Start a gaming blog and make extra money with low investments

Are you an avid gamer and always in search of new titles? Consider yourself lucky since the gaming market is rapidly expanding, and it seems it will not stop any time soon. The good news is that the same applies to Africa, where many startups are seen to produce unique games with African themes.

Among many others, a deck-building South African game ‘Endless Wyrd’ has now become the first game from the African continent to make it to the famous Nordic Game Discovery Contest 2021, while in Kenya, new game development companies are also springing up. The gaming market in this country was worth more than $50m in 2016, and it’s estimated to get up to $100m in 2021.
As this region’s market is growing fast, this is an ideal time to start a gaming blog.

Keep on reading as we will get into the nitty-gritty details of making your blog profitable.

Choose Your Niche or Area of Focus

It’s not enough to say that you want to write about gaming. You have to be as specific as possible when choosing the blog topic. What kinds of games do you like playing? If you play them often, it will probably give you easy access to ideas to write about. The initial step is to select a definite direction for your blog. You should consider questions like:

• What in gaming are you passionate about?
• What is the primary purpose of the blog?
• Who are your ideal readers?

When you have a clear-cut focus for the blog, you will easily find the type of content that resonates with your audience.

Create Your Content Strategy

While you can dream about having a blog with thousands of articles and millions of page views to stand out from the crowd, you first need to put in an effort to master one topic. How?

An example of a focused blog is casinos.co.za, which examines the iGaming niche. It gives players in South Africa information on the latest online casinos and gaming guides. But best of all, it rates the sites as they come out to ensure that they are legitimate. When you open the page, you can click on every top-rated casino on the list (e.g. Yeti Casino, Punt Casino, Springbok Casino, etc.) and read their full review. This way, the authors ensure to keep the readers informed while helping them make the best decision possible.

Staying on point like this and publishing content that is truly useful to your target audience helps search engines know what your blog is about while giving you better page rankings for your articles and then you can be on the highest paying ad network through which you can increase your earning.

Other examples are BigFish’s game walkthroughs, Wolf’s Gaming Blog for game and console reviews, game development, gaming news, online gaming, and e-sports news and events. If you choose what you have the greatest passion for, you’re less likely ever to get bored while writing or editing your content.

After choosing your niche, you must decide on your domain name, web hosting, and content management system.

You Don’t Need a Big Budget

If you are starting a blog to make additional income, consider how much it will cost you.  At the initial stage, you may decide to run your blog as a side hustle.  It takes several months for a new blog to attract consistent high traffic.

You probably already have a gaming PC with internet access if you are a gamer. So, you can focus only on the cost of:

• Registering your domain name
• Basic WordPress hosting
• WordPress theme
• A few WordPress plugins
• Cloud data storage
• Content creation costs
• Advertising costs

The minimum first-year cost to start a blog to make a profit is about $66. Your annual cost will rise as you strive to create more content through outsourcing, add more tools, upgrade your theme, improve security, and do more advertising.

Check IGN’s Social Media to Get Ideas For Promotion

It’s not enough to create high-quality content for your blog without promoting it on social media. Think where your players are and pick Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or even Twitch streaming, YouTube, and influencer marketing. Promoting it gets you to your target audience, driving more traffic to your pages. And with traffic comes your salary.

Take IGN, the most popular gaming news website, as an example. Long ago, they started writing only about video game news, but now they cover all sorts of entertainment, including movies and TV. This is an example of an amazing online spot dedicated to providing readers with new and fresh information. Their Instagram page currently has 2.6 million followers, with even more than 150k views for some IGTV posts, while their Twitter account gathers around 7.9m. Pretty amazing numbers. However, it’s all about making your followers inspired and entertained. Consequently, they are able to get more and more website views. Keep in mind that this rarely happens overnight.

Take a Look at TrueValhalla’s Earnings

You can make a regular or full-time income blogging about video games. To mention once more, IGN has an enormous revenue of $95m. However, you must realize that you won’t suddenly jump from $0 to millions in a few months.

Looking at income reports from other famous gaming bloggers like Matt of TrueValhalla, who earned $107,312 in 2018, can inspire you to aspire to earn a six-figure income. But to do so, you need a strategy.

As a new blogger, you should target low-hanging fruit. These income sources do not require you to invest much money before earning income. To start with, you can sign up for affiliate programs that allow you to market games, tools, and books without having a large traffic volume. You can also add adverts to your blog.

After your blog has grown to 10,000 monthly visits, you can sign up for higher-paying advert programs, create and sell gaming courses, and provide service to game developers. You also form partnerships with game developers who want to launch their new games.

So how much should you expect within the first three months? The answer is simple: it depends on you. The amount of time, effort, and funds you put into content creation, promotion and the type of income source you opt for will determine how fast you achieve your first $1,000.

As gamers keep increasing, the demand for fresh gaming content will rise. Starting a gaming blog in 2021 could be a good investment for active gamers.