David Parkinson - Internet Entrepreneur - My Journey

The car i have (saxo vtr 1.6) is on its way out. Over the past few months i’ve been taking it to the garage and spending quite a lot of money on it when it could go towards a new car.

I’ve been looking at a 2.0l Ford Fiesta ST that does 0-60 in 6.9 seconds. Now i’m not really into speed and that but i love the ST’s interior. My friend has a white ST and he took me out in it, its a nice car, has the power under your foot when you need it. I mean its good to give your car a good whelly every now and then.

I just want a super reliable car and someone told me to get a Ford, so here i am looking at the Fiesta ST as a possible buy.

Fiesta ST outside:

Fiesta ST inside:

I asked ProBlogger, John Chow, DailyBlogTips, Carey, Smemon and Shoemoney all the same question. As you know my Playstation Blog gets quite a lot of visits and i wondered if i should have put adverts on it. My question was:

my friends are saying i’m shooting myself in the foot by not running adsense or some form of adverts. I just reply with “i’m concentrating on expanding my readership and getting my name out there before i start putting adverts on”

Do you think i’m doing the right thing or have i really shot myself in the foot? Whats your say on this?

And here are the responses:

ProBlogger

“I personally put ads on my blog from day 1 so that I establish the expectation with readers that I monetize the site and don’t have to change the rules later on. However others do as you do successfully.

this post might help.”

DailyBlogTips

“I think you are doing right. Running ads now would give you pizza money, and it could slow down your growth rate.

Focus on building something big and good for readers first, then once you ve done that you think about how you can make money from it.”

John Chow

“One of the neat thing about the adsense and other networks is the set it and forget it ad serving they provide. Before the ad networks, you would have to sell your own ads and that meant less time to produce content. Now you still have time for content and let them handle the ads.

I don’t see anything wrong with adding some related advertising on the blog. For example, TTZMedia.com offers real time banners that can show prices for Playstation and Playstation games. Readers may see that more of a service than an ad.”

Smemon

“Yeah it’s always a catch 22 situation… ads can drive away potential subscribers but at the same time without revenue, you can’t be expected to keep a site afloat.

It’s always best to run a site at a loss and claim moral high ground rather than slap ads all over it claiming they’ll pay for the server. Loyal subscribers and readers are essential as these are the guys who will be promoting your site, commenting on it, linking to it etc… at some stage. But that’s my own opinion.

Having said that, many people expect ads on a site, so i reckon you could get away with one or two ads without pissing people off.

I think you could have two ad slots on that site, one skyscraper/square in the sidebar and one banner after the first post. If it were me, i would NOT place an ad before the first post, especially when the site is only starting out. That’s the first thing people will see and it’s a big turn off.

But seen as you’re traffic is booming you should definitely introduce some sort of advertising even if it just to have the site ‘break even’… server costs, domain, time spent on it etc… you could bank that much and then create a prize fund out of the remainder - that way you’re giving back to the community and taking the limelight off yourself”

Carey

Well, Carey works in the same building as me so i walked to his office to ask him the question face to face. He basically told me that running affiliates would work well. For example if i was talking about a named game i could have a link to amazon to buy this game. He also showed me some nice affiliate management websites which i will look into.

Shoemoney

No response yet.

Overall thank you for all replying to me and helping me out. It’s nice to get help from the big boys out there. I will certainly go over the answers in great detail and see which one will work for me the most.

After playing Grand Theft Auto IV since it’s release a week or two ago i’m alreaady looking into the future. I pre-ordered Metal Gear Solid 4 a while back (check out some MGS4 screenshots) and it is released on the 6th of June.

I’ve pre-ordered another game, it’s a sport game, a sport i don’t particular like but i know i’ll enjoy the game. That game is called Top Spin 3. It cost £29.99 from Gameplay.co.uk, you can’t go wrong with it being that price. Take a look at some Top Spin 3 screenshots and gameplay video, the online side of things sound really fun. You can have doubles, double up with your friend against 2 other random people from around the world does it for me.

So whats after them 2 games? Battlefield Bad Company looks good, Haze is not a bad game. I guess i will continue to play GTA IV and hopefully i will complete it, i tend to not finish games and leave them.

My work colleagues are trying to pursuade me to get an Xbox 360 but they don’t offer the games i want and most of the games come out on the PC (i have a gaming quality PC) for example Gears of War, Halo 3 will make its way etc etc. So technically i’ve got an Xbox 360.

I used Internet Explorer as my main and only internet browser but as of recently it has started going real slow and i mean real slow. It would take ages loading up, a short delay moving from one site to another, i was just sick of it so i had to find an alternative.

Firefox was the answer. I downloaded and installed Firefox for the first time and i can honestly say it’s better than I.E simply because it’s faster and you can add plugins.

The Firefox plugins i’ve currently installed is; page rank checker, SEO, download embedded flash movies and Google keyword rank checker.

None of these are possible in I.E and i wonder if I.E will ever have plugins as good as Firefox’s.

I guess i’ve gotten a little used to Firefox and i’ll probably leave I.E alone now until I.E 8 is officially out.

My hosting package restarts on the 1st of every month, it’s the 12th today and so far talkplaystation has eaten up a whopping 25gigs! I find that eating up 25gigs in 12 days is a bit heavy loaded and glad that my server can handle all this and much more! 25gigs, so thats around 2gigs a day

I mentioned earlier that my hosting company upgraded my server to a new, faster one. It works like a real treat! So far this month talkplaystation has had 26147 unique visitors and my server suffered no downtime what so ever.

I’ve also spoken to some of my friends about this and they think i should start putting adverts on such as adsense but i turned around and said something like i’m trying to build a readership and get a constant flow of visitors. I won’t be looking at adverts for a very long time yet.

I contacted some big name blogs such as Problogger and John Chow with their opinions and they replied with some useful advice, i will let you know about that shortly.

So far so good!

Well i knew it was coming. Manchester United are Premier League Champions 2008 since United beat Wigan 2-0 with Ronaldo being one of the goal scorers and is in fact the top goal scorer in the premier league.

I also made a mistake because i thought the games were yesterday and not today! Sorry about that, i should have checked the fixtures.

Hooray to all the Manchester United fans out there!

p.s. check out the Ronaldo freekick entry i posted a few weeks ago.

I only found at this morning that my videos over at talkplaystation weren’t showing in my RSS reader. I added talkplaystation to my RSS reader because one of my subscribers notified me that the videos i were posting weren’t showing in his reader.

So for most of the day i’ve been looking for a plugin that enables videos to be shown in RSS (please note that they show when you look at the feed in a browser but not in a reader). I struggled to find one so i thought feck it i’ll make one myself.

I got the YouTube videos to display properly and i’m working on getting Gametrailers.com displaying properly because i post quite a lot of videos on talkplaystation, i think i’m getting somewhere with this, you never know i might even release it as a plugin!

Add your blog to an RSS reader and see if it shows videos you’ve posted. I use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs.

I’ve applied another update to my Playstation blog. This time i’ve written a better ‘about us’ page so visitors know what we do, why we do it and the team, although it’s a one man team, who knows someone might want to write for us in the future.

• Implement the top bar
• Make subscribe to RSS more visible rather than e-mail 
• Add in a top games section in the tabber
• Add in an exclusive ps3 games section in the tabber
• Write a better more detailed about page
• Run some contests

The about us page is not huge it’s something i want to add to overtime, i want to spend more time adding content and building readership. As of today the subscriber count is 64 - not bad for a blog that’s been online for around 2 or 3 months. I guess the update i did where i made the subscribe to talkplaystation more visible and made the RSS stand out better worked like a treat.

There are a lot of visits still coming in and need to keep on the ball to carry this on.

With regards to the other updates i have in the pipeline, the tabber upate especially, i’m not sure whether to go forwards with that, it would be good to list all the PS3’s exclusive games and a top games section. I will work something out.

I thought about running a contest, i have a few PS3 games i never play so i might run a contest to get rid of them.

Stay tuned!

Well its that time again, the end of season for footballers and fans. Hasn’t it gone quick this season? Tomorrow is the last day for the Premier League, although it isn’t over yet, a winner won’t be decided until tomorrow.

My prediction is that Manchester United will beat Wigan and Chelsea will beat Bolton which means they will be on level points, however Manchester United have a far superior goal difference! United have +56 while Chelsea have +39.

Anyway, anything can happen in Football, United might win and Chelsea might loose… or it could be the other way round. Ultimately i want Man Utd to retain the Premiership.

Here are my top 10 first person shooters.

1. Half-Life
2. Half-Life 2
3. Counter-Strike
4. Call of Duty 4
5. Battlefield 2
6. Doom 3
7. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
8. Far Cry
9. Resistance Fall of Man
10. FEAR

Looks like its Valve’s Half Life series are my favourite. half-Life has the most amazing story in a first person shooter along with Half-Life 2, i could still go back and play them games over.

Counter-Strike, i used to play that 24/7 non stop, it was amazing but a bit dated now, haven’t played it for years.

Call of Duty 4 is the newest first person shooter and i play it on the Playstation 3. Everything about COD4 is so right, the graphics, the feel and gameplay. This could have been top if the story mode was a bit longer, however it would be top if i were judging this from a multiplayer point of view.

Battlefield 2, again a multiplayer only game, i used to play this a lot. I think BF2 took over Counter-Strike when it came out.

Doom 3. I remember when i thought the graphics were simply the best. The first hour of Doom 3 is breathtaking.

The very first Rainbow Six game was very good, the first game i played that featured co-op with the AI. Planning your mission before it starts was good and executing it was even better.

Far Cry was a good game, played and completed this. Far Cry got the wow factor because of it’s huge draw distance.

The first game i got for the Playstation 3, Resistance Fall of Man. I loved playing through the story mode with one of my buddies on co-op. Can’t wait for the second one.

FEAR was spooky, very spooky. What i liked about this game is the graphics and slow-motion feature. i’m looking forwards to the second one (renamed to Project Origin). While playing this game your mostly in dark places and you always think something is gonna pop out.

So there you have it, my personal top 10 first person shooters.