WizardsProductions attended the Jordan Web Awards 2009 that took place a couple of weeks ago, we submitted Sa7ara our browser based game for the competition on the games and entertainment category in the awards, we were all hoping and pretty much sure we will be taking home the gold, sadly though we ended up in the 3rd place and got the bronze award, not what we hoped for but thats fine, were all determined to get the gold next year.

Surprisingly there were not gaming websites competing with us, we originally thought that there is going to be a category for the games as we heard that there are other gaming websites that submitted for the award, sadly though there wasnt the organizers had to merge the gaming category with the entertainment category.

The silver award went for Shoofeetv and the Gold award went for a music related website that i dont remember.

Below are images from the event.

]]> http://www.sohaibthiab.com/2010/03/jordan-web-awards-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.sohaibthiab.com/2010/02/earn-money-with-4-virtual-currency-networks/ http://www.sohaibthiab.com/2010/02/earn-money-with-4-virtual-currency-networks/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:01:45 +0000 Sohaib http://www.sohaibthiab.com/?p=298

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.

Ok, so the blog contest is over and its time to announce the winners of the 4 prizes, but before I do that, lets the effect of the blog contest on my blog traffic and RSS subscribers.

Before starting the contest, I had exactly 3 RSS subscribers and I currently have 44 RSS subscribers, thats 41 new RSS readers, not bad I guess, I was hoping for a bit more, I am still way behind my yearly goal of reaching 2000 RSS readers.

The blog contest post received 45 comments, and 36 contestants, some have blogged about the contest as well. This has plaid a big role in increasing the traffic on my blog, below is a screen show of last month’s traffic stats.

Not all of this growth can be attributed to the contest alone, I did place some banners on two blogs to jump start the contest as well.

Ok, now its time to reveal the winners, I took some images while preparing for the selection of the winners.

Names of the contestants written on paper

All the names in a bole

The 4 winners!

And here they are:

Winner 1 ($50): I heart contest

Winner 2 (Theme forest): Mhaye

Winner 3 (6 months free hosting): Marshal Prince

Winner 4 (Links): Manan Saini

I will be contacting the winners by email to arrange for the prizes, if you dont get an email from me today please do contact me.

Its time for another speed linking post where I share the top articles and blog posts that caught my attention, hope you find them useful as I did.

The Big List: 2010 Marketing Predictions & Resolutions – Search Engine Land

Grasping This Concept Will Massively Impact Your Life – PluginID

30 Fast Life SEO Tactics/Techniques for 2010 – Seoptimise

AOL and Mashable in Talks? Rumor Says Mashable May Be Bought – Rev2

What’s Working for Social Media Marketers? – Emarketer

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over – Readwriteweb

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’ve recently registered at CPAlead and i started testing it out, I’ve seen numerous websites on sale that generate revenue through CPALead, the concept is very simple, your website members or visitors fill out a survey for either access to a premium area or to view certain content and you make money out of the survey, the payout depends on the survey and on the country your members come from.

The majority of the top paying offers are targeted for  the US market, but you can still find surveys for almost all countries so you can monetize your websites no matter where you traffic comes from, pay outs range from $0.25 to $30 in some cases!

My idea is to give our members on our games the opportunity to get premium memberships through means other than paying money out of their pocket, allot of members will certainly appreciate it since not all of them are able to pay real cash, of course what they get in return might not be as good as those who pay in real cash simply because some sruveys dont pay as much.

The part that i still need to figure out, still waiting on a reply from CPAlead on that is whether they have an API that we can use in order to credit members once they filled out the survey and to know the amount that each survey pays out in order to do a calculation on how much premium days the member gets since each survey varies allot in its payout, the good thing however is that cpalead automatically geo-targets the survey to whoever is viewing it, so we dont have to worry about building a system to do that, which would have been allot of work!

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.

Time for another speed linking post, I remembered to post this today after reading a bunch of good articles this week, hope you find them useful.

• What Is the Outlook for Paid Video Content? Emarketer
• Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality, Search Engine Land
• The Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year – 2009 Edition, Evancarmichael
• Why SEO is Easier than Social Media Marketing, Techipedia
• Facebook’s Latest Controversy – New Privacy Changes Violate Policy?, Rev2
• Linkable Asset Inventory: A Starting Point For New Link Building Campaigns, Search Engine Land

Enjoy!