The Planning Cycle

If you go to the main NBTD website right now, you won’t see much. I’ve been talking with our hosts for a while now, trying to get it set up so I can do my database editing in Dream Weaver, since I have a huge aversion to writing connect scripts on my own. Nothing has come of it, so as of right now, we have no main page, except for some links to the blogs and forum, which I have gotten running just fine.

Since I’ve spent the past week talking about how to plan a website, its time to describe a practical example, how the NBTD website has been planned out, from start to its current state, with a little about the future plans. Since the website currently doesn’t have much actual content, my focus will be on my blog and the forum, the two parts that are working and I’ve worked on promoting/monetizing.

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Now that we know about sources of revenue, it sure would be useful to know about the different types of websites, right?

I spoke before about the two main classes of traffic: Loyal Followers and Answer Seekers. They are vital to what type of website you create. If you make a website with the goal of targeting one group, and put content that favors the other, you’ll be out of luck, and the site will go no where. In addition, you’ve got to promote your site, and attract those Loyal Followers and/or Answer Seekers.

Lets take a look at how this all works. You make a website of some sort. Then, you’ve got to go in, and figure out what kind of traffic you site needs most, and match your promotion campaigns to the types that will attract new traffic, and specifically attract the right kind of traffic. Read more

Like promised, I’m talking about the different types of advertising today.Yesterday, I mentioned the two different types of revenue sources for a website: affiliate marketing and ad-based revenue.

Ad-based revenue is simple, or at least relatively simple. There are two main types of ads, ones you find and place yourself, and ones you get through a service. Self-marketed ads are the most difficult to do, you have to put up a region for the ads, say that you’re looking to sell the ad space, and then wait for someone to contact you about it. You’re also probably not going to make much off of it, unless you’ve got several thousand views every day. When you’re going about trying to sell ad space, consider it yourself. I get X many views, of which Y are unique, and Z usually click on an ad. How much would I pay for that, per day/week/month? If you wouldn’t pay for it, what makes you think someone else is going to? Your ad space is worth no more than anyone else’s, except when it comes to the traffic you get.

The other type of ads you can get are by signing up for a service. These kinds of services are all over the places, I’m sure you’ve all heard of them. There’s Google Adsense, which everyone seems to use, there’s Project Wonderful, which is new, but very effective, and there are countless other services that will put ads up on your site for you. When you’re looking into a service like this, you need to make some considerations. Look at Adsense. They pull keywords out of your site, and place ads on the site based on what your content is. Then, you get paid for the clicks on the ads. This means you need to place them well, and in places where people will read and click on them. Project Wonderful, on the other hand, is more closely related to self-sold ads. They give you a box, which you put on your site, and then they take care of selling the ads in that box. You get all of the revenue for the ads, and the advertisers choose precisely where there ads are being placed. You don’t need to be as careful in your placement of these ads, since they aren’t necessarily being based off of clicks. Instead, I’ve found they’re generally based off of the traffic you get,  what kind of volume in particular. If they don’t get any hits after several days they’ll probably pull their ad down, but thats not always the case.

So those are the two types of ads. They’ve been around since before the internet even existed, and everyone is used to them. The other type of revenue is known as more insidious,  considered dirty and deceitful by many. Yes, I’m talking about affiliate marketing. Most of the people who are really into affiliate marketing are soul-less bastards only out to make a buck at their readers expense. They’re not cool. But fear not, not all affiliate marketing requires your soul as part of the contract. There are other types of affiliate marketing out there.

That most dirty kind of affiliate marketing is the paid review. Like ads, these can come in both the self-sold and service varieties, but they have one main characteristic: you are selling your credibility. They function directly as a sale of credibility, I will tell people that this X is a good product, and in return, I will get a cut of the profits. Or, I will tell people X is a good product and get some kind of an immediate kick-back, no matter what  kind of profit it turns. Yes, this is very similar to selling you soul, and it has the same net effect, you usually get some quick cash, but slowly lose all your readers/credibility runs out.

There are other kinds of affiliate marketing though. These are more clean, and won’t leave you feeling dirty for endorsing them. Take for example my linking to Moola yesterday. Its a form of affiliate marketing, since I get a cut of the profits of everyone I refer to it. So many places have some kind of referral program, its likely that you can go out and find products you actually use and enjoy using to refer people to. For example, Google adsense has a similar feature. They offer all sorts of referral bonuses like $1 for getting users to sign up for firefox, or $2 for signing up for the google pack. Many games offer referral programs, World of Warcraft will give you a free month of gameplay for referring someone, War of Conquest directly gives you a kick-back every time someone signs up for it.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be dirty, you just have to look for opportunities for it, and grab them as you can.

As you’ve noticed, I mainly blog about planning. Its a far under-appreciated facet of making, well, anything, usually. Lately, I’ve been trying to get it read. Today, and probably for the next week or so, I’ll be talking about planning advertising and traffic. I know I haven’t posted in a few days, I didn’t intentionally take the weekend off, I just have gotten so caught up in trying to promote my blog/make it better/make it generate revenue that I didn’t even think of something to post.

So, lets talk about that. From everything I’ve read, there are two ways to make money blogging. One is through ads, like Google Adsense, and the other is through affiliate marketing. Both are for completely different types of blogs, and ones that do completely different things. To supplement whichever one you end up doing, you can accept donations, or sell other things through the blog, and also use the other type, but most of your revenue will come from one source or the other, and to optimize one usually doesn’t help the other much at all.

Thats a term you’ll probably hear me talk about a lot. Optimizing. In almost everything I do, I try and optimize it. Its definitely something I look for in games, how much room is there for optimization. I look at it when I’m coding; this is taking too much code, how can I optimize it. I look at it when I do my daily tasks; I’ve got a lot of downtime when I do X, how can I optimize it so I can do Y and Z at the same time. I am, in most aspects, an optimizer.

So, on the actual topic. There are two types of advertising, and with them come two different types of traffic. The most commonly thought of one, and the one most people strive for, is the loyal following. They’re the people who will come and read your blog every day, they’re the people who spend hours every day on your forums. They’re coveted, because they’re hard to come by, and they usually will help draw more traffic to you. The other type of people are the search engine users. They have a problem, and just want an answer. They’re coming to you, they want a quick answer, and they’ll be off again. You’ll probably only see that user once or twice, and never again.

That’s where the planning comes in. What type of website do you have? Most blogs and forums (note the use of most, its important) attract mainly a loyal following. Thats what they’re designed for, and how they work best. You want to attract a good number of like minded people so they can talk about things together. Its great, and its highly effective.  If you offer good content in your blog, or regularly post useful stuff on your forum, you’ll slowly draw a loyal following. The other type of site are things like the article databases. Their only purpose is to draw you in for a few page loads, give you an answer, and send you on your way. Done right, they’re great, they’ll give you what you need, you’ll be happy, and both of you will walk away from the situation and properly forget about each other.

I talked earlier about the two types of revenue sources. When you’re planning your site, you need to consider both what you’re doing, what kind of people it applies best to, and what you’re going to do about it. All over the internet are various “how to make money” blogs. Everyone loves to make a meta-blog, where they just talk about blogging. Its easy, you go, market your blog, and then post on your blog whatever it is you just did. It takes very little time, and very little actual expertise in the matter. Unfortunately, that means most of them are crap. Over the past week or so, I’ve waded through so many crappy money-making blogs it makes me want to kill myself. They’re dreadful, they’ve got very little content, and they usually all say the exact same thing with different words.

When you set out to plan your site, ignore those blogs. Like I said, they’re rarely much use, unless you’re looking for specific sources of revenue, they’re not going to help. Most of the actual marketing you’ll do either comes to you naturally, or it doesn’t come to you at all, so don’t try and force it. Some of the better blogs will have tips on how to do it, but in the actual planning process that isn’t important.

Instead, focus on your own site, rather than what someone is telling you you need to focus on. Lay out a plan for it. What am I going to offer? Remember, the internet runs on free (or very cheap) content. The key to all of this is having something very good to offer, and that lots of people will find applicable to their life. The internet is littered with crap, make sure that your website stands out as having useful content, something people actually want. To have a successful site, the most common method is to offer free, high quality content to the masses. Don’t worry about making a profit at this stage of the plan, that comes next.

The next consideration is how you are presenting your content. Are you going to blog about it? Make forum to house vast stores of collected knowledge? Collect the wisdom of the internet yourself into a database and offer that to your masses? You need to figure out how you’re presenting your information. Again, don’t worry about the revenue, thats the next step. Thinking about how you’re making money will only get in the way of presenting your users with useful information, which will only serve to drive them away. Keep that in mind; if you’re looking for loyal users, you’re going to need to not make them feel like you just want their money, they need to feel like they’re getting a fair deal out of it too.

Once you’ve decide on your delivery method, its finally time to think about revenue. Like I said before, the two types of revenue line up with the types of traffic you’ll be getting, which more or less line up with how you’re presenting your information. If you’re running a forum or a blog, affiliate marketing is generally the best way to make money. Usually that comes in the form of you accepting sponsorships to blog/post about some product, and getting a cut of the profits. That isn’t necessarily the only way to do it. You may talk about the game moola, where users get to gamble with advertisers money (its a little complicated, basically the website gives you a cut of the advertisers money, and you’re able to gamble with it). You currently have to sign up through an invitation, and whoever invited you gets a small (4%) cut of what you make. It doesn’t come out of the users money, the referrer just gets a bonus every time one of their referees cashes out or gets a bonus. There are other sites like that, which you can steer your users to, affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be you selling out your users to someone, it can be you giving an honest review of something which just so happens to make you money.

The other type of revenue is ad based. It works best when used in conjunction with the database type setting, where users are just popping in to get their question answered. Advertisers are only interested in driving people to their site, they just want to make money too. Well place ads can be great, but your loyal users, the ones who read your information every day, will tune them out and ignore them. Thats why popups were created, users were just ignoring regular ads, since they just wanted the content. The key to ad based revenue is drawing users in from search engines. The people coming from a search engine generally just want to get an answer to their question and be done with it. They won’t be used to your layout and know exactly which parts of the site are un-important ads they can ignore. This means that they are far more likely to click those ads. If they’re actively looking for something, and see a relevant ad, they’re likely to click on it,  and since they were already searching for it, are more likely to make some sort of purchase there, and that makes your advertisers happy, which makes you happy.

To re-iterate, when planning, keep in mind the two very different sides of the internet. One side is purely question and answer. The traffic is just there for their answer, and relevant ads are the key to making a profit. The other side is the loyal following. Traffic there is the same people, day after day. They’re not going to click your ads, so you’ll have to get a profit elsewhere, which generally comes in the form of some sort of affiliate marketing.

Tomorrow I think I’ll go more in depth into the revenue sources, since those are of great interest to most people. I’ll break down how each works, and what kind of things you’re looking for in a service.

I’ve done a lot of discussing on here about a game I’m kinda, sorta, planning. Its not concrete, I’ve got no idea where I’d get the resources to host it, and I’m not even sure if I’d ever have the time to actually make it. But thats not going to stop me from talking about it.

However, I also need to talk about the website. As you know, NBTD Productions is my website. If you go to it now, its a static pages with some placeholders on it, instead of the dynamic pages that should be there.

The main hurdle I’ve got with that is that I normally use Dreamweaver to make my PHP scripts. The reason is rather simple, Dreamweaver does a lot of the slow, boring parts. Instead of having to write a connect script, I drag the one Dreamweaver writes for me into the page. Instead of hand coding my forms, and even worse, the form submit pages, Dreamweaver does that. Yes, I still have to do significant amounts of actual coding, but I leave the more basic stuff to Dreamweaver.

This only creates one big problem: Dreamweaver has to work. Unfortunately, there’s some sort of problem. I’m not sure what exactly it is, but Dreamweaver will not link into the SQL database. I had the exact same problem last time I was trying to write up a website, and I believe it has to do with the fact that we used shared hosting. No matter, I will work through this all.

That just means tonight I have to work extra hard on it.

In addition to the making of the page, which is the most important part, I’ve also got to put together two different flash players. One of them will be a video player, the other will be a audio player, both for podcast/videoblogging type stuff.

Most likely I’ll tackle the audio one first, and try and get it out of the way tonight. Audio players are generally very easy to make, just set up some actionscript to load the audio file, and set up the controls. Shouldn’t take much more than an hour or two, then whenever Josh gets me our custom buttons for it, I’ll just be able to throw those together.

The video player is more complicated. I’m left with two options, one is to waste our bandwidth, and always buffer the entire video before it starts playing, this may be problematic, since that uses up a lot of bandwidth. The other alternative is to buffer at a varying rate. Basically, I have to find out what rate the video is buffering at, and extrapolate what point I can start playing the video from so that it plays without problem. I figure it will look something like this:

total size/ playback time = size per second

amount buffered/time taken = buffer per second

time remaining to finish buffering = (total size - amount buffered) / buffer per second

When time remaining = amount buffered / size per second, start playback.

From there it will function exactly as the audio player. I figure the way it will work is by breaking it into 10 minute blocks, and playing that, then you have to hit an ok button, and it will start buffering again. This will only happen if there is at least another 5 minutes after that block. This makes it so at most 15 minutes worth of bandwidth will be wasted, which isn’t a terribly large amount, depending on how compressed stuff gets that can be as little as 10 megs.