I'm open to questions, although here are the main aspects of it:
- Started a blog in Spanish about indie/casual games, mostly for fun
- It was part of a (very small) network (NexoBlogs.com) run by a friend of mine on his spare time
- After a year or so I ran out of things I wanted to write about, but then I noticed some terms driving most of the traffic, and focused on them. At this point I was making probably $40 a month
- A year later, after focusing on those terms, traffic grew a lot (even though for most "big" keywords I wasn't number one) and revenue was maybe a couple hundred bucks a month
- At this point I started looking at affiliate programs. Ended up with BigFishGames' which pays 25% of each sale and keeps the cookie on the user's computer for a year
- Another year went by and I was making around $1K or a bit more a month, quite comfortably
- I spent almost a year basically not writing (I'd write a generic summary once a week). Traffic still went up
- After that, traffic started declining, so I hired someone from oDesk to write for 5€ / post 20 times a month to write new content
- As you can read in the auction, at one point income from BigFishGames dropped a lot and I decided to sell it since someone else could do better with it, and it sold for the amount I wanted
- It ended up netting me (sale price aside) maybe $20K in total, and it was my only source of income for a year while I traveled around South East Asia
Google has changed alot. I had sites sitting there and gaining strength before panda and penguin came along. You could almost write about nonsense and be ranking in google over time without any seo 'help'.
Someone asked in another comment how you gain traffic to a blog like this. Is there any keys to getting the word out there fast? Pinterest might be a quality start for this niche?
I literally did zero marketing or anything else in order to get traffic, other than checking which posts brought more traffic and write about that more. So I don't have much advice in that regard.
I'm open to questions, although here are the main aspects of it:
- Started a blog in Spanish about indie/casual games, mostly for fun
- It was part of a (very small) network (NexoBlogs.com) run by a friend of mine on his spare time
- After a year or so I ran out of things I wanted to write about, but then I noticed some terms driving most of the traffic, and focused on them. At this point I was making probably $40 a month
- A year later, after focusing on those terms, traffic grew a lot (even though for most "big" keywords I wasn't number one) and revenue was maybe a couple hundred bucks a month
- At this point I started looking at affiliate programs. Ended up with BigFishGames' which pays 25% of each sale and keeps the cookie on the user's computer for a year
- Another year went by and I was making around $1K or a bit more a month, quite comfortably
- I spent almost a year basically not writing (I'd write a generic summary once a week). Traffic still went up
- After that, traffic started declining, so I hired someone from oDesk to write for 5€ / post 20 times a month to write new content
- As you can read in the auction, at one point income from BigFishGames dropped a lot and I decided to sell it since someone else could do better with it, and it sold for the amount I wanted
- It ended up netting me (sale price aside) maybe $20K in total, and it was my only source of income for a year while I traveled around South East Asia