The gaming industry is a lucrative one that has recorded impressive growth in the last decade. In 2020, Newzoo unveiled data that showed that 2020’s global games market will generate revenues of $159.3 billion and estimated that the market will surpass $200 Billion by 2023.
The traction and results the gaming industry has produced so far make it evident as the most profitable industry in the entertainment sector.
There are endless possibilities of growth here as technology continues to advance and people aren’t getting any tired of gaming. However, with a lot of opportunities there are also a lot of competitors looking for a slice of the pie.
In this article we'll take a look at some of the top tips and tools used by Paudie McDonnell, a veteran in the niche, to stay on top of the game and well, the search engine rankings too.
Put The Customer First
Your business and websites should be built around the ideology of “How can I help my customers have a better experience?” instead of “How can I make the most money?”.
Ironically enough, those that look out for their customers end up making the most money over long term. Not only you get much more repeat visitors, but people start recommending your brand to others to create a snowball effect.
Again, play the long, fair game over a get rich quick kind of a scheme.
Branch Out When There's Synergies Of Resource Usage
A great example of this comes from when Paudie was starting to have some success with his Australian casino guide AusCasinos and the regulatory framework in the country started to change. On top of having to account for the risk of his website just being outranked by competition, he also needed to worry about sustainable partnerships and regulations being passed in the country. Talk about having all the eggs in one basket!
While creating a new website was an option, it would have been a sizable time and monetary investment. Instead, he decided to white label his Aussie site and use exactly the same technology while slightly altering the offerings and content to fit the NZ online casino market. That's how NZCasinos was launched and helped to reduce the overall business risk by a large margin.
All of this was done at the expense of a registrar fee domain name and about 40 hours of time taken to alter and localize the content for the NZ market.
Small Steps Every Day Add Up Over The Long Run
Nothing great was built in a couple of days. You'll need to learn how to think in months, quarters and years if you want to last in the world of business.
Strive to make some progress on a daily basis that takes you an inch closer to reaching a bigger goal. In a niche like affiliation you can easily break down a big 3-4 year roadmap in baby steps and pat yourself on the shoulder every time one of those steps is complete.
Before long a year will have passed and you'll have made significant progress. This is not a random timeframe, as it typically takes 1 year for a new affiliate site to start seeing some traffic and revenue. This will give you additional motivation to not give up.
Hypothesize, Test and Only Then Build
Deep down we all want to be inventors like Steve Jobs, but most of us fall in the trap of building features nobody really wants or cares about. As a small business owner it's absolutely critical that you micromanage your spend and resources wisely.
Should you pay tens of thousands to a developer to create a feature on your site that might be used by your visitors? Absolutely not.
Instead, try to find ways where you can put a few hundred dollars at risk to find out if people actually want a feature like this. You can set up tracking software like Hootsuite to see what people do on your website or create Google Search Analytics goals to see where people click and what they look for.
Only when there's proof that your visitors want something you go on to spend potentially months of your time and resources on building it.