Previous: Part 1 | Part 2
Next: Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Ending

Useful Link: Download Hatoful Boyfriend here!

We last left off with our heroine looking forward to the last week or so of her first semester at St. Pigeonation’s.  Let’s see how these final days before Summer break play out!

Here’s a chance to score one more shot at the Doc before the semester’s over!

Well, at least he’s actually here instead of Yuuya. I wish he would be happy to see me. ;~; This Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy music isn’t helping us confirm his mental state at all…

Oh oh! A chance to redeem ourselves! Yes, Iwamine-sensei, I came all the way to the infirmary just to hear your –

…What. He sounds like who?

…Unsure if I should be flattered or frightened by that comment… Bani-chan was kicked out, but he doesn’t sound like he hates us any more.

Today is a Summer festival. Let’s check it out!

The wishes that you find on the tree are indicative of which birds you have the highest relationship levels with currently. Papyrus, Yuuya? Really? But even his ‘handwriting’ isn’t as bad as Nanaki’s… who seems to have confused his wish with some other scrap paper of his. Shuu’s message wins the whole day, though.

These are, believe it or not, Bunny’s choices for her own wish. Just what kind of festival is this, anyway?!

Back at school, Ryouta hooks us up with some juicy gossip. Wait… students turn up as WHAT?! Why does my hot doctor have to be so darn suspicious?? Well, let’s continue on our way to the infirmary.

Something’s going down…

What?? Yuuya is lying and trying to get me to cover for him! I care for the doctor more than I care for defending him, but on the other hand, I don’t want to see Yuuya turn up in the school’s lunch food or writing supplies…

Hahaha forget Yuuya, that liar. I want Iwamine-sensei to like me; that’s far more important! 8D

Yay! I made him happy! Unfortunately Yuuya is probably going to end up as quill pens. But the doctor likes me!

If only real-life school went by this quickly. Before we get too excited for Summer break, let’s just make sure my help won’t be needed at the infirmary.

…Bummer.

Sigh.  Maybe he doesn’t like me yet after all.  I wonder if I should ask about the rumors of missing students…?

Yes, it might be kind of cool if he were secretly murdering students, and even cooler if Bani-chan were made to disappear, too. Yes. This relationship is working out perfectly. Nothing to worry about at all.

And mysteriousness is sexy!  And not life-threatening at all!

Summer break is next! But does that mean we won’t see the doctor at all?? Wait and see…

Previous: Part 1 | Part 2
Next: Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Ending

Useful Link: Download Hatoful Boyfriend here!

Previous: Part 1
Next: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Ending

Useful Link: Download Hatoful Boyfriend here!

If you remember from last time, we left off about to select what our extracurricular activity was going to be!

We are doing this.  I’ve got bad vibes from the doctor, but he’s really cute, so what’s the worst that could possibly happen??

Yuuya what the heck.  Not only is “aphrodisiacs” spelled wrong, but you sound totally suspicious.

NEED YOU EVEN ASK?  Open drawers are an invitation.  Snoop, snoop, snoop!!!

OHGOD NINJA DOCTOR.  Thankfully he calmed down a bit when he learned I actually worked here…  Whew!  Off the hook for now, but why do I feel like that was such a close one…?

Okay Shuu some of the things you say are just scary.

By the way, Bani-chan lives hunter-gatherer-style in a cave.  Why are houses off-limits to humans?  I’m not sure if we’ll find out during this playthrough…

Field trip!  Let’s chat with our friend Ryouta.

What friends are for.  If your friends try to tell you otherwise, eat their lunches anyway.  It’s how you show them you care.

Another day, another sporting event I guess.

Sorry, I don’t do physical activity.  But maybe Bani-chan can hook up with the hot doctor in the first-aid tent!

…Or maybe Yuuya will be there instead.

Ah, see, Bani-chan and I are following the same train of thought after all.  Whatever is Dr. Iwamine up to, though?  Anyway, Bani-chan spent the Sports Festival patching up damaged doves with Yuuya.

Summer already? How time flies.

The first semester is getting wrapped up now – it won’t be long before Summer break!  How will Bani-chan fare before the semester ends, and how will she spend her Summer?  FIND OUT NEXT TIME…

Useful Link: Download Hatoful Boyfriend here!
Previous: Part 1
Next: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Ending

There is no easy way to describe this game.

Okay, so it’s about pigeons.  And it’s a dating game, of the otome variety, if you know the term.  In a high school setting.  Yes, it really is an actual game; someone thought of this.  And then made it.

And then it garnered enough attention on this side of the ocean to warrant a translation of the full version of the game in English.

It was released last night, and you can download it right here, a marvelously appropriate Valentine’s Day gift indeed.

What do you mean you don’t want to play the absurd dating game about schoolgoing pigeons??  OF COURSE YOU DO.

Okay, so let me level with you on some things about this game.  It isn’t some slapped-together April Fool’s joke.  There is a legitimate backstory behind the concept of the game’s premise, and it’s more intriguing than you think.  Furthermore, no matter which bird you decide to pursue romantically, you are guaranteed an entertaining and fleshed-out story.

So, let’s check out this game I’m playing, Hatoful Boyfriend.

I know what you’re thinking.  This looks ridiculous!  Okay, so it is ridiculous.  But it’s also really fun!  It’s crazy and fun!  Crazy-fun!  And I can promise you that before you’re halfway through your story, you will entirely forget that the characters are pigeons.  Really!  Okay.  I’m done trying to convince you of Hatoful Boyfriend’s legitimacy.  Let’s just play.

Bunny Bani.  That’s me.

Hmmm…

And then our friend, Ryouta Kawara, shows up:

Hey!  That’s not a bird, that’s a boy!  No, no, it’s just an image that’s simulated for you so you can attribute a human face to your birdie friend.  You’ll never see his cute Shotaro face again after this introduction.

The first term begins.  Bunny Bani goes about her first day of school, meeting all kinds of new birdie friends!

There’s Nanaki Kazuaki, our homeroom teacher.  Tends to doze off in mid-sentence.

The transfer student, Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane.  Bani-chan is optimistic, but he just sounds like a snob to me!

A trip to the library introduces us to this shy fellow, Nageki Fujishiro.

A commotion in the hallway just after that brings us face-to-face with Yuuya Sakazaki, the kind of birdie everybirdie should know.

Oh, dear.  Most players should want to avoid the intimidating doctor, Shuu Iwamine, after hearing Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy playing so ominously in the background of this introduction…

and then there’s Oko San.

That’s all of the birds that will be introduced for now.  If you happen to scope out the Demo Version of the game (along with the English Patch) because you’re not committed enough to drop ~$5 on the Full Version, these are all of the birds that you’ll see.  However, now that the full version is out, there is one… special… additional… character.

I’ll try to scope him out as best as I can, but the truth is I’ve already played through this once (last night, just after I finished downloading it), and went through the whole game without so much as a glimpse at the new guy!  Looks like you’ll just have to sit tight and read along with my adventures if you want to see if I can find him this time. :3

Now, before we end this introduction to our pigeony adventure, let’s see the first set of options we’ll get to choose from.  Let’s choose what Bunny Bani will spend most of her time doing after class!

Oh, oh??  What is this?  ‘Infirmary Staff’?  This is especially interesting, because remember that I said I already played through this once last night?  Well, that fourth option was not there that time!  There is an absurd amount of replay value packaged up inside Hatoful Boyfriend, not only due to the branches and branches of stories, but because of stuff like this – options that aren’t even available to you unless you’ve cleared the game a certain number of times.

And thus ends part one!  Which after-school task will Bani-chan choose??  Which bird will capture her romantic affections, and will she survive the ordeals ahead??  The implications are more grave than you even know…

One last time, here’s the link to download Hatoful Boyfriend for yourself.

Next: Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Ending

Hey everyone! 😀

I know I haven’t been blogging here as much as I keep saying I’d like to, but I have a reason! I have so many cool ideas planned for this site this year, and they’re all being worked on EVERY DAY! We’re still only just getting started in 2012 and I can’t wait to see what kinds of other developments occur through this year, besides the neat things I have planned~

Here’s something exciting: What with January ending and February beginning, payments and checks have all been sent out by all the online affiliate networks I’ve joined and made a secondary income out of. And while I first started getting tiny trickles of payments in November (I started affiliate marketing in October), this past January marks an important landmark: I made my first $100 entirely from commission-based revenue!!

Now, I read up a lot about affiliate marketing before and as I first started monetizing my Web site and blogs. And so many of them stated that your first goal to work toward is that first $100. That first $100 is your sign that you’ve done it – you’ve got a blog with traffic coming in to it, some regular readers, and now it’s just a matter of keeping it going with more products and promotions, and soon you’ll have another $100, then $500, and even $1000 is an eventual certainty as long as you keep at it – and those higher numbers are so much easier to attain now that that uphill climb towards your first $100 is reached.

If you’re a little confused and find yourself asking, “Wait, what’s affiliate marketing? What blogs are we talking about?” that’s okay! I’ll give you some quick background info. There are a toooooon of informative articles you can read about affiliate marketing itself so I won’t go hugely into it here, but basically affiliate marketing is advertising products and linking to them using a code that is unique to you. When someone else clicks that link and looks at that product, or any other products from that site you linked them to, there’s a cookie there that remembers that YOUR LINK is the one that led them there. If they purchase something, a percentage of that sale gets paid to you! You can basically think of affiliate marketing as getting paid by commission to advertise products. The two blogs I have monetized to specifically work as affiliate blogs are both on Tumblr – Kawaii Shopping and The Finer Fashion Shopper.

And here’s the very best part – my sales in January were so good, I actually reached WAY over $100! My total cumulative earnings from all of my affiliate programs across these few months actually totals to closer to $200! Remember how I mentioned I first started getting payments in November? My first paycheck (it was from my favorite affiliate program so far, LinkShare!) was for only $34. And I’d previously received a $50 payment for referring someone to use my Web hosting provider, Hostgator. I was already at $84! So close to $100 after only one month of affiliate marketing!

My sales seemed to decline in December, and I barely made any sales. I think I stayed teetering at that $80-90 range that month. But that was fine, as the holidays were very busy and I didn’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to my blogs. When January came around, I became aware of something I had seriously neglected to address – I hadn’t implemented any SEO techniques to my two Tumblr blogs! Was it even possible to optimize Tumblr blogs for search engines? All I had to do was Google “Tumblr SEO tips” and there were my answers! I’m thankful I’m already so familiar with HTML and a small bit of the SEO I’d worked on for my own personal site (the one you’re reading from right now!), because that knowledge made it easy to implement H1 headers and turn post tags into meta keywords, and those kinds of things.

Well, immediately after implementing those SEO techniques, I witnessed a significant spike in the traffic my blogs were getting, which in turn led to a DRASTIC increase in clicks through to all of the products I was promoting there. My sales through LinkShare jumped from $20 that month to nearly $40, and then finally reached $50 right before January ended. Holy cow! From that program alone, I’d MORE than reached my first $100 earned online!! 😯 And as if that weren’t enough, on the very last day of January, I received a surprise e-mail from Amazon Associates stating that my payment for the month had been processed. Since I haven’t promoted products from Amazon as much as I have from other sites, I’d nearly forgotten all about them! When I logged into my Amazon Associates panel, I was beyond ecstatic to find that I’d accumulated $55 in sales there – all from links I’d created back in November. The SEO techniques I’d only implemented in January had even brought traffic to some of my much older posts!

So those two payments from LinkShare and Amazon alone would have gotten me to my $100 goal, but don’t forget that I had nearly reached $100 beforehand! I absolutely owe this spike of success to search engine optimization. If this past month’s increase of traffic and sales are a reliable indicator, it isn’t unreasonable to anticipate making at least $100 a month from these blogs, regularly. And if traffic and sales continue to increase, well then… I am certainly incredibly hopeful for the future! And what’s even more – I also spent some time in January joining even more affiliate programs! I also have tricklings of earnings from Share-A-Sale and Google Affiliate Network, and I’m hopeful that those will blossom into larger earnings in the coming months, just like LinkShare and Amazon Associates did after only a few months. c:

I can’t complain at all about my experience with affiliate marketing and encourage others to use their blogs for the same. If you want to get started just like I did, join LinkShare and search through their categories of merchants to find some online retailers that fit your niche. Other programs to check out are Share-A-Sale, Amazon Associates, and Google Affiliate Network.

In the future I might post a bit about the techniques I use and precise strategies that I implement in each of my Tumblr blogs when I make posts about products. c:

Thanks for reading!