Kye's blog – Infohub101

I had to take down the forum. The forum I was using was not admin friendly, and would not let me cull the huge amount of spam that accumulated there. I feel very guilty for the two people who did make genuine posts. If you ever find yourselves back on this blog, make a comment and I will definitely get back to you!

I have learnt a few key things in running a blog with ads. I had wanted a site that I could put alot of my interests on. What I wanted to do is pretty unrealistic considering I cant design my own website, and a jack of no trades blog is a bad way to go around things. My RSI article gets the most hits. I could probably dedicate a whole site to RSI and gaming, and would actually have some success with it, since its all centered and together. The same with gaming. All it need is a good article once a month, a very good article and then some patience. Only recently I have been getting hits for my small ArmA 2 post (which I only got a week ago, amazing game and highly recommended!).

I have not had much interest in blogging or working on this site because of the necessity of good articles that had to cover so much in order to get the traffic to get the sought after clicks. If I had a gaming blog or a RSI blog, no matter how informal or unprofessional it would be, it would eventually have some form of decent traffic, a tiny community and a small extra revinue to fund the hosting.

Lastly, the ads. I cant for the life of me change them. They are very ugly, and more importently unrelated because of the broad nature of the blog. The RSI sometimes has an  investment ad. I also experimented with them before giving up, so they are oddly colored.

Anyway, summery of my failure;

• Have a specific subject to write about. It will keep you interested and give you much more content.
• Always update it, at least one good article a month.
• Be patient.
• Enjoy blogging. If you love to write about something, then you cant really fail. If I blogged about gaming, or even about one game, it would of been 10x more successful then this blog.

I think I will try and change this in the coming months. Even if I have a gaming blog and a RSI/gaming site, it would help so much more and keep me focused. I suggest anyone else trying to get into blogging for a tiny extra bit of money to do the same. If you have alot of interests, keep them in one site at a time.

Kye.

If anyone has ever played Baulders Gate 2: Shadow of Amn, then they will know how brilliant that game was. It was (and still is) the most in-depth RPG game ever created. Branching quests, interesting dialog and options to respond in ways that would change the course of the game from then on. You could even experiment on an idea that you might be able to join the vampires on the second chapter, and you almost can! The dialog involved around just that is incredible. Also, if you had a warrior, you could eventually own your own castle! I cant explain in so many words how cool this was, every so often you could return, and something would happen. You could end up having to decide the fate of farmers, murders, giving out rewards or punishments for various scenarios, and eventually have a big quest involving an siege. No game ever since has gone into that much depth. The vampires and the castle are just two of probably 100s of different things that you would shape yourself.

Now, Dragons Age. When i first heard of Dragons age, i was very excited. This was probably two years ago in a gaming magazine. When i heard it was the spiritual successor to Baulders Gate 2, i was thinking about everything great about the first game, and how new graphics and that could shape the older game into a new, exciting, vibrant and violent experience.

However…

Since the older games and there amazing depth has slowly disappeared, replaced by mainstream money- makers, not alot of the newer rpgs have been great. In the quest to deal with the mainstream, the niche of hardcore rpg fans have been sidelined. I think dragons age will be a good game, but not the game older fans will want. It will be like fallout 3 to the fallout franchise; Alot of fun, but not really fallout.

The past trailers for Dragons Age have shown that you will probably have two or three choices, and no more in whatever decision making dialog options you make. Maybe a bit of depth, but ultimately the same two or three outcomes. Secondly, the kind of depth you had in BG2, is kind of split between the different characters you pick from the start. This is bad because you can expect what to happen, or how npc’s will react, and will pick your character with that in your mind.

Anyway, that’s my rant over. I wanted to update my blog, and also see how this post will effect my traffic and adsense ads. If your a hardcore gamer and find this, feel free to post this  a link in your favourate forum, so you don’t have to type a wall of text.

Kye.

It’s been a good while since I have worked on this. After realising making money from the net is not as easy as some people suggest, it has deterred me from posting anything new. When i feel compelled to write something, I am reminded of my terrible domain name, and cant see why anyone would want to read anything on a website called infohub101. The name was great at the time, but it does not give the feeling i would want for a normal blog. I am not sure how I would start again, but i do not have the energy to begin from scratch.

Anyway, I wanted to put on here a trailer, IL 2@: Birds of prey. I enjoyed the first two games in the series, and although this game is much more arcade, I think it will be alot of fun. I don’t have the time that i used to have planning and running a mission that took one hour to fly there, fifteen minutes of action and then flying back, so this kind of pace in the new one should fit around my work, girlfriend and Eve (a full time mmo).

Another game I’m really looking forward to is Dragons Age. It is suppose to be the spiritual successor to Baulders Gate 2, but any real fan of that game will know it will not have the huge branching quests. I don’t blame bioware for making the game more focused. A bigger and better Baulders Gate would only cater for a few hardcore rpg fans. Even so, it looks brilliant. There hasn’t been many good rpg’s out on the PC for a while, and this one will probably be rpg of 2009.

This is just a trailer. I would recommend that you should youtube it and watch some of the official game play videos. Enjoy!

Kai.

Since learning the hard way about niches, I have my first thought out plan for a website which I will try and subsidise my income on. It requires html and css knowledge, something I do not have. I have a very good book on the subject, but self motivation while using the same computer that has your favourite mmo is not a great idea.

Anyway, apart from the big website, I am also making up a format for game sites. My eve online blog is not successful, but it will be. If i have any other game I spend alot of time on, it is easy to add content on it and have some form of success by traffic and affiliates. Other subjects are not viable, like hardware or game reviews. There are to many hardware sites as it is, and game reviews takes (me) days to write.

Once I get the site up, I will let people know how it is getting on and if I am making anything with it.

Kye.

I started this site to try and make somthing out of writing articles and guides. This was after making my Eve online blog. I neglected the Eve blog to work on infohub101. After some consideration, infohub101 is becoming my personal blog with everything that has an interest to me. When i checked back on the eve blog after a few months, it is doing much more successful even with half the content. Its all in the keywords! One mmo game will of course be very niche, so even very common game phrases im getting hits.

Its a shame about the name of this site. It is very generic, but if I have the money I will change it to something a bit more personal, and stop putting people off its formal tone.

Kye.

I have installed a new forum which can be found on the forum page. Anything is welcome (that is in reason!) so if your just passing by, let me know what you think of this site and how your doing! I always wanted a forum, but what is the point if no-one will visit it? I think to make this site more friendly, I will remove the big ad block on the right and replace it with something else. I have no idea what I can put there, but hopefully something that will add some flavour to the site.

I watched a one hour and thirty minutes long video about making money online using systems and delegating work. I realised this site will not succeed on its own. Infohub101 is slowly becoming my personal blog where alot of things that have no place anywhere else get posted. I am definitely not making a gaming site, so anything related to that is posted on this blog, same with any article I decide to dish up. Its a shame the domain name is very impersonal but I still like it.

The video can be found here. If you are at all interested in making money online then this is definitely a good video to watch.

Kye.

When I changed my SEO page to a post, it ended up being put on many automated feed sites. This gave me a large increase of traffic (large compared to the normal passers by). I’m still not sure if I like the idea of my post on many of these sites, but probably more worrying is that the post is not ready to be viewed like that. If I knew the post was going to get some attention, I would of fleshed it out more and made it more worthwhile, but I guess its not a problem.

It at least proves to me I can post and not worry about page SEO.

Kye.

I have posted three times today, and to view them properly people will have to use the category sidebar. If I can make my pages link to categories then we will have some functionality for this site. Till then, it is still a frustrating issue trying to have the pages work how I want to, let alone the SEO problems it causes.

Kye.

SEO and traffic starter page

(I recently changed the page title to making money page seo. It is very ugly, but wise advice dictates that you will not make money if you try and tip toe around whatever you are trying to make money from. I will keep the page title like this for a few months and see what happens).

I am new to blogging and SEO (search engine optimizations) and i am currently learning how to get my site noticed. This is not a guide, but something i would of liked myself if i stumbled across it on the net. Ultimately, the benefit is making money from adsense from gaining traffic. I blog for fun, but obviously it does cost money to run and host this site. It is also out of interest to learn SEO. I find that how google works is fascinating, and gaining traffic from great (or not) content and SEO is actually fun.

What this page is about

At the moment, i am having a hard time learning everything there is to do with SEO, networking, rss feeds, and all the various ways of getting page ranking in google. I will post here every question i have, and when i find the solution i will post the answer. This method of doing things is how i work best, and what do i have to lose sharing it with everyone else? If anyone else has a question they want to add, leave a comment. I find that the answers that are given on another site are harder to digest then they should be, and you might get yourself stuck trying to find a simple solution to the answer!

Questions

Q1) How do rss feeds work in relation to networking my site?

Q2) How do sites like Digg, Technorati and the rest effect my blog and my traffic and how do i use them effectively?

Q3) Are the amount of pages more important then the amount of posts? I cant set hierarchies for pages so this is very relevant to me, since alot of sites suggest more pages are better.

Q4) What are backlinks, and what are the sites that have a backlink page? Once I learn more about pages like Griz’s niche resources I will let you know what I know.

Q5) How can I use authoritative sites to my advantage? (I will try something with my new smoking article and see if what i have planned works).

Q6) What is an anchored link and why are they so important?

A6) An anchored link is when a link from another site is linking to yours with the relevant keywords in that link. For example, if i linked my smoking article saying “you can find a good smoking article here“, that is not what you are after. I don’t understand the workings of google, but from what i have learnt so far, is that google will look at the words used to link and use that, so saying “here” for a smoking article does not tell google much. If I linked the smoking article saying “check out the article smoking and its wider effects“, that is an anchored link, and they are the best kind (Please correct me if im wrong, but I am fairly sure that is correct).

Interesting infomation

Anything I find that makes me go “aaaaah! so thats how it works!” will go here.

1 ) After a little bit of researching and posting on a few forums, I had a nice reply by Terri Wells at www.seochat.com. I thought I would find Terri’s site on her profile on the SEO forums. Instead I found an article written by Terri that made me realise that I can successfully network and market each article I make simply by writing it for authoritative sites relevant to the subject. It sounds simple, and well, it is. What it means though is I have a way of going after a niche and not having to worry about the rest of my content on my site. I will test this with my smoking and religious article, and update here if I am successful or not.

2) When content isn’t king -  An extremely good article by Terri Wells. I stumbled on this by accident (read above) and after reading through it twice I think its the most useful article I have read so far in regards to networking my site.

3) I recently bought Ben Normans Getting Noticed on Google. If you are completely new to SEO, then I really recommend this book. It covers all the basics, from keywords, page optimizations, page ranking, and everything else to do with trying to get into the top 10 for your niche.

Websites of interest

rss-feeds-submission.com – I recently found this site, but have not submitted my RSS as of yet. I am not sure how RSS works, so until I do, I wont be submitting my feed to this site.

www.dmoz.org – I think this is one of the most important sites to submit your site to. From what I have read, once your in dmoz you have a very good chance gaining more traffic because of how it uses a lot of search engines to find its results. There are other more technical benefits but I am not qualified to mention them. All you have to know is that dmoz.org is the first site you should submit to.

Yahoo website submitting page – It is very simple to submit your site to yahoo. Another good way (so ive heard) is to answer questions on answers.yahoo.com. I have not tried this yet, but if it works by letting you use your link as a reference, then you can target your audience directly.

Software

wordpress.org – The blogging software i currently use. It has an extremely powerful plugin search and installation tab, and is the main reason I would recommend wordpress over anything else. For example, a very popular plugin is all in one seo. Type in SEO in the plugin search, and select install on the seo plugin, and there you go! as simple and as easy as that. If you install something that messes up your site, simply deactivate and its sorted.

www.webceo.com – A brilliant piece of free software. It helps you optimize your site, gives you very detailed reports on your keywords and how to use them properly in your pages. This is really an essential piece of software if you want to rank as high as you can.

I tried the ArmA 2 demo yesterday. It is getting good reviews and should be the same kind of experience but better from ArmA 1. Maybe its my computer, but my biggest complaint is the haze. Its like your playing someone who is shortsighted. The voice acting is pretty bad as well, which does not help with the mouth animation when someone is talking. It looks terrible.

The haze issue for me makes it unplayable, but im 99% sure its my end, and the voice and mouth animations are really nothing once you get stuck in a firefight. I will probably buy the game because of the reviews. ArmA 1 is a brilliant game with many memorable moments so im looking foward to the second once I fix the haze. The head bobbing is slightly disorientating but feels very authentic, I can imagine the game gets pretty intense.

In case you never heard of ArmA 1, here is the official trailer.

Kye.