You like games, so much so you feel compelled to share your thoughts. You write about games, you create a following. You attract other gamers to contribute. This is all very exciting, but is this just a waste of time? People love learning about secret cheats and reading reviews of games.
This saves people money and time and increases the enjoyment of playing. It also creates a community where like-minded people can share. Considering how easy it is to create quality quality websites with blogs today, there is little justification for having a website to help monetize your passion. Therefore, creating and managing a gaming blog can be satisfying, but is there potential for making money? Here are four easy ways to monetize your gaming blog.
Link Builders
Many ways to monetize a website are well known, even if merely conceptually. However, a very lucrative niche of website monetization resides within the category of SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the method of increasing a websites visibility on the web. The SEO industry uses many techniques to manipulate how searches rank websites and a major tactic among those techniques is what is known as link building. SEO is highly complex and relies on many methods, but the most powerful is widely understood to be link building.
What this is: when one site links to another site the site that gets linked to increases in authority. That link is essentially a vote of confidence. Due to the power of these links and the difficulty in getting another site, to any impactful extent, to link back to your site, the links have become very valuable. Therefore, SEO companies will pay you to put links into posts or post articles they have written with back links to their clients in order to fulfill their client obligations. This relatively new, complex and mysterious industry is a great way to gain fresh, well written content and make a few bucks.
Advertising
Particularly if your gaming blog has a substantial following, advertising in multiple ways, can be a great way to passively monetize your site. There are multiple methods to place advertising on your site and all of them can create some revenue, relative to your audience. The most common method of ad revenue comes from selling ad space on your blog. This happens when a company, usually one relevant to your content, is willing to pay you in order to place an advertisement which links back to them on your site or in your posts.
If you don’t have companies breaking down your digital door in order to place advertisements within your posts, don’t fret. You can use services like Adsense, which provides code to embed into your site and you get paid relative to their analytics which measure traffic and impressions. More traffic and more clicks on the ads converts to more money for you.
Affiliate Marketing
Companies like Amazon will give you code to create ads for their products. If you place the ad on your site and a reader clicks on the ad and subsequently buys something, you could get a cut. This is also a good way to cross-promote your personal products that you sell. Not only do you get kickbacks for purchases as an affiliate, it can be your book or product that they are buying, which would mean you get your commission.
Merchandise
Perhaps you have created your own game or you have a brand of merchandise that displays your brand. Even if you don’t you can start or you can become a retailer of others’ products. By having a well trafficked website, you can sell your merchandise, not only to your visitors, but to your fans. Because people who visit your site are likely to appreciate your brand, they are also more likely to support it.
If you have a passion, like gaming, you have what it takes to create a profitable website. There are many ways to turn your website into a money machine, but the key is that it reflects your enthusiasm. When that happens, the money will easily follow. Above are four ways which you can convert your passion into cash. Any and all of them could become a viable way to make a living depending on your sites particular audience and influence.
