How this console games website is getting 8M+ visitors
I've been very close to gaming websites these past 3 years, They're a great way of building passive income if you know how to automate the whole process.
Today, we'll be deciphering the strategies followed by this amazing console gaming website that I stumbled across yesterday, and how you can build one for yourself too (If you want to).
First of all, let's look at their last 3 months' traffic:
As you can see, the site is very stable and is constantly hitting 7M+ users each month. Numbers are great, so is their strategy.
As per WHOIS records, the domain was registered on 7th November 2020, which is not very old in my experience considering the traffic they're banking. So what's the differentiator here?
Let's start off with how they're doing at off-page, Look at the exponential growth of their referring domains:
The number of RD's they acquired in the initial days of setting up the domain seems to be an important factor, as the time went on, the growth has slowed down but I think the momentum from the past is still there. Keeping that in mind, most of the domains pointing to this website are pretty relevant to the niche, which is a very good indicator to get good rankings.
The website is divided into 2 main parts:
- ROMS: Offering more than 58,000 ROMs for almost all consoles such as Nintendo DS, Gameboy Advance, PSP & so much more.
- EMULATORS: It has around 330 emulators listed, not big of a number as ROMs but the traffic falling to these pages is good enough considering this ratio.
The site is designed and structured really well too, It's been built using modern-day backend & frontend using NODE & Express (Frameworks for javascript)
Although this is not the exact data, we can still make some rough guesses and the first guess I would make is that the users are REALLY engaging with the contents of it.
With a bounce rate this low and pages per visit this high, it can be clearly seen that users are getting what they're searching for as most of their traffic share is organic.
But is this traffic really valuable to make money?
There's one very simple rule to follow, "When you have a lot of people coming to the same place, you can monetize it. No matter what it is." and these guys are getting it from the US & other tier 1 countries is even better. There are a few Tier 3 countries too, but they're not the majority so we would not count them as most of the revenue would be made up from the creamy layer.
What would be the best way to monetize a website like this?
The best way is to go with Adsense or some premium ADx companies, with native advertising on top. Some sponsored things here and there but the major chunk would be advertising.
It's a download-type website, where a user will come specifically to get a piece of software or a game, which makes it highly targeted towards them. They will eventually visit multiple pages on this site, as sites like this usually redirect the download links to a separate page to increase page views and increase their revenue.
With more than 7M users and half of these users completing the download:
- Pageviews = 7,000,000+3,500,000 = 10.5M
- CTR = 3% (Taking very genric here, but it's quite on the higher side on these download websites)
- Average CPC Considering demographic: $0.1
Estimated Earnings = Pageviews x CTR x CPC = 10.5M x 3% x $0.1 = $31,500
That's a lot of money considering the cost of running a website like this is peanuts compared to revenue. You just need a couple of dedicated servers, for your normal website and your download server & a couple of people on the staff.
It's a very profitable business.
Wondering what the URL is? Here you go, but do read the entire post :)
but how can you make one for you too?
Learn to code. Please. It's the need of the day.
If I were to jump into this niche and make a similar website, I would literally start off with WordPress, just because it's the easiest option to get started with.
Then I would pick a theme (if available in this theme) or I would make s custom layout with the help of ACF plugin and Elementor pro. I've built a lot of websites this way, will be sharing the entire process in the upcoming posts.
Once the theme is all set up, the next thing I would look for is to set up an automation process.
Do you think these sites are manually posting 50,000+ posts? hell no.
It's all automated. The entire internet is more automated than you think it is.
This is where I would recommend you to learn Python because it's the easiest of all to implement (otherwise JavaScript is great too) and then I would scrape and process data from all the websites in a similar niche and publish the data on my site with a touch of my creativity because you can't bluntly copy anyone, that's just plain stupidity, moreover, think of it as an inspiration to make something better.
Then I would place this automation system on a server somewhere on the cloud to do it for me, EVERYDAY. Initially, it requires a lot of work, but once you deploy it, it will work on its own.
These download types of niches can be highly automated. (A hint to wise is enough)
Consistency is everything, and that's what you can achieve with this system.
It will also allow you to focus on other things which are also important.
This is shukrant, signing off, Now close the browser and learn to code, just do, believe me. It's magic.
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