The Zyngo King is my title as owner of the group Elegance Zyngo Hall. It’s not far from the truth. In less than 1 months time I have turned a small unused plot of land into a business that I project to make $6000usd after 1 year after all overhead and operating costs. On top of this I have only played Second Life for 38 days. I know it sounds as if I am tooting my own horn a little bit but can you really blame me? I have always considered myself a little above average when it comes to intelligence but I have never thought that I could succeed in such a fiercely competitive market.
Classified Ads have been a tool for getting new customers that has yet to catch my eye. I used classifieds for 1 week and spent a total of L$5003 to get a decent spot on the Special Attractions listings. I didn’t get too many click throughs but I have a feeling that the audience was extremely targeted to those who actually play zyngo. In the next few weeks as I build my money up to a respectable amount, I am going to attempt to purchase a top listed classified. This will cost me L$25,000-30,000 depending on the current highest paid classified on the list. I have a feeling that my business will double if I do this. I am going to try this for several consecutive weeks to test the effectiveness of gaining paying customers.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Advertising in SL
Well its been over 15 days since the grand opening of Elegance Zyngo Hall and I have been learning alot as far as how to advertise my business. My methods seem to be working, my traffic ranking has increased to over 17,000 in this short time. A word to the squeemish, business in SL is very cutthroat, do not start a business and hope for it to succeed quickly without expecting to use what others may consider less than moral practices. When starting business with an already established product such as zyngo it can be very difficult to earn a profit. The only way to get a customer base is to basically steal customers from others. This train of thought will basically lead you to inovative ways of advertising that will inevitably make you lots of money.
The Direct Steal
Your first option for advertising is to actually goto a competitors busisness and actually ask their customers to come to your place. This is the equivalent of walking into Walmart and asking people to shop at Target while your there. You can probably get away with it for awhile but eventually your going to ask the wrong person and you will be banned from the land. I have had this happen to me this is a very unpleasant experience. I would not recommend using this method as it is the most immoral of all advertising practices and it really doesnt get you many customers. If you do decide to use this method actually talk to the people on a level of friendship prior to plugging your business and always be polite. Personally ive stopped doing this, I just dont like to do it.
The Advertising Board
You can get alot of customers from advertising with other businesses. Alot of businesses make money by offering advertising space on their land. I would suggest only using advertising boards that are on businesses that are similar to yours. Try to avoid advertising in camping areas that have enormous amounts of traffic, the advertising boards are ussually way overpriced and nobody clicks on them. I would probably estimate that 25% of my advertising budget is used in this way, I am too new to SL to tell you how much it effects my business but when I log on I can see how many people clicked on my ads and I can tell you it is probably worth it.
The Linden Way: Posting Classifieds
Posting a classified ad is probably one of the best things you can do to advertise your business in SL. Not only does it allow people who look at the classifieds to see your business but it also shows an advertismenet of your business whenever someone does a related search. My suggestion to how to choose the cost of your advertisement would be to always make sure that you are on the first page before you have to scroll and at least 4 up from that bottom spot. People hate turning the page and they also hate scrolling you definately dont want someone else outpricing you off that first page. I would also suggest NOT using any special characters and only capitalizing the first letter of each word. Everyone capitalizes their classified ads and to tell you the truth the ones that jump out at me are the ones that are diffrent not bigger.
Camping and Picks Camping
I hate Linden Labs for basically making this a requirement for a successful business. Your traffic rating number is not the amount of people who have visited your parcel. It is a calculation that involves the amount of time that people spend on your land and the amount of people who add your land to thier picks. The best way to increase this ranking and your exposure to others is to pay people to sit on your land and freeload. This causes alot of lag and costs alot of money. I would suggest L$2/ 15min for chair camping and L$25-L$50 for picks camping. I know it sucks but it absolutely has to be done if you want your ratings to increase. I have 16 chairs that pay L$2/15min and they are occupied 24hrs a day, for those that are not mathmatically inclined that is 92,160/month to maintain a halfway decent traffic rating to appear towards the top of the search results. Trust me though the boost in income offsets this cost.
Advertising With Groups
This is another practice that alot of other businesses will despise you for, but if done correctly you can do it without detection and bring in alot of new target customers. What I do is I join the groups of all of the other zyngo halls that are in SL, I click on the group info tab and it gives me a list of all of the members that are online in that group. I then click on each of their names and send them a landmark of my group through their profile. I get alot of people who decline the landmark but I also get a ton of people who show up and spend their hard earned money with me. I occasionally get a nasty message inreturn about spammng others I ussually just ignore it. If they knew how much I was making by spamming they would be doing it themselves.
Personally having used the methods above I woul have to say that running a business in SL is a full time job. If you cut corners and get lazy your traffic ranking will diminish and so will your income. Everything ive mentioned has worked well for me so far but keep in mind that I have only been doing business in SL for 15 days.
The Direct Steal
Your first option for advertising is to actually goto a competitors busisness and actually ask their customers to come to your place. This is the equivalent of walking into Walmart and asking people to shop at Target while your there. You can probably get away with it for awhile but eventually your going to ask the wrong person and you will be banned from the land. I have had this happen to me this is a very unpleasant experience. I would not recommend using this method as it is the most immoral of all advertising practices and it really doesnt get you many customers. If you do decide to use this method actually talk to the people on a level of friendship prior to plugging your business and always be polite. Personally ive stopped doing this, I just dont like to do it.
The Advertising Board
You can get alot of customers from advertising with other businesses. Alot of businesses make money by offering advertising space on their land. I would suggest only using advertising boards that are on businesses that are similar to yours. Try to avoid advertising in camping areas that have enormous amounts of traffic, the advertising boards are ussually way overpriced and nobody clicks on them. I would probably estimate that 25% of my advertising budget is used in this way, I am too new to SL to tell you how much it effects my business but when I log on I can see how many people clicked on my ads and I can tell you it is probably worth it.
The Linden Way: Posting Classifieds
Posting a classified ad is probably one of the best things you can do to advertise your business in SL. Not only does it allow people who look at the classifieds to see your business but it also shows an advertismenet of your business whenever someone does a related search. My suggestion to how to choose the cost of your advertisement would be to always make sure that you are on the first page before you have to scroll and at least 4 up from that bottom spot. People hate turning the page and they also hate scrolling you definately dont want someone else outpricing you off that first page. I would also suggest NOT using any special characters and only capitalizing the first letter of each word. Everyone capitalizes their classified ads and to tell you the truth the ones that jump out at me are the ones that are diffrent not bigger.
Camping and Picks Camping
I hate Linden Labs for basically making this a requirement for a successful business. Your traffic rating number is not the amount of people who have visited your parcel. It is a calculation that involves the amount of time that people spend on your land and the amount of people who add your land to thier picks. The best way to increase this ranking and your exposure to others is to pay people to sit on your land and freeload. This causes alot of lag and costs alot of money. I would suggest L$2/ 15min for chair camping and L$25-L$50 for picks camping. I know it sucks but it absolutely has to be done if you want your ratings to increase. I have 16 chairs that pay L$2/15min and they are occupied 24hrs a day, for those that are not mathmatically inclined that is 92,160/month to maintain a halfway decent traffic rating to appear towards the top of the search results. Trust me though the boost in income offsets this cost.
Advertising With Groups
This is another practice that alot of other businesses will despise you for, but if done correctly you can do it without detection and bring in alot of new target customers. What I do is I join the groups of all of the other zyngo halls that are in SL, I click on the group info tab and it gives me a list of all of the members that are online in that group. I then click on each of their names and send them a landmark of my group through their profile. I get alot of people who decline the landmark but I also get a ton of people who show up and spend their hard earned money with me. I occasionally get a nasty message inreturn about spammng others I ussually just ignore it. If they knew how much I was making by spamming they would be doing it themselves.
Personally having used the methods above I woul have to say that running a business in SL is a full time job. If you cut corners and get lazy your traffic ranking will diminish and so will your income. Everything ive mentioned has worked well for me so far but keep in mind that I have only been doing business in SL for 15 days.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Mo.. land Mo.. money
Well the past few days have been eventfull. I purchased the adjoining plot to my zyngo hall and built a nice mall that has retail spaces for rent. I now have about 8200sq meters of land in SL. I hope to get permission from Anshe Chung the second life millionaire to join the two parcels so I can share the traffic from my zyngo hall with the mall, and then my business will soar. My zyngo hall has a traffic ranking of over 7500 at the moment and you might think that its mainly due to the fact that I have a crap load of camping chairs on the property... well it is lol but the simple truth of the matter is that with good advertising I have profited over L$15,000 in just over a week of first buying the land.
I shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever meeting my tier this month and I am well on my way to paying off those zyngo machines I bought. I am thinking that I will have enough to purchase my own sim within 3 months, at that point I plan to open a mega zyngo/gaming complex. If I play my cards right I will be there soon enough. I will need to make $500/month at the very least just to purchase the land and about 20 more zyngo machines. I would also like to buy some deal or no deal machines. As long as I keep L$50,000 on my person I should be able to pay people out if they win.
This type of business is very easy to run, with a few promotional offers and decent payouts on your machines I think anyone with $250 USD can get a business like this started and have it succeed. Do not get me wrong, I have been playing for 4-10 hours a day doing promotions. Its hard work and I will have to say that it is pretty ruthless. Most people are nice but others despise you for stealing their customers. Lets just say Ive been banned from a few places.
I shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever meeting my tier this month and I am well on my way to paying off those zyngo machines I bought. I am thinking that I will have enough to purchase my own sim within 3 months, at that point I plan to open a mega zyngo/gaming complex. If I play my cards right I will be there soon enough. I will need to make $500/month at the very least just to purchase the land and about 20 more zyngo machines. I would also like to buy some deal or no deal machines. As long as I keep L$50,000 on my person I should be able to pay people out if they win.
This type of business is very easy to run, with a few promotional offers and decent payouts on your machines I think anyone with $250 USD can get a business like this started and have it succeed. Do not get me wrong, I have been playing for 4-10 hours a day doing promotions. Its hard work and I will have to say that it is pretty ruthless. Most people are nice but others despise you for stealing their customers. Lets just say Ive been banned from a few places.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Day #3 I Dub Thee "Elegance Zyngo Hall"
Well I named my Zyngo joint "Elegance Zyngo Hall" becouse it looks so perty. I also added 10 new machines that allow bigger spenders To have fun. My dedicated campers are still there and my traffic rating has jumped from 56 to over 2500 over night. Im not sure how that works though, I think its kind of like unique page views on a website, 1 unique person perday adds to it. One of my invited campers actually played a machine of mine and won L$ 150 from it on the first try. Im happy for her but its bad for business, I suppose Zyngo halls make their money over time though and not so much on the short run. I took a nice picture and added some text to it so I can put it up on advertising boards throughout SL. I hope this brings me alot of traffic and spenders.
Day #2 Advertising Camping Chairs R' Us
Well I spent this day doing alot of person on person advertising. I went to alot of diffrent very popular places and sent instant messages to people and started up conversations with them. I would the proceed to ask them to come check out my new land and give me their feedback as to what they thought about it, abd what I could do to make it better. I got about 10 people to come to my zyngo hall this way. I then thought, what can I do to make this better, so that the people who come might decide to stay a bit longer. So I decided to add camping chairs to pay potential traffic L$ 2 / 15min of just sitting there. I really dont like the idea of just giving away free lindens but I suppose with the way the search feature works, this should generate enough traffic to get actual paying customers to my business. I now have freeloaders who sit on my land overnight and earn money and give me that traffic. Still nobody playing my games, hope that changes soon.
About The Blog
Well i've gone and done it, i've forsaken all other games and have joined Second Life. Ive been playing SL for a couple of weeks now and I will have to say I enjoy it, my new identity is Markus Lerner. It started out kind of slow for the first few days but Im a very quick learner. Over the course of those two weeks I zoomed throughout the world and collected as many freebies as I could, camped overnight, completed a bunch of surveys, and last but not least I discovered the games within the games namely Zyngo. I played alot of Zyngo and I had alot of fun I got my account up to L$ 15,000. Since I had so much free money I decided to play the high stakes, what can I say im a gambler at heart. The game in question was a L$ 9999 buying with a L$ 45,000 payout, and what do you know I won. I then decided that I should use the money wisely so I decided to buy some land. I visited SL current resident game made millionaire at http://www.anshechung.com/ and bought a 4096m plot of land for L$ 19,000. I purchased a nice prefab building that used way too many prims as well as 10 Zyngo machines and I was in business. This blog is going to run you through the paces of how my business is doing and to chronical my adventures in the world of Second Life.
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