Monetisation on Blogger and how I will make this work

Blogger is a great tool to write with, and an even greater one to monetise using Adsense ads displaying in your sidebar and inbetween your posts. In the past I have made around £170 using ads over various blogs, but that's a small amount compared to the power blogs out there right now ie. The Verge and Techcrunch.

I don't want to use Adsense this time around though. £170 over about ten different blogs was not profitable. Hundreds of posts meant I was making around 8p per 400 word article - and from thousands of total pageviews that is less than a penny per view. On an effort:reward scale, it was not remotely in my favour. 

This time around I plan on using affiliate programs such as Amazon Affiliates and GameFanShop to try to earn a commission through sales. The links that I provide for you give you no extra cost on the products you go to buy, but directly support me whenever you make a purchase by giving me a percentage based commission on those sales. In fact, I can offer an extra 5% off of all sales in GameFanShop using the special coupon: 

DayallnashSpecial

 What I think is cool about using affiliate programs is that it allows readers who really appreciate my work to support me directly whilst incurring no unneeded cost to themselves. If a reader needs to buy something on Amazon and they know of my affiliate setup on my blog, they only need to navigate to this page and click a simple link to be taken to Amazon to purchase their product at no extra cost - directly supporting my writing in the process. What this program also offers me is the ability to offer a discount on video games using the coupon above, and the knowledge that the money I am earning is not coming from mindless click-drones which crawl the web, but from readers who are actively supporting me in my writing - a boost which I sorely need sometimes when I am feeling particularly unmotivated.

To sign up for a GameFanShop affiliate account, visit this page: http://www.gamefanshop.com/partner-Dayallnash/page/partner/

My GameFanShop is at: http://www.gamefanshop.com/partner-Dayallnash/

To sign up to Amazon affiliates, go here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

To find other affiliate programs, try searching 'Affiliate programs' in a Google search.

Google Adsense is built into the Blogger platform.

SimCity - or should I say 'PuzzleTown'?

Sims protest for better pathfinding and more intelligence

This week, the flop of a game, SimCity, was delivered to my door after I ordered it on Friday 8th March - days before the dumb AI controversy came to light.

In some ways, I regret my decision to buy SimCity: I thought it was going to be a simulation, I feel cheated, lied to by not only EA (where most of the blame seems to lay) but by good-guy-developers, Maxis. Because of my late order, I managed to avoid the massive server problems throughout SimCity's launch, though my friends and I still needed to relog several times before being able to join the same region. However, the emergence of this new problem of terrible AI really bugs me when I play the game alone.