How To Run A Great Gaming Website
Gaming is a large and constantly growing niche, with a massive and very passionate audience. It’s a great space to operate in whether you are a blogger or a business entity.
What started as a blog or gaming community may very well evolve into a limited company that could be on track to becoming a star gaming website if you run it well.
Without much further ado, we’ll go into the exhaustive list of maintain a kickass website. For more gaming themes and other related topics click the above link!
Start by covering big games to gain easy traffic
It’s really important if you want search engine traffic that you write reviews on (or otherwise cover) the big games up front. Sure, the big blogs in the niche will cover them, and they’ll probably get first position in the search results.
But often, you can get hits from angles they didn’t cover, like “How to get a Lamborghini in GTA5”. This way, you can get a specific audience to have a look at your articles which is a great way to build a loyal fanbase.
Make videos for your website to attract viewers
It’s no surprise that top video game blog IGN Entertainment has produced thousands of videos: it works! Video gamers want to see how the game plays, and without actually playing it, a video is the closest they’ll get to the experience. Your best bet is to have a look around for a high-quality capture to stream, and save footage from the XBOX, Playstation, Wii and so on.
Trends do change with gaming websites, but the current and most effective formula is to upload a video to YouTube, produce a short post blog with extra images, share it on social media, and find another game to repeat the process with.
Look at what your competitors are doing
It is a huge point among companies to research about what their competitors are doing. You usually end up in a particular market because you know it well. Your competitors are usually where you want to be because they’ve got their ideas down to perfection. If there is something that they are missing, take advantage, which points to the point above.
Look at a full range of competitors and take their best bits, analyse where their traffic is coming from and why and use this info on your own website. Another thing to think of is “think global”, if you target a specific country you are restricting your readership although this might be beneficial in the long run.
Think further afield and let your users interact.
If you have plenty of readers visiting the site, let them do a review for you. They’ll more than likely jump at the chance.
User interactivity has also been the number 1 factor in driving websites to the top, with publishing platforms such as BuzzFeed and Medium being the primary examples.
You should think hard about your design of interaction though as articles from the public on a gaming website can quickly expand in to something you cannot control, leading to a notorious spam off clickbait articles and spammy content.
Add gaming news, daily
Gaming sites are used to over 10+ posts daily, ranging from reviews to blogs to articles of other sorts. However, don’t get random, get consistent. Readers come back looking for new things to read. This doesn’t have to be a full gaming review, it could be also purely news on gaming related topics.
The best content gives the user a sense of how to apply the information. It doesn’t degrade users by telling them what to do, but rather respects them and provides them with assurance that they know best how to use the material. When you write your blog post, give users tips on applying what you are offering them. Many times, just writing well about a topic will spark some ideas for readers.
Create Original Content
Original content on your site goes a long way with Google and your search ranking. Copying other people’s content will result in a punishment from Google, which can defeat the whole purpose of your marketing your website
Remember when you used to find sketchy e-Zine articles in top Google rankings? You don’t see them anymore, and it’s not a mistake. They were one of the hardest hit by Google’s algorithm update, which aimed to prevent bad content from ranking highly.
eHow was another content farm that updated every day with new but not original content. Google punished them for it, and that resulted in eHow needing to shift their business plans.
But let’s take this a little further. Original also means unique. Your ideas should be unique and valuable to your readers. Rewriting the same concepts or other posts over and over again is not original. If your content is played out, no one will link to it – and that defeats the purpose of writing content in the first place.
Provide answers and solutions to readers
What is the ultimate purpose of a search engine? Most people would be correct in saying “to deliver sets of answers.”
Google is great at this. Type a query into Google and you’ll be presented with links, pictures, and videos.
When people use a search engine, what they ultimately want is an answer, and it’s the search engine’s job to deliver that answer.
It’s the same when people are reading a blog post, viewing an infographic or watching a video — they want an answer so they can gain knowledge. An additional tip here is: people don’t just want answers, they want answers fast. So make your content easy to scan so people can pick up the juicy, important bits quickly.
Read any title and subtitle of a non-fiction book or article. Ultimately, what it leaves the reader with is a question or a sense of curiosity. It is then the author’s job to deliver answers and have supporting information. Join Skywarrior theme for an easy way to make money from your site!
