As I announced in my last post, I’m going to do a case study this month, on a new blog that I’m launching. As some of you may know, I’m working together with some friends on a browser game, that will be launched in January. As part of the launching plan, I decided to start a blog about browser games, to support the launch and growth of the game.

logr The blog I’m talking about is Browser Games Talk. As online games are generally a low paid niche, I think this blog can make for a good case study. Since my reasons in this case have nothing to do with money, and everything to do with reaching an audience that I can promote my game to, I can afford making the project public, and talk about how I promote and grow that blog.

What topics I’ll cover in this case study, in the next month, until the game is launched, and after that, as I continue to develop the site:

  • keyword research
  • content creation
  • promotion
  • link building
  • some monetization eventually

Since my only purpose here is gaining subscribers, monetization is not really a priority for me.

I’ll tell you why I don’t think this is a good niche to be in if you’re after the money. First of all, the value of Adsense clicks is horrible in gaming related topics and the volume of traffic needed to make a living of it doesn’t seem to be there for persistent browser games. There are affiliate offers if you write about casual flash games, but my main interest is getting an audience interested in persistent browser games (check out the Imperial Ages Alpha to understand the difference) that take months to complete or they never end. There are no affiliate offers to promote for these games as far as I know. If your reason is money, there are much better niches out there that can be covered.

Now, before I start filling the blog with content and promoting it, here are a few of the choices made so far:

Domain Name: contains my keywords of choice and the word talk. I didn’t go for the word blog at the end, because I didn’t want to limit the potential of the site. At some point in the future I might want to add a forum or a directory and the word blog in the url doesn’t really fit with my plans.

Full Feed: since my only priority here is subscribers, a full feed is the way to go. You should always go for the full feed if you ask me. A partial feed might bring you a few extra page views in the beginning and maybe a few extra bucks, but ultimately, a bigger number of subscribers give you access to better monetization options.

If you want to keep up with the next parts of the case study, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed. December will be focused mostly on this case study, as I prepare for the launch of my browser game.

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