You may have heard about the Appvent Calendar by Blacksmith Games, creators of Floop and Plushed. From that idea emerged the popular Free App A Day website.
I thought, maybe I can take this idea and transform it into something slightly different: the Cocos2D Linkvent Calendar 2010. The idea being that I publish a blog post every day in December 2010 - you know, the month that ends after 24 days in that culminating event that will crash the App Store and end humanity’s existence. Or so I’ve heard. Each blog post will link to your website, blog post, tutorial, product, open source project or whatever else that might be of interest specifically to Cocos2D for iPhone developers, as long as it is “your thing”.
As my blog is closing in on 5,000 visits a week and my Twitter account is followed by over 1,400 hummingbirds and more and more of my book readers will come here and check out the site, I think that would be a nice gift to anyone who is interested in receiving some traffic from me. What you do to deserve a link is up to you. This is your chance to make your blog better known, or even kickstart it. The better and more relevant the content is to Cocos2D developers, the better your chances are that some of this traffic will stick, in form of return visits.
What you can do
Just to give you a few ideas:
- write a postmortem of your game, and your game will surely get a few extra sales as well
- open source your previous game’s source code, and in turn announce your new project
- lower the price of your commercial product on that day
- receive more attention for your technical essay about some aspect(s) of Cocos2D
- write an awesome tutorial, for example about integrating UIKit controls in a Cocos2D project
The only thing that’s important is that the article, website, product, game, etc. is somehow relevant and of interest to Cocos2D developers. So if you “only” have a game made with Cocos2D, you should spice that up by, for example, talking about your development experience or explaining how you solved some tricky aspects of the game’s source code, including examples.
Accepting Offers Now!
I’m accepting offers now and until all 24 slots are filled, while holding a few reserve slots just in case. Please send all link requests by email to linkvent (at) learn-cocos2d.com - you don’t want to spoil the fun by posting it as a comment!
Also, you can reserve a slot by letting me know what you have in mind and are going to do, without actually having to have something to link to right now. You should be able to prepare and publish your content by early to mid December though.
I probably can’t answer all request, but if I do include yours then you’ll get a notice when I’ll publish it. Keep in mind that I will publish posts on midnight Central European Time (CET) (UTC+1), so you may have to factor in time zone differences.
Note: this is all about helping individual developers and products receive the attention they deserve while giving Cocos2D developers some useful information to digest. For that reason, I won’t link to posts on forums, wikis or other aggregating sites, to Apps on iTunes or to a code repository with just some files in it. There ought to be something to read, a little guidance if you will, and it should come from you, and it should be connected to you by putting that up on your blog or website. You can then of course link from your post to wherever you like.
Over 9,000 visits in the past month with 40% new visits. 40% of that traffic is driven by google, close to 30% is direct traffic (which I believe includes Twitter) while cocos2d-iphone.org sends less than 10% of the total traffic. My own and recently neglected blog (last post May 23rd) gaminghorror.net still sending about 5%.
I am having a hard time making anything out of it actually, I have been running only one other notable website before and the focus and traffic stats were wildly different. If anyone would like to share and compare numbers I’d be happy to do so. Especially I’m interested if the ratio google vs direct traffic vs cocos2d-iphone.org is comparable to your numbers, or possibly totally different. I also don’t know what numbers can be considered good, ok or bad numbers, especially in context of cocos2d related websites.
The short little peak on July 10th was when I sent out the Newsletter announcing the closed sales period of the Starterkit, the plateau on July 19th was coming from the public announcement of the Starterkit. It’s notable that both resulted in the same number of visits but the Newsletter spike was very short-lived since most people are reading their emails within 24 hours. A funny self-made statistic: I’m able to convert approximately 0,0034% of website visitors to Starterkit customers. How is that for a conversion rate?
I did notice two things, which both surprised myself. One is how cocos2d-iphone.org accounts for less than 10% of the total traffic. The only time I saw a real spike in traffic from cocos2d-iphone.org was with the blog post announcing the Learn cocos2d website. That’s when the website was all fresh and new, and everyone went there at once to check it out. Interestingly, that wasn’t a spike followed by a severe drop-off by several hundred %, instead it created just over twice as many visits as the website gets on average anyway. The other thing I’m stunned to see is how the total number of visits curve over the whole time is astoundingly flat, especially for a website which is less than 3 months old:
Double-Rainbow all the way! But what does it mean?
I have no idea, mostly because I have nothing to compare it to. Maybe you have some thoughts or website statistics you’d like to share?
Here are the full learn-cocos2d Google Analytics results from the last 30 days as PDF:
Analytics_www.learn-cocos2d.com_20100625-20100725_(DashboardReport)
I hope you’ll find that interesting. I know, it’s data alright … boooooring. 😀
