The truth is I have no idea. My plan is a common one around here. To be able to control and a website or network of websites that make enough revenue to quit working. To only that but to not become overwelmed with it and enjoy making the site better and better. To know what I'm doing and actually advance with SEO and be with the site(s) growth. It's very confusing becuase I basically am trying to learn everything at once. The SEO, getting traffic, revenue is my main problem. Maybe it's because I got an arcade. It's the first site I've ever owned(not including the free forum I got). Forum are my thing. So let me re-cap sites even though I don't know best. Forum Hosting service - I was thinking about buying one that was low-level. Running ok, but not exactly increasing. But I've been looking it up and notice that it's a total host bandwidth hog, and most of the scripts people sell are junk. Not like invisionfree. IF has a good setup. Adsense ready, forum owners do there own designs, etc. But is there profit without breaking a leg trying. It's just too much to run. loads and loads of users going to several forums, and you paying for it all. You better hope to get some clicks or your finished. Dating script - I looked into a script called Dolphin by some company called boonex. It was a online dating script. Very high performance one. members get to blog, live chat, premium members, store, Forum, rank my pic, etc. But a dating site? there's millions. I'd have to start local and grab a few hundred from my city, then start advertising it in the real world. Making friends sign up, and making them tell their friends, and create fake accounts, etc. Maybe slapping a radio commercial and other things like that. Eventually expanding the distance, until I got enough for it to gather a steady crowd, advertise online more. Doing this will take a lot of effort. This, I would have to really GO FOR. What if no one really feels like buying a few credits to contact someone? what if people just arn't trusting online buying enough to buy a simple gift from the store? What if the site just isn't interesting enough because I didn't realize that myspace is just "better"? What if the amount of traffic chokes my hosting price up? What if no one joins after all of that effort and money? What if I can't handle that much to control? Adult sites - Even though I believe they are very profitable like many people I can't really run a few of these due to the fact of being in a relationship with someone. Simple html sites (fan sites) - I have enough of a hard time trying to get a higher pr from 1 site. I can't very well run a bunch of them. I can't do 1 or 2 because it's not enough. Store of some sort - Never really thought about Just a store. It's wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm sure I could be able to drive in people who relate to whatever I'm selling thanks to Adwords. Picking out the right spot to put them is easy enough. Now finding a dropshipper maybe difficult. I looked for one several times and wasn't really able to find one that seems fair and safe to work with. Then again, being from Canada may not help, either. So the learning continues Right now I make about .07 a day. I'm thinking it has almost topped out. After thousands of directory submittions, advertising, affiliates, SEO reasearch and it's at .07 a day. Sometimes Zero. Actually I wasn't really paying close attention so actually you can take average .04 off of that because of digital points shared paying deal-o. I'm not happy. I've asked and asked questions like crazy. I tried to learn as much as I can. I'm so annoyed with myself. How hard can it be. People are actually selling sites that make $100 a month. I'd hold on to it with Kung-FU grips because I'd be scared I'd never get there again. I don't really know what sites are worth, I can't tell if I would be able to handle or increase a site that's for sale. I feel like there's a major key in things like Keywords, meta-tags, content, getting organic traffic, link buying, etc. Now anyone have comments, or suggestions on what I should do?
First... take a deep breath. I don't have experience with an arcade site myself so I am guessing here but I would imagine gamers come to play, right? Unless the ads are very targetted why would they click off? How is your traffic? You are worrying about choking your host but haven't said how much traffic you get or how you intend to increase it. Dating sites, yeah, they're are a million (not that I personally ... ahem ... you know), forums - I think it's heard to make money there. Before you make a bean, you have to have a site that people want to see and hopefully one that people will want to return too. The site has to be SEO'd. If you are talking about Echo Arcade you need to go back and look at the SEO, mate. Why have the site name as Title on every page? Why have site name as the title on the homepage? People are not searching for Echo Arcade, they are searching for war games, card games, role-player games ... Work on the basics before you worry about the money. If you get too wound up about not making dosh you'll throw in the towel before you've even given it one good crack.
They tell me that to have an arcade site really sucks because it gets worthless clicks with adsense because there is minimal content. The arcade itself I wasn't worried about breaking my host limits. I was refering to if I start something big. Like a forum host, as a good example. They take a lot out of Bandwidth. SEO domain name huh. Now I need 8 deep breathes here. You just told me to start over and you have a liable reason too. So, the 1300 backlinks we're pointless, because I'll have to re-submit? My domains are another example of something that I feared as one of the many things I may have to take a step back because of it. In 50% I agree with the "no one's searching business". However, what about Ebaum's World or Digital Point. No one is going to be a webmaster and search Digital points, or something like that. Or Ebaum's World. It's about flash games, movies, pics, humor stuff. But that domain name doesn't really work with the searching. I don't know what to bother working on or what's worth working on. The domain name suggestion is a pretty good one. Sucks to be me again!
Okay. Don't panic. No I didnt mention the domain name at all. I was talking about the page title. Look at the top of this screen, in the blue bar. You see that your header for your post is up there. That's because that is what is in the title. If you look at view code in your own site, you'll see it here: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <HTML LANG=en> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="+25"> <TITLE>Echo Arcade</TITLE> What I was saying is that you would do well to change each page title to reflect the page it is on. Think of what your gamers might be searching for and use that in the title of each page. Links are great but they are not enough. No, you don't have to resubmit and you don't have to change the domain name. You just have to seo what you already have. Back to what I said before though. Don't give up on EA just yet. There's a lot more you can do. There. Feel better now?
Much better. The Title in the metatag. I didn't think it makes much of a differance. Keywords and description yes, title no. Ok, this is something I didn't know or pay enough attention to. Thanks for the help, I'm calm.
Cool Have you been varying your anchor text on all those links you've got and pointing to inner pages. That helps too.
How long have you been doing this mate? I ask as I was asking some of the same questions to myself not so long ago. I have been learning this stuff for 8 months, mainly here and a couple of other forums, spending about 50 hrs a week on learning/building and promoting. I feel I am really only now getting a grasp of the overall picture, and seeing how it all fits together. DD
Who are you asking me? or the dude? Me, I've been mainl running Free hosted forums for years. I got a good deal of HTML, PHP, Admin CP knowledge. Just never actually had a site of my own until last month.
Good to know GrAveTzT, I know nada about PHP or anything beyond basic HTML so look out for my posts yelling for help the next time I get myself in a mess. If you were talking to me DomainDomian, I've been doing seo stuff since 1997. After 10 years I do alright but I pretty much stick to basic white-hat. Even within that I know I could be doing more. As for the other side, you can see from what I just said to GrAve, just about everybody on the forum has forgotten more than I'll ever know. whatever ... it's a cool way to pay the rent, right?
I was asking GrAveTzT, but thanks e10. With the level of knowledge you have, you can definatly make some money. But like I said before, it can take a surprising amount of time before good ideas come to you. Keep plugging away at it, keep reading and learning and suddenly you'll have more ideas than you know what to do with! DD