How to Start a Gaming Blog and Make huge Money

With this article I want to walk you through the whole journey of how to make a successful video game blog. I’ll show you how we planned the site, structured the articles and made some decent money on the side. I want to promise you: It is much easier than it looks. So, how do you create a gaming blog?

If you have a passion for gaming and want to help other people enjoy the games they play, then you should definitely start an online business related to gaming.

I teach people to build websites about their own personal interests, and one of the topics I get asked about most often is video games. “Video Games” of course, covers a huge range of topics, but that’s the beauty of starting an online business in the video game industry – there’s something for everyone.

Making money online with video games isn’t easy – it can be quite competitive. However, there is a massive amount of growing global interest and if you can find a smaller submarket to focus on, the competition suddenly doesn’t become that big of a deal.

For example, if you try to make a “video game” website, there’s a really good chance that you’ll fail just because it’s much too big of a project to take on. However, if you target only competitive gamers playing Dota 2, now you have a much more specific audience, with set goals in mind that can help you take the necessary steps to profit.

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There are hundreds of possible niches within the gaming industry that you could potentially choose to start your gaming website about.

• gaming hardware for PCs
• gaming laptops
• virtual reality
• competitive gaming
• MMORPGs
• RPGs
• strategy game reviews
• horror game reviews
• family friendly games
• games for kids under age 3/5/10
• Dota 2
• mobile gaming
• indie games
• retro gaming
• retro console restoration
• arcade cabinets
• game design
• gaming secrets

How to Start a Gaming Blog (niche )

Gaming Blog Planning phase

I consider this one of the most important steps in creating a gaming blog. First we set up a Google Docs Sheet and gathered all our ideas in a structured manner. We quickly found out what we really wanted to do. I suggest you do the same and gather some ideas about:

• Which games do you want to blog about? (e.g.: competitive, casual, mobile, PC, PS4, Xbox etc.)
• What type of articles do you want to provide? What is the purpose of the site? (e.g.: news, guides, commentary, reviews, curation, etc. etc.)
• How do you want your site to look? Which hosting will you use?
• What is example content for you? Do you have any article, blog, or review ideas?
• How do you want to make money with your website?
• What is the name of the website?

Most people just throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. What we did was a little different. Try to rank and grade your answers to these questions. There is always options and by ranking them you might find the best one.

Gaming Blog Game Selection

I personally don’t have a particular bias towards any type of game but thinking about your target audience can help you make better decisions when starting a gaming blog. For us, competitive games were the main focus so we picked everything we liked. This includes Counter-Strike, Overwatch, Hearthstone and Dota 2.

Our target audience is mostly between 12 and 29 years old and male. Most of our users are PC desktop users. We wanted our site to be targeting this audience in design, layout, content and monetization options.

A website for a casual mobile game about a restaurant might have a completely different target audience so think about this while making your decisions about your first gaming blog. You may need to focus on your mobile website design or monetize with different ads or affiliate products.

Gaming Blog Articles

Since we did not want to provide regular news updates or gaming reviews we focused on providing quality content about competitive games. We are passionate about learning about new multiplayer games and we like to get good at these games quickly. This passion is what drove us to write quality guides and helpful information about these games.

Try to find something you love and it makes blogging a great hobby that can even get you paid. Let’s say you like to play all the latest and greatest of the Playstation 4. You might want to start a review gaming blog. Do you like to read reviews? Then try to imitate the writing style of your favorite reviewers. Try to research your subject and niche a little bit. Try to scout the competition, and learn from them.

There is lots of information out there that that can help you write better, too. My personal recommendation for this would be Ann Handley’s – Everybody writes. Her book is not only applicable to pretty much all types of writing but is a funny read as well.

After all this research you can now make a very important decision. What is the name of the website? Try to gather as many options as possible before deciding and chose the one that feels the best.

Gaming Blog Hosting

Now that you have a general idea about where you want your website to go and decided on a website name you can think of hosting options. For Max and I it was important that we commit to a ‘real’ website. We did not want a small blog on tumblr or blogspot. We wanted to take this seriously and try to channel our passion for games into making money. That’s why we chose a hosting option that costs money but provides us with a .com domain and a platform to host our website. The most important aspects for us were an easy installation of WordPress (our system to manage our blog – more on that later), a decent price and a money-back guarantee (let’s be honest – we did not know if we were still doing this after 30 days). The hosting partner that fits our needs perfectly is bluehost.

Bluehost is one of the largest hosting providers in the world and offers exactly what we needs. Especially the 24/7 support came in handy multiple times. Their prices start from $3,49 per month so are very affordable. Personally, I would even pay much more for their service. Eventual down times or issues with our hosting provider can cost us real money quick so a speedy customer service is important. If you are an advanced user and don’t need need a money-back guarantee, one-click WordPress installation or the 24 hour customer support, feel free to use other options as well. Most information in this article is still applicable to your gaming blog.

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How To Get People On Your Website

So after all this info about how there’s so many people into gaming and you can make money with video games as long as you have a website….how do you get people to find your website and buy stuff from you?

The secret is keyword research

Using a keywords tool software (i recomended you to use semrush), or even just using regular ol’ Google you can gain insight into what people are looking for online. You won’t see who is looking for it exactly, but you see if people are searching in high or low volume, and what the approximate level of competition is.

As website owners, we want to find phrases that have a high search volume with low competition. Not all phrases will meet these criteria, but they still might be good topics for your site. Once we find those search terms, we write articles or create videos about it. Next time someone types that keyword phrase into a search engine, our website might pop up!

How To Make Money In Gaming Online

There are tons of business models related to gaming, but there are three main ones that I have experience with that I can provide you with some insight for.

YouTube Advertising

The LetsPlay community on YouTube is gigantic, and still growing (Twitch is growing faster) You might think, “Well, the market’s saturated and who wants to watch MY channel when there are so many other good ones?”. But consider this: There are so many channels already because there’s a lot of interest and people are making money doing it. Competition is a good thing, because it means there incentive for the current players to keep producing content.

best youtube tool

There are many other factors that make LetsPlay channels alone a possible source of income (from in-video advertising). Channels rise and fall in popularity all the time. That means there’s room for new startups like you! Also, one viewer can subscribe to multiple channels, meaning they don’t have to choose between you and another person. They can watch both! In fact, LetsPlay creators can also be potential viewers for you, so it’s not always a “consumer/producer” relationship.

But that’s just the LetsPlay arena. There are many other things you can do on a YouTube channel about gaming to make money. You can do reviews, tutorials, or even create your own ‘gaming news’ channel.

And don’t be concerned if you don’t have all the right equipment right now. You can record your PC screen with downloadable software and get started right away. Your computer’s webcam can record you while you play as well. To record console games you may need some extra cables but there are lots of tutorials to be found online on how to set that up.

Create A Digital Info Product

Depending on which market you go for, creating a digital info product could be an option for you to make money from your gaming knowledge. Some examples of topics that could work would be vintage console repair, modern console repair (remember the red ring of death?), mame arcade cabinet construction, game mods, or game creation.

Even if there are free resources online, many of them are low quality or incomplete. They are also scattered around the web, and require a lot of research to find. Compiling your knowledge into an easily readable, concise, and user friendly format (written or video) is definitely something people would buy.

Finding people that want to buy your guide is as simple as creating a website to market your product, and using your blog and social media to attract gamers to your website. How to develop a marketing strategy is something you can learn about with online marketing courses.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is something you might not have heard about but it’s something I’m passionate about and a real opportunity for you to make money online in the gaming industry. The basic breakdown of how it works is that you create a website and write articles for the website. On your website you can feature sponsored products, do product reviews, and place advertising on your site to earn revenue.

The “affiliate” part is that companies will pay you to do this. They pay for each sale generated through your website. Stuff you can promote include gaming laptops, downloadable games, game accessories (mouse, keyboard, monitor, controller), PC hardware, or other swag like shirts and action figures.

Some promoting is done directy through the company's affiliate program, and some can be done through Amazon or other online stores. Signing up is free, and you can pretty much create your website about anything and design it how you want.

There are lots of other ways to make money in the gaming industry including competitive gaming, game development, reselling retro games on eBay, or even playing games with real money systems, but in this article I’m going to focus on how to reach an online audience.

5 Ways To Make Money From Your Website

Affiliate Promotions

This is what I’m most excited about because it’s what I know best. You might not be 100% familiar with how it works right now, but it’s pretty simple to understand. You are basically a freelancer advertiser. You help promote companies on your website, and are paid a commission for each sale you make.

The cool thing though is that you don’t technically ‘work” for them, so you can still write whatever you want. You could review games from Blizzard and say that you loved World of Warcraft, but at the same time say that Diablo wasn’t a very good game in your opinion. You can make money by linking to BOTH of these games.

You can also promote gear like gaming headsets, hardware mods, or in game purchases. Not all products you talk about will have affiliate links you can promote, but many will. It’s free to sign up with affiliate programs, and all you need is a website to get your links.

Sponsored Content

This is where a company pays you to write about their product. Sponsored content is a little more touchy because you need to have a disclosure, and most real gamers will not take your opinion very seriously if you are paid to write about things in a positive way. Some people are able to do it well and not offend their fans, while others bomb.

You can worry about this later though, because you’ll need a well-developed fan base to even be considered for sponsored content. However, when you do, this can pay big. I’d bet ten bucks that those headphones PewdiePie wears were given to him by the company that makes them.

Display Ads

This is by far the easiest to do because you don’t need to do any kind of promotions to make money. All you need is a website, and traffic to that website. In fact, if you are monetizing your YouTube channel, then you are using display ads!

Although Google Adsense isn’t the only company that does it, they are the biggest, most widely known, and the easiest to get accepted to. In fact, there’s really no requirement other than a website or a YouTube channel.

The downside is that they don’t pay very much, and it’s easy to get banned if you break the rules. If you decide to build a website about gaming and want to make money with Adsense the training I recommend will give you instructions on how to set up your account and what the rules are.

You can also place these same style ads on your website.

(If you don't see any ads in the picture, turn off your adblocker).  You can see here that the game review website I visited showed me two ads for Chevy trucks. I recently bought a new truck, and Google tracked my searches and is showing me ads that are relevant to me. If I click these ads, the website owner makes money.

Create A Brand And Products

I’m sure you’ve seen all the big YouTube gamers with their own t-shirts and branded gear. This is big money. You can start a Patreon account, and supplement your income with a Twitch account and Paypal donations.

Once you really get rolling, you can get paid to play games, or even appear at events. Even if you don’t go the YouTube route, you can do similar things with just a website.

Gaming gear is getting immensely popular as “nerd culture” grows. Imagine designing your own shirts, hoodies, and bags? Growing your ‘brand’ online and developing surrounding products will largely depend on what angle you take with your business, but as you gain more followers, subscribers, and website traffic, you'll start to see more opportunities open themselves up to you within the larger gaming industry.

source : onemorecupof-coffee.com, on-winning.com

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