Revenge of the 10-day Money-Making Website

[Caveman Joe]

Right, Mr Linehan, if you can do it, so can I.

RetroReviews.net is a little site I started up in April, wrote half a dozen reviews, got a few hundred visitors, and then pretty well forgot about. As of the first of this month, I decided to have a proper go at it. Right now I've got sod all else to do anyway. I made new graphics and a new template, queued up a month's worth of reviews ready to post and started promoting the site.

Here's what I did:

Installed GeekLog 1.4.1, with Ratings Plugin 2.3.0 and a home-cooked theme. I may release this theme to the public, or I may not, I haven't decided yet.

Played twenty random MAME games, wrote twenty reviews. Posted them to GeekLog with advanced dating, so they post automatically at 10am every weekday.

Set up a Project Wonderful campaign to spend fifty cents per day on advertising (342 unique clicks so far, $1.02 spent = $0.003 per click).

Used GSiteCrawler to create and submit a SiteMap.

Added social bookmarking buttons, and made a LiveJournal syndication account to suckle from this site's RSS feed.

Pinged all major blog tracking sites (this is built into GeekLog, obviously).

Current status:
Getting about sixty cents per day from Project Wonderful, and ten to twenty cents per day from AdSense. Nowhere near enough, obviously - but hey, it's only the 6th day of the site being properly updated and promoted. Let's see what the future brings...

[Caveman Joe]

Update:

Retro Reviews is now sixth from the top in Google when you ask for MAME ROM reviews, top of the list for retro arcade reviews, and eighth down on the second page for retro game reviews. Currently getting between 50-100 unique visitors a day.

Added and customized a ratings system, no login required.

Over the next few days I intend to implement OpenID support, a system for players to submit their own reviews, and - possibly - a forum. Wish me luck.

[Caveman Joe]

Update for Monday:

Dropped AdSense, 'cause there was too much of it and it wasn't making much money. Put in another Project Wonderful skyscraper instead, in the lower-right. Current price is zero dollars and zero cents, if anybody cares to advertise there.

[Dan.Linehan]

Awesome Joe, good luck!

I'm going to drop off some flyers at the local high schools to generate more traffic for meanmails.

Kids today, they need an outlet.

[Dan.Linehan]

Cool looking site BTW..

[Caveman Joe]

I'd print up some flyers too, but I'm too lazy. Should go well for you, mind - it's not that often you see an entertainment site advertised offline.

Thanks! The template is a Caveman Joe original.

[Dan.Linehan]

Sooo.. Mr. Joe..

How much would an unmetered server run me?

[Lauxa]

I love your site! My husband is really into emulators and MAME, and it's nice to see a site that is sorting through some of these games and giving ideas of which ones could be fun to try out.

[Caveman Joe]

@Dan - Hmm. That's a mouthful you just asked, there. I don't generally offer "Umetered" services, 'cause there really isn't any such thing as unlimited data transfer, and I don't think it's really honest to advertise it as such.
However... Send me a PM, or E-mail (info AT hostingforaquid DOT co DOT uk), with some rough details of how much data transfer you generally go through in a month (and how much you think you might end up using) and I'll see if I can sort you out with a quote.

@Lauxa - thanks! I used to supply these games to pubs and clubs, and developed a taste for them. If your hubby's got any recommendations, direct him my way!

[Caveman Joe]

Update for Saturday, while I'm here:
Well, my Project Wonderful ads are varying by an inordinate amount. I'm currently spending fifty cents per day on promotion, and earning back anywhere between five cents and two bucks, with the average being around eighty cents.
RSS subscribers have gone up considerably, which is nice. I've got a review of Guwange coming up next week, a Cave/Atlus vertical shooter - vertical shmup fans are pretty die-hard, and a Stumble on that review should get me a coupla thousand views.
I've just added a BlogRush bar, and will let everyone know how it turns out. Handily, the colours kinda match my site anyway.
Wish me luck!