Tales from the web: Making a gaming site and making money – Part 1
This is the first article in a series that I plan to write about trying to build a website and generate a positive cashflow from it.
The Plan:
I like to play casual games on the web, so I decided to go with what I like. My plan is to create a series of websites that host casual flash games. Each website will have a targeted URL with a targeted home page. The first in the series is Golf Arcade the url is www.golfarcade.net. On this site the home page contains all games related to golf, but like all the other sites I intend to create, the site will include other game types. I have decided to take the targeted approach on the home page with hopes to be more successful in getting ranked in search engines….I’ll let you know how that turns out.
I will place advertising on the website to generate some revenue. I’m not really sure what kind of revenue I can expect, but I don’t expect to get rich off the idea. I think right now I would be happy just to make enough to pay for my morning coffee.
I’m using two advertising services to try to generate revenue from my site(s). The first is adbrite and the second is google ad sense. Both are very easy to setup. You just create an account, and paste a little snippet of code into your web pages and voila, you are now an advertiser. I’m going with two different advertisers to compare how well they pay. My research on this topic gave me mixed results, so I just decided to try it for myself. If one tends to pay out much more than the other, I will ditch the least paying one.
I’m using google analytics to track the traffic to my site, if you have never used google analytics I would strongly suggest you get an account, it’s free and gives you loads of great information.
I am using 1 and 1 hosting as my hosting company, they offer 250gig of storage space with unlimited transfers, that is a big bonus if you intend to host files that have any significant size to them. My hosting costs are $10 a month.
To build the actual website I did some searching around the web and found a good site that has a very large database of games and offers a nice xml feed. I wrote some software to read the feed and download all the information I need for each game, so far that is working well. I’m writing the software in Java and using Apache Velocity, a templating engine, to create the actual html. I then upload all the static html to my domain. Why don’t I just create a dynamic web app instead? Well the answer is quite simple, I took this approach so I am not tied to any one hosting company. If I decide to switch hosting companies then I don’t have to worry about wether or not that company offers jsp/.net/php service.
I launched Golf Arcade about a week ago, and I’ve already made several changes since it’s first inception, and learned a lot.
What I’ve Learned So Far:
I started working on the first website about 3 weeks ago, and have launched the first version of my website about 1 week ago. Immediately after I launched the website I started thinking about how I can spread the word without having to spend a ton of cash (read: spend no cash). The fist thing I decided to do was post a link to some of the games on my facebook page. I figured that all of my friends that spend way too much time playing games on there would love to get another gaming site. I posted the links and waited until the next morning to look at my analytics. First thing the next day I looked at my analytics expecting to see hundreds of referrals from my facebook links, and of course I had 2. At that moment I learned that this is going to be a bit harder than I thought. For the next few days I spent a lot of time reading about website promotion and seo.
The second thing I’ve learned is that I should have done some research into the actual games before I decided to begin with a targed golf gaming site. As it turns out, there are not a lot of good golf flash games available. I chose the domain and the theme because I like golf, not because there are good games. As a result of this, my first website really took a hit because the home page has just terrible content.
SEO Tips:
Here are just a few of the tips I’ve found over the last few days.
- Use the meta keywords tag
- Make sure your meta keywords match the actual content of your site
- Use the meta description tag
- Add as much unique content as you possibly can to your page
- Make sure all your images define values for alt and title, these two attributes are the ‘content’ of your images.
Over the next week or two I intend to go through my website with a fine tooth comb to make sure my keywords are relevant. I’m also goin to focus on creating another website in my series of flash websites. As of right now I’m leaning towards a site that is targeted toward Solitare games.
At the time of this writing my analytics show that I have had 153 visits to my golf website, which would be great except that 80% are from me testing things out.
Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/web-design-articles/tales-from-the-web-making-a-gaming-site-and-making-money-part-1-1424875.html
