The national newspaper released an article covering the growing gaming sector in Jordan, Wizards Productions was one of the companies covered in the article, the article goes over a general over view of Arabic gamers and quotes from founders of the biggest gaming companies in Jordan.

You can check out the full article online here, below is a screen shot of how it looked in the actual newspaper. (I am the 1st person from the right)

Sa7ara one of Wizards games screen shot included in the rest of the article:

Online gaming in the middle east has been growing quickly in the past few years, something that makes sense with the explosive growth ( 1,648.2 % in the past 9 years) of internet users, there are currently 57 million internet users according to Internet World Stats in the region, the MENA region which includes north Africa (mostly Arabic speaking countries) has 85 million internet users! The Middle East region witnessed the highest increase in internet users compared to the rest of the world.

The  rest of the article is now posted at Arabcrunch, please read it here.

We’ve been working in the past 2 weeks on the new design for WizardsProductions website, the change comes to reflect the new vision that has evolved over the past weeks and months, the focus on social gaming will be reflected in the new website and a proper look for our company is the main driver behind this change.

The new website will also be available in Arabic, the website will showcase both the Arabic and English games that the network has after the merger with Go3 (a press release will be posted about the merger soon).

Below is a preview of the new website, we will be developing a simple CMS for the website to manage it, been thinking of using Wordpress or Joomla, but neither give us exactly what we need and customizing them will take more time than developing a simple custom solution.

Lately I’ve been coming across a number of games adding a new method for monetizing their traffic,  which simply allows their members to get their virtual currency (points, cryslats, gold etc.) in return for filling out surveys and forms.

I’ve also been seeing this on lots of high quality content websites, especially movie websites that are popping out all over the place (I have to admin that i opened one as well around 4 weeks ago).

Today I will be providing you with the 4 top companies that are used by most if not all of these games and website, starting with the most known one, CPALead.

The mos well know company, mostly used on movie websites for their easy to use and install widget, I’ve been a member with CPAlead for over a month now, I earned around $170 with them from the testing I’ve done on my movies website, however these tests have turned out to be a big loss so far, I have yet to find a good converting traffic source, I tried a number of CPC and CPM based networks with bad results do I decided to switch my strategy to be a long term one and focus on optimizing and link building for the website for higher search engine rankings.

Super Rewards is one of the most famous virtual currency monetization method for games, well known after the launch of the Facebook platform and many games using them to monetize their apps, you will mainly find them in Apps on Facebook and Myspace, according to their website they have more than 2500 offers!

SuperSonicAds, similar to Super Rewards specializes in game apps on social networks, however they have a focus on Europe and the international markets, these will be excellent to test on our Arabic games in Wizards Productions, from what is mentioned on their website their interface is also multi lingual so thats perfect for multi language games as well.

Tatto Media is relatively a new company in the area of virtual currencies for games, they contacted me some time ago to implement their system across the games on Go3, we tested it on Hitmanslife for a short period of time with excellent success however we haven’t launched it yet. Integrating their “offer wall” was quite easy and they do provide the ability to customize your wall colors to match your website, although the features are a bit limited compared to what your able to do with your wall in CPALead.

There is a 5th company that I’ve seen used on some gaming sites but I haven’t personally used to contacted called BLVD Media, check them out, they also provide you with an offer wall and the opportunity to monetize your games and game apps.

I think that its very important to set your yearly goals, this is the 1st time that I set and write down my yearly goals to be honest, on one side this keeps reminding you and pushing you to achieve what you thought you could achieve at the beginning of the year.

Raising the value of Wizards Productions to $10 million

Wizards Productions is my the main business i am working on and have been working on for the past 2 years after the merger with Go3 Media, the goal is a bit bold but I believe it is achievable, we will see if we can make it.

Raising my RSS subscribers to 2000

I currently have 36 feed subscribers, I had only 3 readers when I started my RSS blog competition 5 days ago, I believe that jumping to 2000 readers is a bit high but I certainly think it is achievable.

Launching Site bidding and establishing it as one of the top Website marketplaces

I bought Sitebidding months ago and didnt really have the time to work on it, but I did change its design recently, allot more work still needs to be done, the original company that coded the site were horrible to work with, simple changes took weeks to be done, thats why I am on the look for another company, I contacted Interberry after a recommendation from Tyler and I think I’ll be moving ahead with them soon.

I will be posting more details about the progress of Sitebidding on a regular basis in the coming weeks.

Grow U4media’s blog network

U4media currently has 5 blogs under it, my goal is to hit 30 blogs by the end of this year, these are all blogs with content writers behind them and not auto blogs, I am not going to set any traffic or revenue goals for them right now but I am hoping that the network would generate around 1 million page views per month.

I am going to use my limited design skills and try and do a desktop background with the headlines of these goals and use it as a desktop background on my laptop, this should remind me on a daily basis about my goals and push me to achieve them!

What about you? have you set your goals for this year?

Since I finished updating my blog 2 days ago and already had all the files downloaded and the process laid out, I thought I should go ahead and update the blogs under U4media, I spent around 2 hours this morning doing so, which was mainly upgrading all of them to the latest Wordpress installations and installing a few needed plugins that I mentioned in my previous post.

While installing the updates and checking Google Analyics like I usually do each morning, I noticed that all of the blogs are reporting 0 visits for the past 5-6 days, which didn’t make any sense, I quickly realized that I didn’t add the Analytics code on the new themes that the blogs were recently changed to.

This was a good chance to try the new asynchronous tracking code that Analytics is currently providing, the main difference between the new and the old code is that the new code is placed at the end of the <head> section instead of placing the old code at the end of the <body> section, thus supposedly it should be providing more accurate stats.

If you check some of these blogs such as Truth Daily which is a political blog, you will notice the pretty good theme its using, this reminds of me of sharing the best 3 Wordpress themes resources I found and usually use when I am looking for a high quality theme quickly and at an affordable price.

Woothemes is definitely one of favorite Wordpress themes sites, their designs are of excellent quality, and the best part is that they give out some of their best designs for free, which is always a good marketing tactic, it got me to mention them in this post didnt it?  their our paid designs are very affordable as well considering that you get an extra theme for free! Woothemes is one Adii’s projects, Adii customized one of his themes for my around 2 years ago. And I just love it!

OBox Design are my 2nd favorite source for high quality Wordpress themes, however they have only one free theme and less than 10 themes for Wordpress, other themes are available at a very good price and they also offer themes for Tumblr and Posterous.

Elegant Themes gives you the best bang for your buck, you get to download all of their great wordpress themes for only $19.95 and they have almost 30 themes that work for almost any kind of blog. I’ve been a member of their’s for almost a year, download around 5 designs and the great thing is that they add 1-2 new themes each month.

Its been a long time since I did any updates on my blog and installed any new plugins and since I am seriously back to blogging now, I thought its time to upgrade my wordpress installation to the latest 2.9 version.

I will be posting monthly or bi-monthly blog update posts depending on the activity that takes place on my blog, I will be noting down Feed subscribers, traffic and blog revenue and any other updates such as plugin installations.

RSS Feed Subscribers

I added the feedburner chicklet today, and as you can see I only have 3 RSS subscriber, lol, on my defense, I haven’t been a constant blogger for along time, and I never really focused on promoting my blog or encouraging readers to subscribe to it, but all of that is going to change! why? well one part of it is that I plan to be way more active on my blog, secondly i am going to start a blog contest!

The blog Contest

The contest is very simple, signup to my RSS feeds and get a chance to win one of the following:

• $50 prize sent to your paypal account.
• Any template if your choosing from ThemeForest.
• 6 months free shared hosting account on any of their plans from my good friends at  MellowHost.
• 3 Link placement on any of the u4media blogs for 2 months, free!

More prizes might be added if I get any friends to sponsor it, if anyone is interested, shoot me an email.

Note: The contest will be running for 2 weeks. You need to leave a comment on this post to be entered and contacted if you won.

Blog Updates and plugins

As I mentioned above, I just upgraded my blog  to the latest wordpress version, its always best to update your blog right when a new version is out, simply because a new version is released either because there was an exploit that was found and fixed or there was a new feature or enhancement that was added, in either case you should install the latest version right away.

In other updates I added Mybloglog to the sidebar, I’ve been along time member at Mybloglog and I’ve had their widget on my old theme, but I didn’t add it again when I switched themes.

I also installed a number of very useful plugins that I would like to share with you:

1- TweetMeme

You may have noticed that retweet button added to each post, this very useful since it allows your readers to quickly retweet your content, its always a good idea to make it easier for people to share your content, you can download the Tweetmeme plugin here.

2- Comment Relish

This was a plugin recommended by PluginId, what it does is send an email to people who comment on your blog for the 1st time, usually thanking them for commenting and encouraging them to signup to your blog, feeds or email newsletter, you can download comment relish here.

While making sure of the download page I came across a blog post on Siteguide that gives 3 reasons against using comment relish, while blogs such as Problogger recommend this plugin, each side has a good view on things but I still think its a very good plugin especially if you keep the email it sends simple, not annoying and not too needy.

3- Add to any

Just as the Tweetmeme button is a good idea, these share/save buttons you see at the end of each post is a great idea as well, it makes  sharing your posts and content much easier for your readers, which is always beneficial for you. The plugin allows users to share your content on more than 50 social bookmarking/networking websites,  you can download the Add to any plugin here.

4- Enhanced Wordpress contact form

As you can guess from the name, this plugin adds a nice contact form for your blog, its installation is extremely easy, it literally took me 3 minutes to install it and update my contacts page, you can download the plugin here

5- My Top Commentators

This plugin is only viewable in the admin side, where it displays the top commentors on your blog, very useful to find out who they are, you can view them based on a number of time frames, today, last 7 days, this month, this year etc. installing it is also very easy. You can download Commentators here.

I am glad to inform you that Medievilwars was reviewed in one of the top online gaming magazines, Thirteen1 which is an online gaming magazine which you can read the full contents of the magazine online!

Its a very interesting concept if you ask me, its the 1st magazine that I saw so far that provides its full contents on the web, they also have an interviews section and an active forum.

You can check out the detailed review here, btw the game got a score of 10 out of 13 which is pretty cool!

Below are screen shots of the 2-page review.

I was thinking of what my next post should be, and I decided to share some images for our offices in Amman, I took these images from my mobile phone so they are not of extreme how quality!

Our logo and main office entrance!

The guys working !

More guys working and our whiteboard!

And finally our meeting room

The office space is quickly diminishing so were actually thinking of expanding the space in the coming months, these sort of issues are new to me and anyone else that is used to work from home or working at a company,  anyways hope you enjoyed the images!

Been busy the past couple of days with a number of things including the new WizardsProductions website which is the gaming company setup in Jordan, the website is still missing some pages but they are not important ones, all the main pages are up there, the content was written by one of the partners in the company and he did a pretty good job in my opinion.

Keep in mind that this is a corporate website and not a gaming site, we were wondering for quite some time which approach should we take with the website, should we keep it corporate? or add some a gaming touch to it? we finally decided to go corporate and save the gaming portal look for another project.

I’ve went through a number of stages that ended up with these theme:

1- The 1st thing I did was a wordpress blog using a paid gaming template, you can check it out here.

2- The egamer theme we used didnt have all the functionality we did, so we went custom and got a custom design made, html’d it and used it for a couple of months, however the design didnt meet what we wanted (not sure why we didnt decide on that sooner before going through the trouble of creating the whole website)

3- Bought the paid template you see now on the website which looks very good in my opinion, I did go through allot of templatemonsters as well but we didnt like any of them, they all the same!!

During my 6 years of working online and launching websites, I’ve learned that going custom is usually the best thing to do, this also depends on many variables mainly your budget and the project itself, however using a template that delivers the end result is also a smart choice.

Btw, what do you think of the Wizards logo below? this was custom made by a Jordanian designer we hired locally, he did quite a good job in my opinion!