David Parkinson - Internet Entrepreneur - My Journey

I have set myself some goals and i have to reach them by the July 1 2008. Since my brother has been doing some stuff on talk playstation its grown into something kinda big.

So the goals are:-

• To reach 150 RSS Subscribers (currently around the 80 mark)
• 20 of which must be subscribed via e-mail
• Last month the blog received 61,053 Visits. July 1 will see 70k

So there we are. How am i going to reach them targets? I will use social media sites and promote the blog using social media.

If i don’t reach my goals… well what can i say but try again the month after, it is afterall quite a hard task because the blog did so well last month and hasn’t performed as well this month and if i don’t set targets they won’t be met again.

Other than working hard at my job, i haven’t been up to much apart from playing Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Playstation 3 and watching the European Cup.

There has been a huge inactivity on this blog and thats due to time constraints. I said i would sit back and have a look at where all this time is going and re-adjust it so i can spend a bit of time on this blog.

I usually watch the Euro cup but not this time! Although i did watch it last night when Holland thrashed the world champions, Italy. Holland played a really good game and have a good chance of winning this competition if they play like they did last night.

Now onto the subject of England not being in it. Well yes it sucks because i obviously only watch it when my own country is playing. I think i’ll only be watching Euro when the big matches are on like when the knockout stages start otherwise it doesn’t interest me.

I think that one of the 4 teams will win…

1. Spain
2. Holland
3. Portugal
4. France

Thats my bet that. I really hope Holland win it actually, they played so well last night and deserve it.

The long awaited Playstation 3 exclusive stealth game Metal Gear Solid 4 is almost here! I cannot wait to get my hands on this game. This game is sure to be a total system seller, hell it even crashed the Amazon website when they started selling the bundle… MGS4+80GB PS3.

So i’ve completed Grand Theft Auto IV now, i wanted to before MGS4 came out because i’d probably not have gone back to GTA IV.

I have 3 game currently on pre-order and these are…

1. Metal Gear Solid 4 (released June 12)
2. Top Spin 3 (released June 20)
3. Battlefield: Bad Company (release June 27)

So thats 3 games, week after week from each other. I think when i’ve got the above games i won’t be buying a game for a good while.

I’m enjoying the PS3 and has some great games ahead that are exclusive to the console.

Anyway, online play in MGS4 will keep me occupied!

I mentioned a couple of days ago that i’ve been looking for a new design for talk playstation. Although the current design isn’t bad at all but i can’t keep it forever.

A friend of mine has designed me a mock up of what he think the blog should look like and this is what he came up with:

I must say it is a really nice, clean design and will most likely go with that. Other themes i’ve been looking at are:-

wp-magazine

A magazine style theme, this is just what i’m after, a news style theme and this does the job. With featured articles that flick through and a thumbnail system for the posts. It’s not free and will come at a price. I was very tempted to get this theme last week, but i saw the above design instead.

Revolution Magazine

Another magazine theme that looks really nice. The only thing is, is that i don’t think its suitable for the type of blog it is. I think this magazine theme is for a blog that concentrates on a number of subjects rather than one.

Mimbo Pro

Another magazine theme again. Same as Revolution magazine i don’t think it will fit the one subject. As you can see it has a featured section for a number of subjects.

I will have to have a really good think on which one to go for. I will of course let you know.

A few of you have e-mailed me telling me that i’m stupid for not putting adverts on talk playstation. I thought i would answer this in a blog post. It’s quite simple, i don’t want to. What i’m doing is building up a community and readership. Whats the point in pointing adverts on a blog that isn’t ‘very’ busy in traffic.

Sure 61,053 Visits in a month is good but not good enough. I would need triple that amount before i even consider putting adverts on.

What forms of adverts could i try?

Well i could try adsense to start off with to see how well that does but other than that i don’t think i would bother with banner adverts. Not yet anyway, i don’t think it will fit in with the design i have.

Anyway on talk playstation more than 500 posts have been posted and as of recently a lot more comments have been posted.

I’ve been looking at re-designing talk playstation and i will post what i’ve been looking at in a few days.

After much practice i’ve finally scored a goal from the half way line in Fifa 08 on the Playstation 3. I was so proud of the goal that i recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube.

How did i do it? Well what you do is as soon as you kick off start heading towards the opposition and hold the long pass button (on PS3 this is square) and it will do a massive lob. 9 times out of 50 you will not score but it can be done if timed correctly. I’ve known a few people that have done this including my work colleagues. Luckily i’ve never had this done against me online but people have attempted and the closest someones got is hitting the bar but it went over.

The idea of this is to post the blog stats at the beginning of every month to share some information with you and how well i’m doing. All these stats are in accordance to Google Analytics.

So without further ado here are the stats.

daparky.com

From 1st May 2008 until 31st May 2008:

Visitors

• 2,615 Visits (2,381 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 4,268 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 15

Bandwidth Transfered: 869.81 Meg

talkplaystation.com

Visitors

• 61,053 Visits (49,688 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 76,952 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 85

Bandwidth Transfered: 49.76 Gig

Total Bandwidth Transfered: 50.61 Gig

May was a strong month for talk playstation with it reaching new records and heights. I created a custom 404 page and have been looking at a few new templates for it too. Meanwhile daparky.com hasn’t performed as well as i thought - probably because of lack of motivation and May was probably the month with not as many posts.

Key Moments in May 2008

• I asked 6 bloggers a question with regards to advertising etc. Check it out here.
• I’m also enjoying Firefox, it is now my defauly browser. I love it.
• I started to create my own plugin that will allow videos to show in RSS.
• I’ve constantly applied update to talk playstation.
• Daparky.com achieved a page rank of 3

I plan on improving thing even more so check back next month for updated stats.

I was looking for a plugin that would manage galleries/images better and in a more organised way and i found the perfect plugin that does this. NextGEN Gallery is the Gallery Plugin for WordPress you only need. Its simply brilliant, probably the best plugin i’ve used so far.

I’m not using NextGEN Gallery on this blog i’m using it for talk playstation because a lot of screenshots get posted and needed a more organised way of displaying images/galleries. If you take a look at talk playstation you will noticed that i’ve added a new slideshow in the sidebar. This is another neat feature of this plugin because it will randomly choose an image from the image folder and display it.

This adds more interactivity into the blog and in my opinions looks a lot better now. Also, i can now attach galleries to post so if we mention a game we can simply attach a gallery and say “check out some screenshots for this game”.

If you post a lot of images on your blog i’d highly recommend this plugin.

No not on this blog! But on talk playstation. Why might i do this? Well for one it can be entertaining and the main thing is that it could draw some attention and gain more visitors/subscribers.

So what might i use as a prize? I was looking at my Playstation 3 games collection and thought to myself; which games do i not play anymore and won’t play again. I was going to list them on eBay but i had the perfect idea to give them away in a contest over at talk playstation. I asked my brother who also owns a Playstation 3 if he wanted any and he thought its a good idea to run a few contests to get rid of them in return for visitors and possible subscribers.

I sat down and thought about some possible contests i could run. Could it simple questions with an easy answers?

If i did it this way then i would get the user to sign up to my RSS feed via e-mail and then randomly select an e-mail address from the list and then announce the winner on the blog and ask them to contact me with their details etc.

Who knows what i’ll do but do check back to find out!

You know i did the custom 404 page for talk playstation yesterday? A user e-mailed me saying that the ’search did not find anything’ page wasn’t very good as it just displayed ‘Not Found’.

So what i simply did was put the content from the 404 page into the search page and modified it a little. I’ve also added in a random post section underneath the RSS subscribe information to make my page views go up a little. I think this is a nice feature because not every reader will have read talk playstation from the beginning and it might bring back posts that are worth reading.

Other than that visitors are still swinging in and i’m starting to see more traffic from search engines which is a good sign.

I’m still not up to scratch with design and such, just like any blogger, no blogger is 100% happy with their theme and i’m always finding ways to improve this. I’m still considering the Revolution Magazine Theme as a future upgrade.