Am I happy with that? Of course I am! That’s around £1800. What will I do with the money? Well what I might do is put it into any future projects I might work on, this sale has made me realise what’s to stop from me trying different niches, getting them good page ranks, high in google, 28k backlinks and then selling them off?

All in all I think the sale of Talk Playstation was fair and I’m very happy with the result.

I’ve had some private offers of $3000 and currently negotiating an offer of $3800. To be honest, I’m not really that fussed on how much the website goes for, I just want it out of my hair.

So far more than 600 people have viewed the auction and 28 people are keeping an eye on it.

I’ll keep you updated.

It’s gaining quite alot of interest, I’ve had a few private offers, one being $3,000 (around £2k?) but I think i’m going to let the auction run. I’ve also been looking at past sites sold on a similar scale to Talk Playstation and they have gone for $4k.

The auction is currently sitting at $600 and I only put the listing on last night, it runs out next Monday/Tuesday night, we’ll see where we are at then.

I’m quite happy with what I’ve achieved and learnt from running the site, the stats are excellent. Here’s some of the highlights:-

• Page Rank 4
• 28k backlinks
• 66.72% of the 45k monthly visits come from Google
• Had a steady income via Adsense

Anyway, we’ll see where we are at next week. I did mention just before Xmas that Talk Playstation is worth around $3.5 to $9.5k.

I’ve been looking at a number of ‘we give an estimate on your site’ websites and a few have come back with some legit looking results and others have come back with some unrealistic results. I got an estimate of around $800,000 once!

Anyway, the three sites I’ve properly looked at are:-

• mywebsiteworth.com
• peekstats.com
• yourwebsitevalue.com

MyWebsiteWorth gave $4,078, Peekstats gave $9,536.36 and YourWebsiteValue gave $3,587. I’m pretty impressed with these results but what is it really worth? No one knows unless I put it up for sale which I’m not prepared to do.

Here are some stats that these evluations go off…

• Alexa Traffic Rank: 245,218
• Compete Rank: 362,353
• QuantCast Rank: 564,615
• Indexed Pages: 6,359
• Backlinks: 32,410

I’ve been look at websites that have been sold for those estimated values above and they have pretty much the same stats. I’ll say it again, it’s not going up for sale. I just found it interesting to know. Try your website.

I use Google Analytics to track my web stats as i find it most reliable and best of all FREE! So, the below stats are from March 08 until December 31st 08.

Visits

• 691,878 Visits
• 1,002,373 Pageviews
• 1.45 Pages/Visit
• 515,945 Absolute Unique Visitors

Browsers and Screen config

• Firefox 312,944 (45.23%)
• Internet Explorer 270,309 (39.07%)

Looks like Firefox is gaining or if not already overtaken Internet Explorer in the browser market share. Here’s an interesting one:-

In third place was the Sony Playstation 3, maybe because it’s a Playstation website? It even beat Apple’s Safari. (Playstation 3 40,081 (5.79%))

• 1024×768 174,817 (25.27%)
• 1280×1024 161,160 (23.29%)
• 1280×800 119,074 (17.21%)

Operating System

• Windows 591,923 (85.55%)
• Macintosh 45,935 (6.64%)
• Playstation 3 40,081 (5.79%)

Countries

• United States 288,173
• United Kingdom 108,060
• Canada 49,060

Top Traffic Sources

• n4g.com (referral) 200,777 (29.02%)
• google (organic) 195,018 (28.19%)
• (direct) ((none)) 126,267 (18.25%)

I’m rather happy with the above stats, i’m hoping the year 2009 will take things to the next level. I’m currently looking at a site re-design as i think it needs one.

Talk Playstation has gone a long way in such a short time, the site currently has around 5 authors working on it, they work brilliantly hard to keep the site up to date.

Anyway, lets wait and see what happens.

I was looking at a few themes, free ones of course, i like them but i feel if i ever need a re-design it will have to be custom made and built to my requirements. I have a few plans for the blog including new features and such. Traffic is still on the up and so is the subscriber count.

I think the next update is to display the feedburner widget where it displays how many subscribers you currently have.

Anyway, its late here, i’m going to bed.

So what were the goals?

For talk playstation they were:-

• 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

First of all lets talk about the subscribers.

The goal was to reach 150 subscribers and i reached it on July 1 2008 – the day the goal was meant to be met. As you can see from the chart above, its up and down everyday but overall the subscriber count is going up.

The next goal i set was to get 20 subscribers subscribed via email. I can tell you that today 28 people are subscribed, the number was 24 on July 1.

Now here’s the big jump. I wanted to see 70k unique visitors. I saw 84,376 unique visitors, a massive 14k above my target.

I hope to raise this even more this month and running a competition might do the trick.

First thing i did was implement the top bar with the ‘recent posts’, ‘popular post’ and ‘recent comments’ areas.

The second update i applied was ‘make subscribe to RSS more visible rather than e-mail’. In this update i put in a ‘subscribe to talk playstation’ section in the sidebar to make it more visible to users and easier to access.

The third update was to write a better ‘about me’ page because it was very basic and still is but its better than it was.

The fourth update was to make the 404 pages more ‘informative’ because they were pretty basic and just said ‘couldnt find this’. Now it displays the top 15 posts, theres a search facility and other information packed in.

The more recent updates are the gallery section and poll. I mentioned that the gallery plugin i found is the best plugin i used because it organises all your pictures etc. This plugin is called ‘Next Gen Gallery‘. I’ve also added a poll in the side bar that i plan to change every weekend to keep users coming back and entertained.

Special thanks goes to my brother who keeps putting a lot of work into Talk Playstation… so thanks bro!

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.

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.

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!

• 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!

Dear David Parkinson,

Grand Theft Auto IV is nearly here!

Thank you for your order ********** for Grand Theft Auto IV. The highly anticipated GTA IV game is due to be with you on Tuesday 29th April. To make sure that we get this title to everyone who ordered it for release day we have had to start our picking and packing process earlier than we would for our normal pre-orders. As a result, we may look to authorise and charge your credit/debit card from tomorrow.
Kind Regards

Customer Service Team
Gameplay.co.uk

Well well, that means i’ve secure my copy because GTA IV is almost guaranteed to sell out day 1. GTA IV is expected to make around $400 million in it’s first week! thats crazy money!

Take a look at some screenshots HERE and HERE.

The stats for daparky.com are:

• 120 posts altogether
• 2,548 Visits (from 18th March to 17th April)
• 4,259 Page Views (from 18th March to 17th April)

The stats for talkplaystation.com are:

• 119 posts altogether
• 11,531 Visits (from 26th March to 17th April)
• 16,469 Page Views (from 26th March to 17th April)

This clearly shows that a Niche blog is far better than a blog about anything. Thats not to say my blog is about ANYTHING, it’s about me, what ever is on my mind and my journey.

When i’ve sorted out talkplaystation i’m going to do some advertisement to try and expand my readership. i’m more than happy with the way things are going with talkplaystation.