Today, I did the unthinkable: I constructed a myspace page. I suppose technically, I had already done that with my personal page last year; but in reality it was simply the bare minimum login and I had done nothing at all to it since it was created.
I really have to hand it to the myspace developers; they've created one of the single most dysfunctional, hard to use, and unconfigurable interfaces I've ever seen that still happens to mostly work. It reminds me a lot of Gimp.
Actually, Gimp is worse. But not by much.
At any rate, if you still have a MySpace account, feel free to add us! Our myspace URL is:
http://www.myspace.com/alter_aeon
Showing posts with label seo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seo. Show all posts
Friday, April 16, 2010
Monday, May 18, 2009
Advertising/Public Relations
Last night on a whim, I searched for the mud Dragon Realms just before I went to bed. DR is arguably one of the biggest and most successful muds of all time; they are fully commercial, with accounts going for as much as WOW accounts. They regularly top 700 concurrent users, and that's just for the one server. They have at least one additional.
An hour later, it was way past my bedtime and I must have had over 50 browser tabs open. This sort of thing is an amazing way to get ideas of where to post and link to Alter Aeon; they've already done most of the hard work, and Google has made it accessible.
Today, I began trimming tabs. I'm down to probably only 15 or so, most of which are waiting for some event to occur. I know I can repeat this process for a handful of other large games easily enough. I'm about 90% certain that the main AA pages can breach Google Page Rank 5 by the end of the year, possibly sooner.
While copying isn't a great way to be a leader, it can at least get you into second or third position. Given that we're in about 30th place right now, I'm totally up for doing some copying.
An hour later, it was way past my bedtime and I must have had over 50 browser tabs open. This sort of thing is an amazing way to get ideas of where to post and link to Alter Aeon; they've already done most of the hard work, and Google has made it accessible.
Today, I began trimming tabs. I'm down to probably only 15 or so, most of which are waiting for some event to occur. I know I can repeat this process for a handful of other large games easily enough. I'm about 90% certain that the main AA pages can breach Google Page Rank 5 by the end of the year, possibly sooner.
While copying isn't a great way to be a leader, it can at least get you into second or third position. Given that we're in about 30th place right now, I'm totally up for doing some copying.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
More PR
Over time, you tend to run out of things to say on blogs, and I think I'm hitting that wall. It's not so much that you run out of stuff entirely, it's that you tend to repeat the same things over and over.
I'm rapidly finding out that running the game as a business very much falls into this category. You're never done with PR, web page improvements, enhancements to the newbie experience, game additions, etc, but there's only so many ways you can say "I worked on the web pages today." I suppose such is the drudgery associated with a business.
This pretty well explains what I've got to look forward for the next few weeks. I've found some new avenues to pursue regarding getting traffic to the site, and as usual there are articles to post and other PR work to be done. This is all slowly paying off, but it's definitely slow - I suppose like guitar, if everyone could learn it in two weeks, it wouldn't be impressive. The PR:4 thing is a real boost however, in that it shows that it's actually possible to improve things. I hope to hit PR:5 by the end of the year, but I suspect we're a long way away from that.
I just got more advertising set up for Alter Aeon on Top Mud Sites, though I suspect it will drive the same type of people as the Mud Connector. This market for players is really limited, but in the short term it's going to have to be our bread and butter.
(Another neat web site I stumbled across is Mud Stats, which collects periodic statistics from games and sorts them. Stats collection appears to be every few hours, so it's pretty up to date.)
On a somewhat depressing note, I shut off the Google ads completely and the overall newbie load does not appear to have changed by any noticeable amount. It's only been a few days so far and the stats may yet be bogus, but if it's really that hard to pull in true newbies the future of the game could be very questionable. I need to look at this a lot harder I suspect.
I'm rapidly finding out that running the game as a business very much falls into this category. You're never done with PR, web page improvements, enhancements to the newbie experience, game additions, etc, but there's only so many ways you can say "I worked on the web pages today." I suppose such is the drudgery associated with a business.
This pretty well explains what I've got to look forward for the next few weeks. I've found some new avenues to pursue regarding getting traffic to the site, and as usual there are articles to post and other PR work to be done. This is all slowly paying off, but it's definitely slow - I suppose like guitar, if everyone could learn it in two weeks, it wouldn't be impressive. The PR:4 thing is a real boost however, in that it shows that it's actually possible to improve things. I hope to hit PR:5 by the end of the year, but I suspect we're a long way away from that.
I just got more advertising set up for Alter Aeon on Top Mud Sites, though I suspect it will drive the same type of people as the Mud Connector. This market for players is really limited, but in the short term it's going to have to be our bread and butter.
(Another neat web site I stumbled across is Mud Stats, which collects periodic statistics from games and sorts them. Stats collection appears to be every few hours, so it's pretty up to date.)
On a somewhat depressing note, I shut off the Google ads completely and the overall newbie load does not appear to have changed by any noticeable amount. It's only been a few days so far and the stats may yet be bogus, but if it's really that hard to pull in true newbies the future of the game could be very questionable. I need to look at this a lot harder I suspect.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Improving Google PageRank
In a totally unexpected twist of fate, the main Alter Aeon web pages breached PR:4 over the weekend. I was actually not expecting this at all; it's only been 3 months since we went from 2 to 3, and I figured we were well below the required popularity for this jump. If this increase is anything like the last one, our traffic and the quality of our web hits should increase substantially. In fact I only noticed it because the web hits were abnormally high today.
This leaves the very open question of how to get to PR:5 though. I haven't submitted links or done link propaganda in a while, mostly because I was running low on quality sites to hook up to. I'm pretty sure getting PR:5 is going to be a lot harder than 4.
Also related to this, I've been setting up ad campaigns at a few other sites. These should be coming on-line in the next few days.
All this advertising is actually paying off (though in a limited, short term kind of way. More on that later.) The rate of verified, saved unique newbies has doubled since November; the actual number of logins has tripled. Pretty much all of the stats agree on the relative increases, so I know that I'm seeing something legitimate. How long it will take for that to push up the average userload is an open question however.
One unfortunate aspect is that these logins are fairly expensive. I'm not tremendously over budget with ads, but I'm not breaking even either. I need the userload (and associated purchases) to increase between 50 and 100% in the next few months for things to work out.
Now, the short term aspect of things: nearly all of the new advertising is on mud lists and other mudding related sites. This is a problem, as the total pool of mudders is small, and the pool size is shrinking. I saw a statistic somewhere that the total number of mudders is only on the order of a hundred thousand; if things go well this advertising market will saturate quickly.
The only real answer to this that I've been able to come up with is to focus more on the custom AA client. To get a million accounts, I'll need to pull from the global pool of ordinary, non-mudding gamers. In order to do that, I need to get away from text-only interfaces and complex clients.
There's enough web work to keep me busy for a while, and I have to get the game's taxes done this week, so I won't be improving the client for a while. But it's becoming clear that the client is very, very high priority.
This leaves the very open question of how to get to PR:5 though. I haven't submitted links or done link propaganda in a while, mostly because I was running low on quality sites to hook up to. I'm pretty sure getting PR:5 is going to be a lot harder than 4.
Also related to this, I've been setting up ad campaigns at a few other sites. These should be coming on-line in the next few days.
All this advertising is actually paying off (though in a limited, short term kind of way. More on that later.) The rate of verified, saved unique newbies has doubled since November; the actual number of logins has tripled. Pretty much all of the stats agree on the relative increases, so I know that I'm seeing something legitimate. How long it will take for that to push up the average userload is an open question however.
One unfortunate aspect is that these logins are fairly expensive. I'm not tremendously over budget with ads, but I'm not breaking even either. I need the userload (and associated purchases) to increase between 50 and 100% in the next few months for things to work out.
Now, the short term aspect of things: nearly all of the new advertising is on mud lists and other mudding related sites. This is a problem, as the total pool of mudders is small, and the pool size is shrinking. I saw a statistic somewhere that the total number of mudders is only on the order of a hundred thousand; if things go well this advertising market will saturate quickly.
The only real answer to this that I've been able to come up with is to focus more on the custom AA client. To get a million accounts, I'll need to pull from the global pool of ordinary, non-mudding gamers. In order to do that, I need to get away from text-only interfaces and complex clients.
There's enough web work to keep me busy for a while, and I have to get the game's taxes done this week, so I won't be improving the client for a while. But it's becoming clear that the client is very, very high priority.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Gaming Articles Suck!
It's been a while, so I figured I should post some observations about the web pages and traffic. Things work differently than I had expected, though honestly I didn't know what to expect anyway.
The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.
Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.
Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:
1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.
The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.
[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]
I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.
The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.
Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.
On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.
As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.
The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.
Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.
Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:
1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.
The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.
[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]
I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.
The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.
Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.
On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.
As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Google Adwords - The Content Network
In preparation for the advertizing bump due in a little over two weeks, I've started looking at little harder at statistics, and at some of the other options. One of the easier things I can test out is to turn the Google 'content network' back on, as this is known to bring in a lot of web page hits for not a huge amount of cash. I've been fiddling with this for the last couple of days. But it's clear that the content network has some problems:
1) Even after these last couple of days, I still don't have things set up properly.
The content network has huge numbers of impressions, and above certain thresholds it's possible to blow your entire advertising budget for the day in a -very- short period of time. I've finally got it cranked back far enough that I don't run out for the day, but it's still about four times higher than the level I'm shooting for.
My advice if you're going to use the content network is to start out at $0.01 and raise it up by a penny a day until you figure out the appropriate level for what you're trying to do.
2) Content network click rates are stupidly low.
Expect at best one tenth the click through rate of regular adwords ads. Rates like 0.04% (four clicks per ten thousand impressions) so far seem typical.
3) Content network clicks are damn near worthless.
If you don't have some way of tracking or testing content clicks for click through, you're fooling yourself. Keep in mind that there's a fundamental difference between someone searching for information, and someone presented with information incidentally while they're looking for something else.
Regular adwords suffers much less from this problem than the content network, because of 1) the negative feedback ad system which kills bad ads, and 2) because people searching for something are still looking for something instead of being shoved things they don't care about.
My own experience and statistics for this show that the content network is 10 times (!) less likely to result in a saved character or a new player than regular adwords search traffic. Price your content ads to reflect the difference for your own site.
4) Content clicks can be gamed, sometimes badly.
I have so far had only one serious incident of content network click fraud, but it can and will happen if you run an extended campaign or one with wide coverage. Sometimes, Google will refund and clear the damage to your account; in my case, they did nothing, even though it was clearly and obviously fraudulent.
The only recommendation I can give for this is set your daily limit to the lowest possible value that still serves everything you want to serve. Then watch carefully for days when the budget is exhausted more quickly than usual. Assume there will be no recovery for click fraud; your only recourse is to limit the damage.
1) Even after these last couple of days, I still don't have things set up properly.
The content network has huge numbers of impressions, and above certain thresholds it's possible to blow your entire advertising budget for the day in a -very- short period of time. I've finally got it cranked back far enough that I don't run out for the day, but it's still about four times higher than the level I'm shooting for.
My advice if you're going to use the content network is to start out at $0.01 and raise it up by a penny a day until you figure out the appropriate level for what you're trying to do.
2) Content network click rates are stupidly low.
Expect at best one tenth the click through rate of regular adwords ads. Rates like 0.04% (four clicks per ten thousand impressions) so far seem typical.
3) Content network clicks are damn near worthless.
If you don't have some way of tracking or testing content clicks for click through, you're fooling yourself. Keep in mind that there's a fundamental difference between someone searching for information, and someone presented with information incidentally while they're looking for something else.
Regular adwords suffers much less from this problem than the content network, because of 1) the negative feedback ad system which kills bad ads, and 2) because people searching for something are still looking for something instead of being shoved things they don't care about.
My own experience and statistics for this show that the content network is 10 times (!) less likely to result in a saved character or a new player than regular adwords search traffic. Price your content ads to reflect the difference for your own site.
4) Content clicks can be gamed, sometimes badly.
I have so far had only one serious incident of content network click fraud, but it can and will happen if you run an extended campaign or one with wide coverage. Sometimes, Google will refund and clear the damage to your account; in my case, they did nothing, even though it was clearly and obviously fraudulent.
The only recommendation I can give for this is set your daily limit to the lowest possible value that still serves everything you want to serve. Then watch carefully for days when the budget is exhausted more quickly than usual. Assume there will be no recovery for click fraud; your only recourse is to limit the damage.
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