My Tips On How To Get Traffic For A Gaming News Site/Blog

I have made and sold a few gaming news sites, so I thought that I could put up some of my tips on how to get traffic for them. Examples of the sites I have made are:
Gamestatics.com
Thingsuwant.co.uk
vg364.com

1) A good theme is your friend
Getting a good theme for your site is essential, it needs to be fast and able to load quickly so that visitors don't leave if the site doesn't load within a couple of seconds, it also needs to look good because no one wants to visit a site that looks like utter crap.

If you are running the WordPress CMS I would recommend going to a site like Themeforest and finding yourself a good theme that suits you and what you want your site to look like. If you are running any other CMS I cannot really recommend a place to buy themes since I have only ever run Wordpress however Themeforest also has Drupal themes.

2) Sites like n4g.com ,gamegrep.com and Reddit are useful
When I started to write gaming news I simply relied on SEO however since many other sites will be writing pretty much the same thing you do unless you are writing unique articles you need to find another way to get some traffic, this is where sites like N4G.com and Gamegrep.com come in.

N4G is a gaming news aggregate that allows you to submit news and present it to the visitors of the site (which is a lot). There are some simple rules, if you submit the news first and its important/interesting you can get a huge increase in traffic however if you are unable to maintain it you may have problems if you try to sell the site later since it would be odd for your site to suddenly receive a crazy amount of traffic and then it suddenly stops. If you do not submit the news first then it will be reported and removed. You can also submit articles to the site and if they are really interesting then you may receive a large amount of traffic aswell.

Reddit and Gamegrep are also relatively the same as N4G however for Reddit you need to be part of the community and not just visit it to submit and get traffic, that wont work (believe me I tried 5 times :/ and got banned....5 times)

3)Use Twitter and Google Reader
Using Twitter and Google Reader are a great way to keep on top of gaming news, along with use of N4G you may be able to maintain a lot of traffic coming in however constant referral traffic isn't the best therefore you should really try and focus on a good balance of referral, search engine and direct traffic especially if you plan on selling the website. Anyway back to Twitter and Google Reader. My set up was a tab for Google Reader in Google chrome which auto updated and told me the number of stories I had not read in the tab title which was very useful. As for Twitter I either used a Twitter tab which also told me the number of tweets I had not viewed or a program called Tweetdeck which alerted me with a notification and/or noise when a tweet was made. If you do not want to be constantly bombarded with a *bleep* noise I recommend that you simply open a tab with Twitter in it.

4)Write fast but not too fast
Getting the jump on a new piece of news is great and if you manage to get it onto N4G.com first then you may be rewarded with a lot of traffic depending on the importance of the story however writing too quickly just so you can get traffic may cause problems with the visitors who will get annoyed if you simply post the bare minimum with no detail or you leave constant spelling mistakes, therefore write quickly but do drop the quality.

5)Dont focus entirely on making money
I have seen many sites which try to make as much money on each page by putting as many ads as possible on each page (including pop-ups), doing this will not do you any favours, it will simply serve as a reminder for visitors to not visit your site again. Do not overload your site with ads, if you are not getting much money from ad networks then try to sell ad spaces in the Digitalpoint marketplace, this way you get to set your own prices for a length of time.

6)Traffic isn't the most important thing overall
Lastly traffic is not the most important thing overall, there are more important things for your site such as Bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who simply visited one page of your site and then left, Avg Time On Site, which obviously means the average time users spent on your site, you do not want this to be low, the more time people spend on your site the better. This is not to say traffic is not important however you should not completely put your focus on it, also do not buy traffic, i have never done it however those users will most likely not come back to the site and your bounce rate will simply increase while your avg Time Spent will simply drop.

Well those are my tips, that was the first time i ever wrote one of those lists, please tell me what you think below

 

I disagree with point 6.

Its all about traffic!! its all about how you get your traffic and the quality of it!

 

Thank you for sharing your tips regarding the gaming site or blog.

 

well thats what i kinda meant, the quality of traffic along with quantity is important. it should be balanced.