Monetizing a Small Gaming Niche Site

Hi

I currently own a small gaming sites that offers articles about a specific FPS shooter. I receive about 300 daily visitors a day. However, I'm having serious problems monetizing the traffic.

Originally this site was designed to be a niche adsense site. It is ranked in the first position in Google for a keyword with 1,600 exact searches and a CPC of .10. However, when I originally researched the keyword it had 1,900 exact searches with a cpc of 3.90. I don't believe I researched it incorrectly, so I'm curious about how the CPC dropped so rapidly. In terms of "broad searches it has 4000 general searches and $2.60 cpc, currently.

I've tried Adsense twice, first with a CTR theme. I received a dollar a day if that and my bounce rate increased dramatically while my CTR rate however around .50%. I changed my theme to a gaming theme and my bounce rate decreased but I still received dismal CTR rates and made no money.

So I switched to Clickbank. I found a gaming guide to the game my site focused on and advertised it heavily. I got about 30 hops a day and an earning per hop of around $.05, so still no money.

Then, I tried PDD downloads through cleanfiles by inserting a link in my posts to a free guide I had created. $2.44 in two weeks.

Finally I tried to list my site with buysellads, but they wouldn't list my site.

So all in all, I'm still making little money from my 350 + daily visitors.

I honestly don't know what else to try. I've contemplated doing CPA, but if since I had such poor clickthrough rates for my PPD method, I don't think it would work well. Also I have little experience in the area. Anyone know how I could monetize my traffic?

Other Analytic stats

3:07 visit duration, 30% bounce rate, 25% returning visitors.

Thanks

$1 a day seems ok to get going with, the way ads work now it isn't a case of the ads reflecting the site, they reflect the user. I would just use what you know, and continue developing your site, and another bunch besides, and just keep learning.

Edit. Oops.

Try and create your own ebook product and sell for a cheaper price than the Clickbank product. Your visitors would be more willing to spend say $10 on a game guide, than the usual $30 or $40 that those Clickbank products cost!

$1 is ok, but I mean is that honestly the best a site should do with 300+ visitors a day?

I would create a product but there are plenty of game guides out there for the game already + the game is becoming slowly less popular + no experience in the area + very few conversions on the Clickbank products, make me think that it is too risky.

Advertise gamer jobs clickbank or CPA offer

you can try game specific ad networks such as cpmstar this might help to better monetize your site, however for the amount of traffic you get i think $1 a day is ok.

Sounds like CPA is the thing left to try

The main reason why a gaming niche is hard to make money out of, is the fact that your traffic does not have that much (or any) money power. Demographics show that most of the people interested in gaming are in their childhood/youth, having an average age of 14 or 15 years old. That's why advertisers never bid more than .02-.10 per click for ads in Google's network. It just does not pay out/convert well for them. Kids generally save up their allowance for the month to buy a couple of $30 video games, so it's unlikely that they will be buying something else that month.

If you decide to carry on with the niche, your only options are to either monetize using PPD/CPA or to seriously increase the traffic volume, by adding and ranking more content. Having 50 clicks is better than having only 25, even though we are talking about pennies here.

i will PM you with my offer and exchange .
regard
vizer visily