Building a niche arcade site
Hey I?ve been on bhw for a little while now mostly lurking and reading other peoples threads. I started with Fiverr, and made $300 the first month but I was doing too much work for too little pay and in January I decided to reinvest the money and to enter the arcade niche. I started an authority arcade and was able to drive a decent amount of traffic, around 500 people a day. I did this by making my own flash games and putting a link back to my site in them, and uploading the games to other arcade sites, this is pretty much what every arcade site that can afford to hire a game developer does, luckily in my case I could make the games on my own. This worked pretty well but a large majority of my visitors were from China or other countries with a very low cpc this would be okay if I could either increase my traffic by a lot or build a good fan base from the American players, but unfortunately the arcade niche is incredibly popular and they have no reason to use my arcade over other, better arcades.
The Plan
I?ve decided that increasing my traffic would be a lot of work and not worth it. The arcade niche is really competitive, and the big arcades have a lot of money backing them. Instead of trying to compete with them I?m going to attempt to build a niche arcade site that will mostly have only my games; I don?t want my players being linked to other arcade sites. The niche that I?ve picked is very easy to build games in, and has a decent amount of monthly search traffic, if I can rank it well the search traffic combined with traffic from the games should be pretty good and I believe it can be pretty profitable.
Goals
I?ve bought the domain and hosting already, the site is going to run off wordpress, I?m either going to use an existing wordpress arcade theme that I find online or find a wordpress theme that I can modify to look like an arcade and use a plugin that lets me embed flash games into my posts, I expect to get this done today. I?ve also already made a game in the niche that I?m targeting for my other arcade site so I?ll add it to my new site since I don?t mind people being linked to my other site from this site.
I don?t know much about seo to be honest, but I see this as an opportunity to learn a bit about something new, I don?t think the niche is very competitive and if Google is working properly then my site should in theory rank naturally as long as my site really is about the niche, unfortunately I don?t trust Google very much so I?ll be writing a few articles targeting my keywords and creating a few backlinks, I?ll write more about this once I actually get started with it. If anyone would be interested in helping me with this, I?d be willing to split profits that?d be pretty cool.
I want this site to mostly use games that I?ve built that way people won?t be linked to other arcade sites from their games. This is definitely going to make it a bit more challenging, like I mentioned earlier, I?ve already created a game in this niche for my other site so I plan to just modify it to include new levels/graphics I?m not very good at creating graphics so I?ll probably find some open source ones, which should speed up the process. In an ideal world I?d like to make a game a day for one week and then focus on seo and make a game every few days until I feel I have a decent amount. Unfortunately the world is not always so ideal so instead my goal will be to make a game every other day, starting tomorrow since today I need to focus on building the site and making it look nice. Each game will also have a long description, probably around 300 words but if possible I?d like to make it longer.
Lastly I?ll try my best to keep this thread updated and answer any questions that are asked. I?ll try to update it everyday but I might miss a few if I?m really busy that day, or I simply didn?t do any work on the arcade. I?d like for this project to be done by June 30[SUP]th[/SUP] (That gives me around 2 months) if it works out well, I?ll probably repeat the process with another niche, which I should be able to do in a much shorter time frame since I?ll have a lot more experience. If it doesn?t work out I?m sure that I?ll learn a lot and I hope you can too. Sorry for making this so long, if you read it all you?re pretty amazing.
Tl;dr
Building a niche arcade site, read the text above for more info
Hey I?ve been on bhw for a little while now mostly lurking and reading other peoples threads. I started with Fiverr, and made $300 the first month but I was doing too much work for too little pay and in January I decided to reinvest the money and to enter the arcade niche. I started an authority arcade and was able to drive a decent amount of traffic, around 500 people a day. I did this by making my own flash games and putting a link back to my site in them, and uploading the games to other arcade sites, this is pretty much what every arcade site that can afford to hire a game developer does, luckily in my case I could make the games on my own. This worked pretty well but a large majority of my visitors were from China or other countries with a very low cpc this would be okay if I could either increase my traffic by a lot or build a good fan base from the American players, but unfortunately the arcade niche is incredibly popular and they have no reason to use my arcade over other, better arcades.
The Plan
I?ve decided that increasing my traffic would be a lot of work and not worth it. The arcade niche is really competitive, and the big arcades have a lot of money backing them. Instead of trying to compete with them I?m going to attempt to build a niche arcade site that will mostly have only my games; I don?t want my players being linked to other arcade sites. The niche that I?ve picked is very easy to build games in, and has a decent amount of monthly search traffic, if I can rank it well the search traffic combined with traffic from the games should be pretty good and I believe it can be pretty profitable.
Goals
I?ve bought the domain and hosting already, the site is going to run off wordpress, I?m either going to use an existing wordpress arcade theme that I find online or find a wordpress theme that I can modify to look like an arcade and use a plugin that lets me embed flash games into my posts, I expect to get this done today. I?ve also already made a game in the niche that I?m targeting for my other arcade site so I?ll add it to my new site since I don?t mind people being linked to my other site from this site.
I don?t know much about seo to be honest, but I see this as an opportunity to learn a bit about something new, I don?t think the niche is very competitive and if Google is working properly then my site should in theory rank naturally as long as my site really is about the niche, unfortunately I don?t trust Google very much so I?ll be writing a few articles targeting my keywords and creating a few backlinks, I?ll write more about this once I actually get started with it. If anyone would be interested in helping me with this, I?d be willing to split profits that?d be pretty cool.
I want this site to mostly use games that I?ve built that way people won?t be linked to other arcade sites from their games. This is definitely going to make it a bit more challenging, like I mentioned earlier, I?ve already created a game in this niche for my other site so I plan to just modify it to include new levels/graphics I?m not very good at creating graphics so I?ll probably find some open source ones, which should speed up the process. In an ideal world I?d like to make a game a day for one week and then focus on seo and make a game every few days until I feel I have a decent amount. Unfortunately the world is not always so ideal so instead my goal will be to make a game every other day, starting tomorrow since today I need to focus on building the site and making it look nice. Each game will also have a long description, probably around 300 words but if possible I?d like to make it longer.
Lastly I?ll try my best to keep this thread updated and answer any questions that are asked. I?ll try to update it everyday but I might miss a few if I?m really busy that day, or I simply didn?t do any work on the arcade. I?d like for this project to be done by June 30[SUP]th[/SUP] (That gives me around 2 months) if it works out well, I?ll probably repeat the process with another niche, which I should be able to do in a much shorter time frame since I?ll have a lot more experience. If it doesn?t work out I?m sure that I?ll learn a lot and I hope you can too. Sorry for making this so long, if you read it all you?re pretty amazing.
Tl;dr
Building a niche arcade site, read the text above for more info
