After having such a good interview with Andy, Owner of Av Arcade, We now have a great interview from Brad, Owner of Arcade Trade Script - Enjoy the interview.
Are you able to give us a short insight into your background?
Sure, I don’t see why not. I started my first website when I was 17 and a senior in high school. It started off as a website to simply show to colleges and later evolved into an arcade. From there I began to teach myself PERL/CGI and PHP to help make my site easier to manage. I no longer dabble in PERL/CGI as PHP is a far more lucrative language. Now I have 5 years of HTML/CSS, 4 years of PHP/MySQL, and 3 years of Javascript/Ajax under my belt.
Currently I am still a student trying to broaden my web and computer knowledge. I am now certified in Website Development as well as Website Support and Maintenance and will soon have 2 more certifications.
What do you do in your spare time?
I have been getting back into Tennis recently. It’s a great sport. I also play a lot of Billiards, Ping Pong, and I bowl a lot. I go to the gym a few times per week too. I’m a pretty average 22 year old when there is no work to be done.
How did the idea of Arcade Trade Script come to you?
I got the idea for traffic trading originally from a client that had me build him a trading system for phpAS v3 about 2 year ago. There was no script for sale at the time that had trading abilities built in and I was getting tired of constantly purchasing new licenses of phpAS, so I figured I would save money making my own arcade system. It was not originally planned to be sold, but while making it people were asking where to get something like what I was building. The market was there with very limited competition, so as soon as ATS was finished I put up the store and began promoting it.
What was your biggest challenge getting Arcade Trade Script to where it is now?
Probably getting the word out. The more people that know, the more that buy, and then the more people telling me their ideas for the future and the more people helping each other out.
Do you own any other script/sites
Yes. I have several. Most sites are arcades. The only arcade not using ATS is Woochoochinchilla.com . That was my first site as mentioned earlier. I also have WordScatter.com which is a new spin on the game Boggle, which effectively turns it into it’s won game.
I have several scripts that I have not been working on for a while, but plan to begin again and release for sale. One of which is being used on some peoples sites and is called “MyEasyAds” and is a on site script to manage and sell ads yourself. This will be my next script to release I am sure.
In the history of ATS which date stands out the most for you?
This is a tough one. It is probably a tie between the first day of the store launching or the day I realized the the plug helper file was taking off.
The first day because on that day it sold a few licenses and completely surprised me. That was very exciting.
The day I realized the helper file took off was really nice too. I had gotten the idea from someone a good while before, but I didn’t think many non ATS sites or big sites would integrate it. I remember going though my trades and auto gathering plugs from them all when I realized I auto gathered successfully from a very large site, that I had never even contacted about integrating it. I even went to their site to make sure I was not seeing things, but the file was there and in working order.
How do you relax at the end of the day?
Well, it depends on how much work there is to do. At the end of some days I get back on my computer and work through the night. Mostly though, I just sit back and watch tv/movie or go out with some friends.
How do you think Google, and the way it indexes site affect the way Arcades operate?
I don’t think it really affects the operation of an arcade, but it can really affect an arcades income, volume of trades (for trading sites), page views per visit. In my opinion the only affect it really has is traffic and quality of traffic.
With the creation of so many different arcades, where do you think the industry will be in 5 years time?
There have been far too many arcades for years now. It is already getting very hard to make a new site take off without a substantial marketing budget. SEO will get even harder and people to pay less for ads on arcades. Most likely more extravagant social arcades will come in and those along with the current leaders will take a good peace of the market. However, the number of people playing online games is increasing every year, so when that happens there will still be plenty of surfers looking for a simple play to play games. This is a niche that will never die out.
What are your top 5 SEO tips for arcade beginners?
First off, never underestimate a little SEO and don’t get your hopes up either. SEO takes a very long time, and if you become impatient you may ruin all your hard work. SEO is always worth it though.
Tips:
1. Always give your games and categories unique descriptions. If you use stock or steal them then you just lost a large percentage of possible free traffic.
2. Do not stuff keywords. By this I mean don’t over use the same work/term and never, ever, ever put text somewhere a user can’t see it unless looking at the source. Google will not count that, and may penalize or ban you.
3. Don’t buy too many links too fast. Let your new site grown on it’s own for a few months and then begin buying links, slowly.
4. Read Googles guidelines to be sure you are not going against them.
5. It’s true that the first paragraph on a page is often the most important, but don’t go over board putting a huge paragraph at the top of your pages or adding a bunch of
< h1 >tags per page. This will not help your SEO much, and will surely drive visitors away. The best thing to do is build your site for your users, not for Google. Then SEO will come from that.
Why does your script stand out from the rest?
Traffic trading of course. ATS also has several other features to make the admins life easier. Such as being able to use up to 3 game icons per game. You can update a game/icon file via upload from the admin panel to avoid FTP. When you delete a game all files are removed from your server. When adding a custom page you can use a file from your server (.html, .php, etc) as that page instead of just coding plain text or HTML into a text box.
It is SEO friendly. You can change the page title of any page set and the meta tags via the admin.
It is easy to template. All templates are standard HTML and PHP files. You can make a theme that looks completely different and even have different features and let your users decide which one they want to use on their computer. If you are making a new theme you can test it live on your site while the rest of the world uses the other theme you have enabled.
ATS wasn’t all about traffic trading. I made it for myself at first, so I needed to add things that others didn’t have that I needed or would like for myself.
Are we going to see any major updates in the coming months?
I am a bit behind on v1.2. There are a lot of things that need to be worked out and still to be added. RSS feeds will be in it as well as some other good features. As for major updates, I am not sure what most people would consider major. It’s likely that at least somethings in v1.2 will be considered as such.
For the Online Gaming industry what do you believe is the greatest challenge going forward?
Coming out with newer and better ideas. Somewhere down the line arcades will need to come up with ideas out side of surfing for and playing games to beat your friends/scores. With the market so saturated now, I am surprised at how little this is happening.
Who is your direct rival in the Arcade Script world
I don’t really have any rivals to be honest. There are some scripts that probably sell more than ATS now like: phpAS, GSS, ArcademPro, but really none of those come with traffic trading which is the main selling point for ATS.
With ATS are you satisfied with where the script is currently?
Yes and no. I like where it is at this time, but I am nowhere near done with it. I have long lists of plans, features, and I know there is too much I have not thought of to be happy with the the current state for long. That’s how I do things. I get it to where I like it, and then I get new ideas and have to change it some more.
What do you believe are the key points to run a successful arcade?
Always check your stats and communicate with partners. Add something that no other or few others have done. Sites with gimmicks can do very well. Make the site easy to use and easy to manage for both you and your users. Don’t over do ads. SEO is not a chore, it’s a side affect of a good site, but there are some things you can do to help it along. Add new games at least 1-2 times per week and make sure to add the newly released ‘hot’ games.
What is the hardest challenge to you, as a developer to keep ATS running?
Being able to sit for hours straight and type until my fingers hurt. It’s not as easy as it looks to sit still for hours. Also the organization of files. I have so many test files around my computers, its hard to keep track and some times I have to code an entire feature.
What, in your view, is key to retaining gamers on an arcade site?
The same keys to running a successful game site as listed above. If your not keeping your users, then you won’t be very successful in the long run.
With the need for competition between gamers become more fierce how do you anticipate changes within ATS to accommodate?
I don’t talk about v2.0 much any more, but that is where I plan to accommodate. v2.0 is and has been planned to turn ATS from ‘user catapult’ to a thriving community arcade script. It will be based all around user features and community and that will be integrated with the trade system also. The hope is to turn ATS into a script that has the option of traffic trading, not just the script to get if you only want to trade.
Thanks Brad for taking time out to answer our questions!
