As a classic, hardcore gamer, im always looking for a good game to play, i have passion for all kind of games, but my favorites are rpgs, being Dark souls one of those games i played and changed me, that’s why i started writing about videogames, i was writing for fun, now i write to create good posts for my blog, to grow an audience and start earning some money on the road, i started 2 years ago, but it was the first year when i realized how hard is to monetize on this niche, so, these are some gaming blog post ideas to help you monetize.
Check this post if you want to know more ideas to make money playing videogames.
First, i want to be clear, im not complaining or regretting anything, i love writing about games and uploading this posts into my blog, but monetizing this gaming blog has been a pain, cpc and rpm for advertising is very low, you will have to write at least 100 posts in the first 3 or 6 months to get to a nice amount of pageviews and start creating a very good strategy to monetize, and thats why this post is all about, i will give you my tips to help you survive in the gaming niche and grow your blog.
Create a good posting schedule based on keywords
As you may know, you need to write posts based on a keyword research to actually start getting traffic, this is a common mistake made by beginners, you will write about topics you like, of course, but from a different point of view, so start using keyword planner or another good seo tool to do a good keyword research of your topics, its recommended that you save that keyword research into an excel file, to categorize your keywords by best paid, competition and search volume.
There’s always free ways of doing a good keyword research, but to get your hands on great seo tools i suggest trying semrush, ahrefs, ubbersuggest and so on, this websites have nice free trials, and their paid plans are great for the benefit you can get, but as you are a beginner, learn how to use keyword planner, google trends, search and look for keywords of your topic to look into your competitors.
To learn more about SEO optimization click here and start ranking on google.
Dont sub niche that much your gaming blog
Its a good idea to create a website based on a subniche or a subtopic, that way you gain authority faster, but beware, as you create posts, you have to avoid using the same keyword for every post, this is called canibalizing, by doing this, you are creating posts that will compete against each other, this will slow down your ranking, and of course, you will get less traffic, so if you have a good amount of posts using the same keywords, try to adjust the text to change the keyword and you will start ranking better.
Creating a website based on a single games is a good idea, but, once you have too many posts and has every topic and keyword covered, then you will need to go for another game, of course a game within the same genre, we dont want to divide our audience too much.
Leave news for the big ones
Within the video game niche you will see many websites posting news, i dont recommend posting news, unless you have a big website, with authority, and 100k or more pageviews monthly on average, as a new website, news content is not going to help you growing your site, as it will take from 6 to 8 month for a single post to start getting organic traffic, so your best bet, is creating evergreen content, and by evergreen content i mean, posts that people will still search for 5 or 10 years later.
Its not a bad idea thoug, writing about patch updates, DLC’s, or another piece of content your game has, but you have to be careful, write about those changes in the game as you will talk about it with your friends, telling about your experience with this updates, our what you think about that specific DLC, avoid copy pasting, as this will get your site penalized by google, remember, google will keep track of every word you write, to check for plagiarism and will penalize accordingly.
Earning money from a gaming blog with adsense
We are going to display ads on our site, the first step is to apply to adsense, this can be tricky, and as a beginner, you are going to have a rough time trying to get your site accepted, but we need to do this as other advertising networks will require you to have more pageviews monthly.
Displaying ads with google adsense is a good strategy, but their cpc and rpm are the lowest, so you will not earn but a few bucks for the first 8 to 10 months, once you start getting up to 10k pageviews, you will start earning more money and raising your cpc and rpm, but, from 10k to 30k i recommend you to switch to ezoic, a premium ad network that will pay much more, here your rpm will grow to $15 USD and up to $25 USD, so you can earn up to $250 USD monthly with 10k pageviews.
Check this post to learn how much money you can earn with google adsense.
Affiliate programs
There are a good variety of affiliate programs you can apply for your gaming blog, and this is where you need to create an affiliate marketing strategy, the objective is getting our users to click on those affiliate links, so we will create posts about what we need in order to play this game the best way, or the benefit of using an specific product to play that game in particular, by this you are creating the user the need for this product, and of course making sales to earn comissions.
Check this post to learn how to get affiliate programs to earn a full income.
Crowdfunding your gaming blog
There are many youtubers, influencers and bloggers using crowdfunding platforms like patreon, buy me a coffee, or kickstarter to earn money, to do this, you create an account on this websites, put your subscribtion levels and fees, and start promoting, in order to succeed and earn money this way, you have to offer exclusive content for your paid subscribers, that will require more job, but, you will get to a point where you can earn a full income and start doing this full time, dont be afraid to make that call to action to your followers, there are people earning up to 4k from patreon or buy me a coffee.
The best gaming blog post ideas
Creating generic news and reviews for your blog is not the way you want to go, you will have to write as much as 1000 posts your first year to get you a decent income, so, what you really want to do, is create guides, solve your audience problems, visit official game’s forums and websites to know what they want to know about the game, write helpful information and you will earn your audience.
Try to write your articles with your own personality within them, be friendly, start solving beginners problems, as not everyone is a hardcore gamer who wants to know the most advanced secrets of an mmorpg’s crafting system, write as you talk with some of your best friends, that way you will get a great audience that will gladly read your posts.
Conclusion
Creating a gaming blog is all fun and happyness until you see no money is coming after a good amount of time, so you have to do a good monetizing strategy, be creative, dont go over just one of the methods above, try harder and do every method to earn as much as you can, you can even sell infoproducts, but, for this specific niche, infoproducts are hard work, and not too much earnings, but you can try, the most important is not to give up, this is a long play game, the rewards will come and once you start earning, you will be growing your income over time.
