Month report: October 2019
I am so happy that I finally found the time to evaluate my October. I guess I will keep writing these reports to see myself backward in the future.
My October goal was publishing one post every week and I achieved that. I have tried to come up with four different topics and write about them. Here are the posts I published.
- Code Faster In Unity (5th October)
- Clean and Responsible Coding in C# with Unity: Properties II (12th October)
- Data Structures for Games: Bidirectional Dictionary for Unity in C# (19th October)
- How to Make a Modular UI in Unity (26th October)
These are almost 30 minutes of reading.
Total Page Views
The beginning of the month was better than the ending. Here is a graph that shows the page views of the blog.
It is not great but it is over a thousand now. The content here is for more advanced Unity developers, I haven’t created content for the entry-level game developers. So, the next month I will consider that to get more views.
The most-read posts in the blog during the month was;
- Avoiding Singletons in Unity (177 views)
- Dependency Injection for Unity: Zenject Framework (144 views)
There are quite old posts, and a couple of people referenced to them so their SEO is relatively better than the other posts.
The average time spent on page is also quite important and it is around 4 minutes. I will also try to have a medium like look and feel for the blog to see if I can improve this time.
Unity Asset Store Affiliate Review
The last month, I have tried Unity Asset Store Affiliate links to monetize my blog. I mean, it sounded like a good strategy since my readers are potential customers of the Asset Store. The main mechanism of this affiliate campaign is that whenever you click a link, there is a little cookie stored in your browser. If you make any purchase in the next 30 days of the period, the affiliate owner takes a share which is 5%.
During October, I sent 250 clicks to the Asset Store through my links. However, none of them made a purchase. I thought that there is something technically wrong on their side, and I have made a purchase myself, and I was able to see the commission. So, it seems that the system works somehow, but it is not convincing enough to continue. Therefore, I am going to remove all the links from the blog.
It is not worth it until it becomes something supportive. If I would see 3-5 conversion rate, that would keep me going but, unfortunately not.
Other Monetization Ideas
I don’t want to spread ads all around just to make a few bucks. However, I might try a less aggressive ad placement strategy. It will be more like an experiment to see if it is working somehow.
In case you have less disturbing ideas to monetize a technical blog, please send your comments to me.
Next Topics for November
- Zenject Tutorial: Inject Game Objects from the Hierarchy
- Game Design Patterns: Command Pattern
- An Overview of Unity for Beginner Level Developers
- Clean and Responsible Coding in C# with Unity: Methods I
My Current Projects
As some of you know, I am already working full-time, therefore, I don’t have much time for side projects. I am trying to keep up with this blog most of the time. However, that’s not all.
I am working on a casual game, but I don’t want to share any details this month since they are relatively easy to clone. However, in the next month’s report, I will try to share some screenshots.
I am also learning about procedural generation. It seems that it is worth to learn the approaches. I have started a small project about the procedural generation of monsters based on evolutionary models. So, there will be chromosomes, genes, evolution and neural networks. If that works, I will make use of the project. Maybe it will be a low poly game, or an asset, or maybe both. I will share more details as the project matures.
Life
During October, I traveled to Budapest and Berlin. Visiting my friends there was really nice.
I have played GTA V on PlayStation. Yeah, I haven’t played it till now, but I had some free time to kill. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to play more games than I used to have before.
I am currently reading The Stranger by Albert Camus. if you feel senseless times to times, you will find yourself in this book.
I have rewatched Kill Bill Vol I and II. I always enjoyed the revenge themed movies.
I have been binge-watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Glitch on Netflix. I loved the humor in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The Glitch has a nice topic and it doesn’t bore you except some episodes.