Oh no! I definitely want to look into making sure that this one is good enough before I look to make a second. I do have a million more projects I'd like to take on - but each of them has to play out to their maximum potential before I switch to the next.
If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site?
Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content"
Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache.
I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly.
how far it gets its going to be related to how people are finding your site, and how much room you have to grow.
if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching.
I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search.
generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play.
affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.
I've got a site that gets ~10,000 uniques per month (www.area51.org), and I still have never found a way to make much money at it. Yes, I've got ads. And yes, I've thought about affiliate marketing. But I wish I could bust out of my boxed thinking and come up with some revenue model that's more compelling.
(On the other hand, the site is self-sustaining; I don't have to think about it much.)
Guess I didn't get the memo. I'm not quite at 500 yet, but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day. I'm sure I can easily bring that up to 500 (for instance, the site doesn't even render in IE right now). And I can make another 10 like it.
In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site, intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but relatively more.
but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day
I'd really like to see the stats on that.
Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.
I would guess he is not exaggerating in the terms you mention, but what it took to get him there. Reading "12 hours...$250 a day" sounds like he started from zero. He probably didn't.
Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.
Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."
So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.
I was like you for a long time, until two things happened:
1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)
2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.
I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.
If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site?
Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content"
Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache.
I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly.
Thanks for the feedback :)