Flash Game/Clip Website; How To Get Started?

Hello everyone,

I am starting a arcade website where people play flash games and watch funny clips. I have made a very unique design which will hopefully attract people and make it look unique. I have also written a large script for the website. I didn't want to use a free script because anyone could view the source code. Now, the question is, how will i bring traffic to my website?

Most of my friends tell me to go with adwords. I have a slim budget ($300) and I am trying to get the best out of it. So I was wondering, would it be good to spend $100 on google adwords, another $100 on yahoo and maybe the other $100 on something else, or should I spend it all on adwords? I also want to raise my page rank. My friends have told me to submit my website to over 300 directories to raise my rank. Another this would be link exchange between other websites which I think will be a hard one unless I can talk webmasters into it.

Anyway, that's all I know. I hope you people could give me some tips where to get started the right way. My goal is to have 10,000 daily unique hits within the first two months. It may be hard but I'll give it my best shot!

 

hard?! wow, i'd say it was impossible (though im not a SEO guru or anything)

My arcade/video/jokes/pictures/ringtones/wallpapers website was finished in sept. Its a custom design, not based on any free script.

Since sept, i've added plenty of content, put adsense on the site, and done the following:

* Submited to over 1000 directories (though, i'm still getting emails every-now-and-again saying my site was added/denied)
* Paied for 4 articles to be submited to over 800 sites.
* Swapped links with sites in the same catogries
* Joined some top forums, and added links in my sig back to the site.
* Posted it to some review sites.

So, what do i have:
PageRank: 2 (gained by backlinks(+ more), but only updated every 3 months)
Backlinks: 242 (gone up from 70 in sept)
Keywords: Doing "ok", getting into the top 10 for some, but still have miles to go for the TOP keywords, such as "free games" "flash games" etc.
Unique vists a day: 71
Adsense a day: $0.0* upto $0.**

Pritty crap ah? yeah. Its a hard area to get into (unless im doing somthing really wrong. lol)

I think my pagerank will go up on the next update, as most of my directory subbmitting was after the last update. Still, pagerank really means nothing. Like i said, im getting most of my visitors from google/msn, via my "lower" keywords. Instead of going for "flash games", "funny videos", i have a load of others that people search, but dont have as many sites to compete with. i am still targeting the big ones, but im not even in the Top 100 yet for them.

Good luck anyway matey, theres some advice in my post of what you can do (maybe), it explains what i've done anyway.

Cheers

(p.s want to see my site, check my sig )

 

Well you didn't seem to advertise on adwords and other. I know a guy who started his website two months ago and makes 10,000 daily unique visitors. All he did was spend money advertising. I am sure you are doing something wrong. Your design does look very poor and you don't seem to have a large database of games, clips, and whatnot. I think advertising is the trick for success, well, it's more of a fact.

Anyway, I think you should have submited your website to directotries after you have done some advertising.

 

Testing is the key to finding what works best with your ad dollars. splitting it up is a good idea.

 

Well, what else can be done? So far I haven't recieved an answer to my question(s).

 

What script(s) are you going to use?

I run both an arcade site and a vide site and I can say the best way is promotion.... I don't spend a dime on advertising, but I get 40,000 unique hits per day on my arcade site and my video site which is new does a few thousand a day, but I haven't promoted it yet except a link on my video site.

 

earning money from a games site will be difficult, unless you go for CPM ads. People come to play games and see videos, so they won't be clicking on google ads.

10,000 uniques daily is a lot what you're asking for in 2 months.

I'd suggest you advertise using banner, but you should do that ONLY after ur site is complete and up and running

Good Luck webviz !!

 

Yes, the reason for this is that adsense sites, cannot generate money if you use adwords (i've read this on here) You wouldnt make enough back from paying out, to make a profit.

It also takes time and a lot of money to research the words you want to target.

I've just never used it as its always been discouraged on here unless you sell a product/service.

And p.s:

Cheers for the advice, I've got over 1000 games, 85 funny videos (not alot, but its hard to get them unbrannded), and lots of other stuff -- Also, "Your design does look very poor " its not that bad. lol -- but nice looking websites dont mean much anyway, take a look at the really popular ones, like milkandcookies, killsometime, even miniclip and addictinggames. All these sites dont look "great", some are slow, some are clutterd, some are just ugly - its the content that people want. (thats what i keep telling myself about my design anway. lol )

Cheers.

 

You can get alot of traffic from link exchanges with other games sites, they seem to work much better then most other type of websites, I guess people playing games are always looking for other games to play so they click the links more, the same is not true for ads though, ad's do not get clicked very often and you need to be very carefull with YPN and Adsense they have cracked down on many game sites for tricking people into clicking their ads.

 

Wow, 40,000 daily unique hits, impressive. Maybe you could give me a few pointers, what do you say? Also, I use a custom made script which I made.

Thank you very much, I will try hard to make it a great website. Also, what does CPM mean? I've never heard of that before.

I completely understand that content is what makes a website not the design, but then again, you want something that dosn't look like crap.

 

advertising might be the right way to get started, however, you would need a greater budget for that

 

I see. I hope more people will give me more suggestions. So far all I have been told is the things I already know. I need tips on logical advertising. So I wont have to spend a fortune to make a fortune.

 

I put a few hundred dollars into advertising my arcade when I started. I got my money back...but didnt make hardly any profit. At the time i was running a competition and thats how I got my 200 users that I have now.

It did serve to get the word out..and a 1/3 of my visitors atm are return visitors

I had no experience at advertising though so I could have done a lot lot better. As a result im going to stear clear of it for a while until I have a better Idea of what im doing.

Anywayz thats my experience.

 

You are wrong. There is much more to a website than it just having traffic. It needs to be well designed and have a good navigation and also have good content.

Your site looks ok and there are much worse sites. If a site looks unprofessional then there is less chance of your getting your first visitors to click on more than 1 page.

I noticed a good improvement in my site when I re-designed it to a more professional design. The average pageviews per visitor has increased from about 2.5 to about 3.5 - 4, which is a large improvement.

 

Here is what I got from doing nothing at all.

It can be called nothing at all compared to what itsall3 had done.

What I did was that I just provided 4 High PR backlinks to it. And then told my directory submissions guys to submit it to dirs. Which was a free service for me and they submitted it to only 50 dirs. But yeah I am getting Traffic and click through's

Moreover The PR is 3 right now.

The script was a unique one though. I had to develop it myself because I didn't wanted it to be like 1000 of other arcades out there. Added some unique games from here and there.

 

lol, this is an old thread. From the last time i posted on here, i redesigned my site to the one you can see today. It's not a bad design now i dont think. I like it. (The menu could do with a bit of improving but i dont have time )

The site is making about $15 a day now. <-- but once i finish my degree, i'll try and double that.

I still say that content is much more important then deisgn -- look at MySpace, the best example of totally crap design, and just having a good idea and content. I still go on my example of killsometime and milk and cookies. <-- they dont look great. But they are the big players.

I think i will redesign my site again one day.... In the future. make it look cleaner or somthing but who knows.

Just have to say though -- when i make a new game, and release it on the net, the site gets loads of hits. massive spikes. and then dies down to an improved click through as the game gets put on other sites.

 

Right. john269 bumped it. And I forgot to look at the other post dates.

 

It's good

It'd be nice to hear how webviz has done after this time???

 

Oooops! I never hardly use the search feature on these forums and just reply to a few of the recent threads. But I had done a search and then just replied to a few forgetting that I had done a search and that these threads are old. Oooops!

Anyway, I wouldn't really say I had bumped it on purpose as it is not a post that I had started or is it a post that I have replied to before.

 

Similar suggestion link exchanges with related site will help