Promoting your "Gaming" niche website/community.

Well, recently I have been developing a community & content website dealing with World of Warcraft, and at the start of it, I was a complete novice to promoting websites and getting users.. well in just over a month, I have nearly 50,000 unique visitors total, i average anywhere from 800 to 2300 unique visitors a day!

What did I do to get the traffic? Well first off I put it in my signature on some related forums I post at, I have around 300 posts total accumulated on all of the related websites.

But best of all, to keep my traffic fresh and help my ranking in search engines, I used social bookmarking // article websites .. not just Digg, but others too! I didn't pick the normal ones like FURL, Reddit, techcrunch, or whatever. Those are good to use, but I prefer to only use them to get more backlinks. I tried to pick out some sites that were low on content in my niche, and I found a couple of great sites, check 'em out:

DIGG: http://www.digg.com/users/darthnuri
Standard stuff, you guys know digg.

LEETDAILY: http://www.leetdaily.com/?user=242
Gaming social bookmarking website, very similar to digg.com

GAMECRUNCH: http://www.gamercrunch.com/user.php?login=darthnuri
Gaming social bookmarking website, very similar to digg.com (seems they have more console game type news)

WOWTICK: http://www.wowtick.com/user.php?login=darthnuri
World of Warcraft social bookmarking site, very similar to digg.com (specific targeted social bookmarking site is very good)

SENGO: http://www.sengo.com/id/darthnuri
Sengo lets you submit articles.. I submit a quick paragraph with a summary of the article, enter my keywords, and to read the rest of the article they must click and go through to my site.

MYLOT: http://www.mylot.com/darthnuri?ref=darthnuri
MyLot has alot of opportunities, you can start discussions about/linking to your topic, you can start discussions about/linking to your own website, you can upload images about your site, and best of all they will pay you to do it!

BLOSKER: http://bored.blosker.com/user/darthnuri
Blosker lets you post links with a tiny thumbnail or avatar next to them.. kinda neat idea for a site with a good layout.

Aside from those, I'm just working on directories and blog comments to get some more PR! Enjoy, everyone .. and happy promoting!

 

I'm going to have to try this out for one of my gaming communities. Thanks for the advice.

 

No problem, and what's your gaming community?

 

Hey Thanx -

Going to try this for my gaming forum!

 

Do you find directory submission work ..? and what about auto submissions? thank you in advance, :0)

 

cool thanks. I just started a gaming site and am finding it hard to get any decent search engine position. this may help, i'll have to give it a try.

 

nice job man, some great ips, i am subscribing to this thread

 

Excellent tips for new sites, thanks

 

No problem feel free to share some of your own tips or some links to some more gaming social websites!

 

http://vgamin.com/ was good to me
forum is great for partnerships etc..

 

Checked out vgamin.. got myself a couple of solid backlinks from members there!

 

Try also siggy at my gaming forum www.gamevolume.com

 

wow site eh? interested in swapping links?

 

I have a Gaming site as well called www.computergamerz.com this might help it

IT

 

dragons5, pm me more information about your website, it's a possibility.

I'm also trying out ReachAds, a targeted advertising / traffic network for gaming websites! It seems really good, you can display many diff types of banner ads, and text ads as well I think! It only displays gaming niche ads as well, so you will have a high CTR on a gaming website!

 

Did you spend any money buying links or advertising? Or was all your marketing viral?

 

I have only spent about $20 on a PPC advertising company, game-advertising-online, to advertise on a website called curse-gaming, but they banned my ad, and since then I haven't spent a dime on advertising. I'm going to purchase some adwords soon, but so far all of my traffic has been from natural indexing, backlinks from readers, and social bookmark sites.

It's been pretty much 80% viral so far which I'm pretty happy about!

 

Thanks for the tips I might try using some of them on my gaming websites. How much do you make daily from that site if you don't mind me asking?

Edit: I just re read the thread and I don't see a link to your site. Would you mind pm'ing it? If not thats cool too.

 

World of Warcraft Information
World of Warcraft Forums
World of Warcraft Guides

: ) My site and some of its subpages.

 

To be honest, the site doesn't seem too active. 400+ posts.

Hm, but thanks for the links