowballing your traffic. The players vote, you get higher on the voting sites, and thus you receive more free visitors to your site. I also experimented with finding huge forums that were mainly frequented by casual users with spare time. I eventually found the perfect one, and placed a sticky ad for 24 hours. The users liked the game so much they had also written around 75 pages of replies on their forum about the game I was promoting. I spent $25 on the advert on this forum and earned $600 in a period of 2 days. That's around a 2000% profit return. It takes a great deal of work, a great deal of patience and a lot of learning to make money on the internet. If making money online is not your passion, this is probably not the type of business for you. I enjoy making other people happy and earning money, so running a browser based game was right up my alley. After I sold my site the new owner's hosting provider had messed up the database and therefore I have decided it is morally allowable to sell my original game script on digitalpoint, at this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1196029 Edited by ClearView Writing
Yes, but after around 9 months of hard development work, I would say it's leagues beyond "mafia wars" If anyone has any questions, or wants to pick my brains even further, I'm available via PM most of the time.
So a verteran Php/mysql programmer worked for u for 40hours a week for $like $10 seems a BIT hump as you said It was then that I made the best decision possible. I worked out a deal with a veteran php/mysql programmer to work on the game for around 40 hours a week for a 30% cut of net profits. At this point the game was making roughly $300 a month in net revenue. This was just from people referring each other to the site, listing my site on the top100 voting sites, etc. It seemed obvious that it was very much worth it to find a partner. The game runs 24 hours with or without you, so it's best to find someone to help fix bugs as they arise, whatever time they occur. trouble with these mafica games they are so yesterday and boring ashell to play when will anyone come up with somthing new . Im glad it worked for u It worked for me to but not as much as i sold earlyer.
What an excited story. Thanks for sharing . Since I am not php programmer, can I "copy" your success ?