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Cristian Villalobos
5,099 PointsHelp with new blog!
Hello Treehouse Community, I am a newbie when it comes to creating blogs. Right now, I am going over several tutorials in order to learn how to create a blog, how to customize it, and how to keep it up and running properly. I have been thinking for several weeks about making a blog about gaming. Gaming news, reviews, and other kind of things related to the topic. An example of such a website could be IGN.com, or Joystiq.com. I would like to listen to suggestions, ideas, and name suggestions would be great as well. I came up with several words that could be used to create a good domain name.
List:
-Achievement -Aggro -Criteria -Critical
- Spawn -Nerf -Pixel -Euphoria -Sensation -Puzzle -Conflict -Camping -Any animal name combined with another word
Thanks for the feedback!
3 Answers
John Michael Mendez
945 PointsYou need to decide on what type of gaming blog you need to launch. Some important points to consider aside from the technical side are
*Objective of the website (Monetize, Be an awesome gaming resource, build your credibility?)
*Your target market (Who are your target visitors, customers, followers?)
*How will you attract your target audience. (A.K.A Marketing) Is it through Social Media, SEO, Paid Advertising? Always remember that having a website is not enough.
*How will you measure your site's success? (Is it number of visits, leads you would be getting, number of followers. This will really depend on your objective)
With regard to the name of your site you can use Name Boy (https://www.nameboy.com) to see aggregated names for your domain. If you see a domain you like, you may purchase it on the domain name registrar of your choice. Remember your domain name is your brand, it should properly reflect what you intend to do with your site.
In terms of measurement for your site, one popular free tool to use is Google Analytics.
Best of luck.
Freddy Heppell
9,753 PointsSounds like a great idea to me! However you may encounter a couple of issues
- There are a LOT of sites in this market already. You need to come up with something unique.
- Platform: How are you going to make this site? Hire developers? Write it from scratch? Write wordpress plugins?
- Writing: Will you hire writers or do it yourself. Websites such as IGN will hire famous people from the gaming industry to write news, you may want to consider this
- Monetization: How will you make a profit (if that's what you want) from this idea. It would be a good idea to start off with a network like Google AdSense but you may be granted access to an exclusive ad network, like The Deck or Tribalfusion
Best of luck with your idea!
Cristian Villalobos
5,099 PointsSo I should bother in making a gaming blog with something unique like a website with videogame suggestions or couples?
Freddy Heppell
9,753 PointsDo some market research. See who offers this service already, try and make your service better than theirs. One major competitor for offering this service is Steam, which actually sells games as well, so you may need to come up with a very original idea to better that. As Matthew said gaming is very competitive so make sure you can do something nobody else does. One thing you could do is look through the Wordpress Plugin tutorial and the PHP tutorial, this would help you make a better site.
Finally, if you don't want to make your own theme (yep, there's a tutorial for that too!) a lot of these are very nice themes: Number 7 is my personal favourite (although you do have to pay for it, but if you aren't prepared to make an investment in a business you're not prepared to run a business)
Cristian Villalobos
5,099 PointsThanks for the help both of you guys. I think I will wait for a little bit, learn all I can about programming and then, come up with a great idea and beat Steam and all those companies :D.
Matt Campbell
9,767 PointsGaming is a seriously competitive market. You'll need money and a fair amount of it for advertising.
The big one with gaming is, how are you going to get the games to review pre-release and how are you going to get the news as soon as it breaks? The lifetime of a post is only relevant for a few days or less most of the time. With so many sites out there, SEO is key.
I know because I started a gaming site a few months back. I've focused on unique style of content creation through hired writers, unique design through hired designers and a lot of time on SEO.
All in, I'm probably in for several thousand pounds and nowhere close to seeing a return. Any less commitment is a waste of time as you just won't get the visitor numbers to make any money.
Social networks are great, you can get several hundred people to your site for about £50, it works out cheaper than Google Adwords and is better suited to promoting individual posts.
Hope my experience is useful and good luck with the idea!
Cristian Villalobos
5,099 PointsThanks I will think about this. So far I think it is more about getting a great name to get plenty of visitors and then about unique content or a unique idea of a website related to gaming never seen before.