This year I have been building small websites in subjects that are fun for me to work on.  I try to build websites that are useful to me so that I know others will use them as well.  It’s given me a chance to really work on my SEO skills, and also gives me what is now a very small extra income, but could one day start to add up.

This is in addition to my main website, Poker Underworld, which is celebrating 8 months since it’s launch.

Kill The Zombies - Online Zombie Games
Kill The Zombies! came about after playing The Last Stand one night, and then collecting links to over 50+ zombie games.  I quickly realized that I could build a really great online zombie game website pretty quickly, and a quick search for competition turned up nothing.  Within 3 days, I’d created a template for my zombie site and filled it with what is now over 100+ zombie games.    Kill The Zombies! has grown very quickly, now with over 1000 unique visitors every day!  Unfortunately many competing zombie sites have shown up in the 3 months since I launched, often stealing games and ideas from me, but it’s fun and challenging to continue to improve and stand out from the rest.  I have also built Top Zombie Sites to rank the best zombie sites.

Toronto Maple Leafs Info
As the season was approaching, especially during free agency, I found myself reading at least 5 or 6 different blogs and news sources for my Leafs news.  This lead me to build a site featuring syndicated news from all of the blogs I was reading, plus my own blog which I update with my own Leafs opinions.  I was also the first to create an iCal feed for the Leafs schedule, which you can add to your Google Calendar, iCal, or Outlook!  TML.info has grown pretty quickly in the past month, and I hope to really turn it into a great source of Leafs news, possibly adding pools to the site.

Stock Market Blogs Today
After building the Leafs news site, I decided to do the same for the many stock market blogs I was reading.   I had no idea what a great tool this would be for me because every day I get investment ideas from a very diverse selection of blogs, including bullish and bearish views on a large variety of sectors.  So far, there hasn’t been very much traffic to it - which is really a shame because it’s so handy and it can make you money.  I’ve also used Yahoo’s API to add quotes for the major indexes, and to allow each visitor to track their own 5 top stocks.  This has become my own way of checking my stock prices through the day, rather than having to type them into Yahoo Finance over and over.

Santa’s Arcade
Once I’d built Kill The Zombies!, I wanted to build more arcades since most of the work was already done.  Seeing that there aren’t too many sites for Christmas games, I decided to collect any games I could about Santa, snowmen, reindeer, elves and.. Yetis.  I think this site will be a lot of fun as Christmas draws nearer, and I really think it’s the best and easiest to use site for Christmas games.   I hope to add the ability to send games as e-Cards before November rolls around.

Redneck Jokes & Pictures
Redneck Jokes was a quick one to throw together, as a site to test my SEO skills and to try different ways to rank highly for the terms “redneck jokes” and “redneck pictures“.  Of all of the sites I’ve built this year, this is one I won’t be using myself very often.  I am also working on a Redneck Games site to go along with this one that’s got a really fun game where you stack deer on a… well… I’ll write about it when it’s done.

Poker Underworld
The first site I created this year was Poker Underworld, which is a free texas holdem poker game based on my friend at ProWagerSystems software.  The game centers around a social network which allows you to get to know your opponents at the poker table.  You can use these friends to share hand advice, and to add to your favorite competitors list so you can add comments about their playing and challenge them in the future.  The site is very intelligent, and uses sophisticated hand analysis to let you know what your playing habits are.  It ranks your best and worst hands, and ranks you against other players in the game.  Although I haven’t been able to improve Poker Underworld in many months, there are many new features in development which will really set it out as the best free poker game online.

Sexy Fucking Games
I was very tempted to leave this off the list (especially since I may know you) but it’s a great site and one of my more successful so far.  I wouldn’t say that I’m the type to create a collection of sex games, but once I had the gaming site template I couldn’t resist.  The site is a lot of fun and you should check it out — you can’t tell me you won’t enjoy it.  So far the earnings have been very low despite the nice traffic since adult ads are sold based on CPA and require very high volume to convert (especially when I’m giving away content for free!)

That’s it for now, although I have 3 other sites in various stages of development right now.   These new sites, like Poker Underworld, are actual services and not so much a collection of games or blogs like the sites I’ve made this summer, but with all I have learned about SEO and publishing ads, I’ve been much better prepared to launch new products in 2008.

Have fun checking out these links, and I’ll be back with more.