Summer Events
Entry posted by Josh ·
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This blog is going to actually be about business rather than technology. Here's what's going to happen this summer:
First, we need to get this ATI driver bug fixed ASAP. Nothing else can happen until that gets fixed:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/tracker/issue-165-terrain-textures-bug-radeon-hd-5850
The official documentation is coming along well, and I am really pleased with how this has turned out. (Thanks, Aggror!)
An updated evaluation kit with some limited programming will be released. One of the biggest appeals of Leadwerks Engine 2 is the ease of C++ programming, and we need to demonstrate that better.
With the release of the evaluation kit, we're going to begin an affiliate program. My preference is to have a Facebook and Twitter share buttons in the header that copy the current URL, and adds your affiliate ID into the php arguments in the URL. Then you can just click that to share any page on the site, with your embedded affiliate ID. When a new user comes to the site from that link, your affiliate ID will be detected, and any sale they make will give you 15% of the sale price credit to use in the asset store. if you are a Leadwerks Merchant, you can also have the cash sent to your PayPal account.
The Asset Store will be "launched" at this point, meaning I'll put out a lot of news announcements and PR to make a big deal of it. This requires the front page be fixed, so you have the nice scrolling rows of products. I also have to set up a merchant account, which will lower the transaction costs by a lot. Right now, I am losing about $8 on each engine order through PayPal, and that needs to stop. I also need to formulate an agreement for Leadwerks Merchants, so that we can give more people access to sell their stuff in the Asset Store. The tax issues here are pretty serious, so I need formal paperwork to do this.
We're opening a new section of the site for videos. You can check out the beta here. I like searching for "Leadwerks" on YouTube and clicking around on videos. The idea here is that if someone is wasting time clicking around on Leadwerks videos, they might as well do it on our site. There's a lot of great videos out there that are easy to miss, so this will gather them in one spot. Best of all, it doesn't require any bandwidth from our server, as YouTube provides the data transfer, and even more importantly, users don't have to upload their videos to two different sites. To add a video, just enter the 11-character YouTube video ID, title, and description. If I have already added your video, and you would rather have it appear under your name, just add it to the database yourself, and I will delete my original entry.
My goal with the affiliate system and video gallery is to raise site traffic. Right now we have about 36,000 visits per month. I want to raise that to 100,000 visits per month. Our new dedicated server can definitely handle the load.
Finally, we're going to implement advertisements in the video gallery. I want it to be tasteful and relevant. I tried Google Adsense, but it displayed a lot of irrelevant ads. I tried "section targeting" and even set all information to be blocked except a few keywords I chose, but it made no difference. I inquired about AdBrite, and they seem to be the same sort of system of automatic analysis and placement of irrelevant ads; artificial stupidity, if you will. I know my users are interested in video games, 3D models, programming, computer hardware, and art programs. If a system won't let me choose what content is displayed, I won't use it. Therefore, I am going to attempt to find advertisers with relevant content that have affiliate systems. I'd prefer not to sell advertising space and manage accounts, at least at first.
So, the ultimate goal here is to raise traffic. More traffic = more LE2 license sales, more asset store sales, more advertising revenue, and more opportunities for you guys. There's potential with this we can only begin to imagine.
There is so much to do, I had to draw out a diagram showing the dependency of events, so I can cross them off as they are accomplished:
And last, I will leave you with this video, the band from which I am really starting to like, for some reason:
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