Running a gaming clan can get overwhelming for just about anyone. If you pile your clan responsibilities on top of school or work, sometimes it can get down right impossible. The key to dealing with this problem is making the most of your time. If you only have one hour a day to work on clan duties, make sure you work for that hour instead of becoming sidetracked with other things. Personally, I have a hard time staying on track, so there are a few things I like to do to keep myself headed in the right direction:

To-Do Lists. Write everything down. Have a plan before you go in. If you take care of all the thinking ahead of time, you can cut out the awkward “Ok….what now?” waiting periods in between different tasks. Make your to-do lists semi detailed, but don’t go overboard with it. Give yourself a basic outline of what you want to accomplish for that day.

Establish Priorities. Make sure whatever your working on is the absolute best thing you could be working on at the time. If what your doing at the time isn’t going to benefit you the most, change it up. Save the less important jobs for when you have a bit of free time.

Keep A Notebook (And up to date) You’d be surprised how much keeping a notebook can help. Just to have all of your thoughts there in front of you sometimes saves you alot of mental stress when you’re trrying to get things done. Write anything of any importance in the notebook.

Of course staying organized is really more of a personality trait than anything else, but if you’re trying to make strides in the right direction then there are always things you can do to help yourself out.

How to create revenue for your gaming clan

A Big problem alot of clans have (especially FPS clans who have to worry about server costs.) is coming up with enough money to support their clan. This can be a daunting task when you factor in all the probable costs of any serious clan. There’s web hosting fee’s, advertising, server fee’s, scripting fee’s, and any other web design fee’s a webmaster may come across that he himself can not deal with. Below are a few strategies that I personally have found effective.

Donations- If you are able to provide a fun, stable gaming enviorment for your members, there are usually at least 3-4 older members who don’t mind donating a small amount of money to help you out. Place a paypal button on your page with big, colored, boldened letters above it that say “DONATE.” Perhaps even ocaisionally make a forum post reminding everyone that donations do in fact go to the clan, and not into your pockets.

Make sure your clan members know what their donation is going towards. If they know their $15 are going toward website improvements or an expansion into a new game, they will probably be more likely to donate. I’ve spoken with many clan leaders that have paid for all of their clans fee’s with donations alone.

Adsense – Since Clans (usually) don’t draw huge amounts of unique visitors outside of the memberbase, Adsense usually doesn’t generate all that much money. However, it can’t hurt to have it. A few points about Adsense:

  • -Never ask your members to click on your adsense, this will cause you to be banned from their service.
  • -Always try to have your Adsense ad’s blend in with their sorroundings, because this generates more clicks.
  • Try to place Adsense on pages that contain lots of ‘keywords’ so adsense will pop up with relevant advertising links that will interest your readers.
  • Try to offer the general public a reason to visit your clan site. Maybe have it double as a game fan site? This will also attract new Clan Members.
  • http://www.adsense.com

    There are numerous other advertising agencies, but if for some reason Adsense is not suiting you (AKA you are banned from it :) ), then I would suggest using http://www.adbrite.com

    JohnnyLocke