I have previously made and distributed some simple Flash games to use as viral advertising for my games portal, mainly for use with the phpBB2 arcade and activity mods. Recently, I discovered that you can add advertising in games, such as MochiAds, and get paid for the impressions generated.
I've just submitted a game to them for approval, and I'm going to give it a try. The game is a simple trivia game, and, unfortunately, I was unable to use some of the options available due to my copy of Flash being second hand and about four years old. I also can't tell what earnings per hour this would work out at, as I never made a note of the total time spent on the game. I'll start doing so in the future, although not for the couple of games I'm working on currently.
Still, it's stuff I would have done anyway as part of my site promotion, so it's bonus money anyway. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Showing posts with label Site Promotion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Site Promotion. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
More Steps to Get Your Article Declined
Here are some other faults I've come across with submitted articles that can get them rejected.
Problems With Pen Names
If you submit articles you've written on the different article directories around, you will more than likely find that these allow you to have a username, which you use to login, and at least one pen names, which are shown as the name of the author of the article. Now, I've seen a few faults here.
The initial fault is usually caused when you already have an account at an article site, then join an article submission program such as iSnare. The distribution service will generate you a new account, and in some cases, if the pen name you use with the submission service is the same as one you already have at the site, you may end up with a blank as the distribution services pen name, as the identical one is declined. This means that the ability of search engines to spider your articles is significantly decreased, as there are no links to "About the Author" or similar pages. Some directories will decline your article should this happen.
Next, using your site URL as your pen name is often not appreciated either, so just don't do it. In addition, quite a number of sites will reject articles written by something other than First Name Last Name, so, although conditions do alter from site to site, it's doubtful that any will object to a pen name of, for example, "John Smith", whilst will reject or remove articles by "mysite.com" or "The SEO Guru". Just stick with a standard name, even if it's not your actual one, and you will avoid any problems like this.
Bad Usage of Article Spinners
You may not have heard of services such as these, or you may use something similar without realizing it. There are a number of different versions around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take one article, and make a number of different versions of it. The differences may be only minor, but the concept is to make a variety of "unique" articles to avoid duplicate content filters.
Now, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but there are wrong ways of doing it. If the spinner replaces words or phrases with variations, for example, "In the beginning" could also be phrased as "To start with", after doing this for an article and producing a number of variants, read each one through to make sure they still make sense. It's quite easy to produce gibberish if you don't, and most decent article directories don't like to publish gibberish. If an article needs tweaking, do so manually. Far better to make sure you spend a bit of time now on the article, then having to fix it after rejection.
The next problem is if you generate a batch of 20 variant articles, submit each article to a different site. Therefore, 20 articles to 20 sites. Or submit them to groups of directories, one article to 10 sites, the next to a further 10 etc. Don't submit all 20 variants to the same directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may get your account deleted for annoying the site owner.
Submission guidelines, and what an article directory or site will accept or decline do change, sometimes quite substantially, from directory to directory, but if you are cautious, you'll get less articles rejected.
Adrian Kennelly runs DirectoryGold Web Directory and Article Directory. See it for more articles on Writing Articles.
Problems With Pen Names
If you submit articles you've written on the different article directories around, you will more than likely find that these allow you to have a username, which you use to login, and at least one pen names, which are shown as the name of the author of the article. Now, I've seen a few faults here.
The initial fault is usually caused when you already have an account at an article site, then join an article submission program such as iSnare. The distribution service will generate you a new account, and in some cases, if the pen name you use with the submission service is the same as one you already have at the site, you may end up with a blank as the distribution services pen name, as the identical one is declined. This means that the ability of search engines to spider your articles is significantly decreased, as there are no links to "About the Author" or similar pages. Some directories will decline your article should this happen.
Next, using your site URL as your pen name is often not appreciated either, so just don't do it. In addition, quite a number of sites will reject articles written by something other than First Name Last Name, so, although conditions do alter from site to site, it's doubtful that any will object to a pen name of, for example, "John Smith", whilst will reject or remove articles by "mysite.com" or "The SEO Guru". Just stick with a standard name, even if it's not your actual one, and you will avoid any problems like this.
Bad Usage of Article Spinners
You may not have heard of services such as these, or you may use something similar without realizing it. There are a number of different versions around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take one article, and make a number of different versions of it. The differences may be only minor, but the concept is to make a variety of "unique" articles to avoid duplicate content filters.
Now, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but there are wrong ways of doing it. If the spinner replaces words or phrases with variations, for example, "In the beginning" could also be phrased as "To start with", after doing this for an article and producing a number of variants, read each one through to make sure they still make sense. It's quite easy to produce gibberish if you don't, and most decent article directories don't like to publish gibberish. If an article needs tweaking, do so manually. Far better to make sure you spend a bit of time now on the article, then having to fix it after rejection.
The next problem is if you generate a batch of 20 variant articles, submit each article to a different site. Therefore, 20 articles to 20 sites. Or submit them to groups of directories, one article to 10 sites, the next to a further 10 etc. Don't submit all 20 variants to the same directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may get your account deleted for annoying the site owner.
Submission guidelines, and what an article directory or site will accept or decline do change, sometimes quite substantially, from directory to directory, but if you are cautious, you'll get less articles rejected.
Adrian Kennelly runs DirectoryGold Web Directory and Article Directory. See it for more articles on Writing Articles.
Monday, 23 June 2008
How do I get Visitors to my Site?
I've been answering this question a lot on myLot, so I thought I'd post up my responses here for reference.
Simply building a website is not enough, you need to get people visiting it. I wouldn't suggest using thinks like Google AdWords if you're new to it, it's far too easy to lose money on. Start getting links to your sites, one place you can do this for free is by adding a link to it from free web directories. A good list is here: http://info.vilesilencer.com
Try to build reciprocal links with related but non-competing sites; no matter what SEO experts say, you can still get good, relevant traffic to your site from them.
Add a blog, or an RSS feed (say, of your newest products). Everytime you get write a new blog entry, or add a product, ping the site feed using sites like this: http://pingates.com
Write articles (or have them written for you by authors you can find at places like Scriptlance) with links to your site in the resource box. Distribute them using services like Article Marketer.
Add a link to your site everywhere you can without causing problems; eg forum signatures and profiles.
Simply building a website is not enough, you need to get people visiting it. I wouldn't suggest using thinks like Google AdWords if you're new to it, it's far too easy to lose money on. Start getting links to your sites, one place you can do this for free is by adding a link to it from free web directories. A good list is here: http://info.vilesilencer.com
Try to build reciprocal links with related but non-competing sites; no matter what SEO experts say, you can still get good, relevant traffic to your site from them.
Add a blog, or an RSS feed (say, of your newest products). Everytime you get write a new blog entry, or add a product, ping the site feed using sites like this: http://pingates.com
Write articles (or have them written for you by authors you can find at places like Scriptlance) with links to your site in the resource box. Distribute them using services like Article Marketer.
Add a link to your site everywhere you can without causing problems; eg forum signatures and profiles.
Saturday, 17 May 2008
Indirect Links are Bad
Similar to the concept I mentioned in Reciprocal Linking is Dead, you likely have come across this too. An indirect link is a link that doesn't go to http://www.yoursite.com but instead passes though some other script firs, e.g. http://www.someothersite.com/out.php?yoursite
For the same reasons that reciprocal linking is considered worthless, indirect links are also; namely, they don't improve your search engine rankings. And, for the same reason that reciprocal links still have value, so do these. Indirect links, from somewhere targeted towards your site's niche or market, can still generate useful traffic.
For the same reasons that reciprocal linking is considered worthless, indirect links are also; namely, they don't improve your search engine rankings. And, for the same reason that reciprocal links still have value, so do these. Indirect links, from somewhere targeted towards your site's niche or market, can still generate useful traffic.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Branded Flash Games
Flash games are very popular computer games that make use of Adobe's (formally Macromedia) Flash player. By adding links to their website in the games, then distributing those games free of charge to any who want them, companies are able to get their site linked to from dozens of others. Okay, links embedded in a Flash game are pretty hard for a search engine to read, but people can click them and go straight to their site directly from the game, rather than a search engine.
Whilst the biggest users of branded Flash games are undoubtedly games sites, such as Miniclip (although they don't seem to actually give the swf files away any longer), many other businesses have used Flash games as a way to promote themselves. Usually, in these cases, the games will be relevant to what they're selling. Car companies for instance tend to use driving games for their promotions.
I use a number of Flash games to promote my main games site, currently one purchased, and the rest I made myself. Okay, they aren't the best games around, but I don't have Miniclip's budget.
Whilst the biggest users of branded Flash games are undoubtedly games sites, such as Miniclip (although they don't seem to actually give the swf files away any longer), many other businesses have used Flash games as a way to promote themselves. Usually, in these cases, the games will be relevant to what they're selling. Car companies for instance tend to use driving games for their promotions.
I use a number of Flash games to promote my main games site, currently one purchased, and the rest I made myself. Okay, they aren't the best games around, but I don't have Miniclip's budget.
Monday, 5 May 2008
Reciprocal Linking is Dead
If you are at all involved in promoting a site on the internet, especially using links, you will more than likely have come across this claim. The reasoning behind it is simple; search engines no longer count reciprocal links towards your sites' search engine rankings, therefore a reciprocal link will not increase its' ranking, and is thus worthless.
Completely true - up to the worthless bit. Reciprocal links won't boost your search engine rankings, but anyone who claims that makes them worthless is missing the point. The objective when promoting your site is not boosting your rankings, but increasing traffic. Higher rankings do result in increased traffic, but that assumes that the only traffic a link will create is that from the search engine. A good reciprocal link to a non-competing but relevant site has a good chance of creating quality traffic in itself. The traffic may even be of a higher quality than the search engine traffic, because it's more likely that the visitor who clicks on your link is looking specifically for your product or service.
This doesn't mean you should just build reciprocal links with every site that will have you of course. Look for sites relevan to yours, that don't compete with it. For example, a web designer could look for web hosting firms and SEO firms, as a user of one of those services is very likely to use the others too.
Completely true - up to the worthless bit. Reciprocal links won't boost your search engine rankings, but anyone who claims that makes them worthless is missing the point. The objective when promoting your site is not boosting your rankings, but increasing traffic. Higher rankings do result in increased traffic, but that assumes that the only traffic a link will create is that from the search engine. A good reciprocal link to a non-competing but relevant site has a good chance of creating quality traffic in itself. The traffic may even be of a higher quality than the search engine traffic, because it's more likely that the visitor who clicks on your link is looking specifically for your product or service.
This doesn't mean you should just build reciprocal links with every site that will have you of course. Look for sites relevan to yours, that don't compete with it. For example, a web designer could look for web hosting firms and SEO firms, as a user of one of those services is very likely to use the others too.
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