Marketing and promotion

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you have a huge advertising budget and brilliant natural marketing sense I don't think you have much of a chance of making $500 a month from a gaming site.

The fact of the matter is there are allready hundreds of large sites that have hundreds of games available for free (miniclip.com, shockwavearcade etc) and these companies have large advertising budgets and a massive existing user base. What's different about what you offer?

Let us know the URL and we might be able to throw some marketing tips that will help you in your direction.

you need to really figure out who your core target audience is, and start by getting the word out to them, and work your way out from there. there is nothing wrong with starting with grass-roots/word of mouth advertising, that's how most sites get started. as mentioned above, you really need to do your homework on search engines, it will take a while but eventually they could prove to be the savior of your e-store.

email marketing is probably the cheapest method of drawing people to your site, just don't be a spammer, there's no quicker way to kill your site's reputation.

don't get discouraged, it takes time, lots and lots of time, but anything is possible on the web.

Hi Mary,

Don't despair cuz anything is possible! I began online in 99 and can I just say there have been lots of deadends, dissapointments and times I didn't know which direction to take.

My best month year-to-date was over 12K from 9 sites combined. But you need to know you may work two or three years before you see a significant income. Now hopefully it won't take that long. I didn't know places like this exsisted my first 2 - 3 years. So you're smarter or better informed than I was.

I know a guy with games sites that does very well selling specific games thru a Amazon affiliate set-up. It's a simple arrangement and it takes lots of traffic to make much as an affiliate, but he proved it can be done. Now we aren't talking boatloads of cash but he regularly makes 1200 to 1500 a month.

Your best bang for your buck (ad dollars) continues to be Google Adwords and Overture in my opinion. However since games are such a low revenue producer per visitor, it would be difficult to make that fly.

If you're intent on games, you need to come up with a good plan to get players to recommend the game to their friends. There are lots of ways to do it. The trick is making sure it actually happens.

Some guys like myself began with a single website in an area for which they had a real passion and later decided it might be wiser to go where the money is. Something for you to think about.

There's wisdom to being into whatever you love ... it's easier to build content and stay interested when there's no success in sight. On the other hand, sometimes it's just plain easier to admit you are in a tuff market to crack.

High paying subjects will have plenty of sharp competitors, but these days most every subject has plenty of folks working it. Either pick something you really enjoy or something lucrative and plan on spending 3 to 5 hours a day for a couple of years at it.

I know a Okie can do it!

I do over 300k per month in sales. It started with a $600 advertising budget a couple years ago.

The average cost of products sold on the site is 28%. I spend another 18% of the margin on advertising. Reinvest each month into your advertising, and spend it smartly. In 2 years, the $600 per month advertising budget has grown to $50k+.

Depending on what your game is I know of at least one game that was making over 3000/mo (if only I could get that lucky)