Where Does One Get Gaming Traffic From ?

In the old days before the search engine bans, one could just start an adwords account and Google, Yahoo and MSN would basically give it to you. The bidding prices went from lows of .05 cents in the early days right through the roof to 12 then 15 dollars per click.

At one time, people were even reporting 20 plus dollars per click, but most of us thought that this was simply Google discouraging casuals from buying these words.

Soon after, the US fined Google, Microsoft and Yahoo for an amount not less than 100 Million and that put an end to that until the UK’s Queen mother herself petitioned for Google UK to operate by UK rules for UK whitelisted companies.

For the rest of us, however the question of getting gaming traffic looms large on a daily basis.

One obvious method is to use seo ( search engine optimization ) techniques to rank highly in the search engines for gaming keywords and therefore get a lions share of the gaming traffic. This still works, and is one of several prime drivers that we also use to explore this area. Currently, we have over 6,000 keyword phrases in the top 10 of that many search listings with Google.

However, a primary complaint of gaming executives and ceo’s is that the seo route is fraught with mis-steps, mistakes and professionals claiming to have knowledge that they don’t.

I personally think that while there is evidently some truth to the above, the other part of the story is that most gaming executives simply don’t have the patience to wait the 2-4 months for results to start showing up.

And unfortunately many seo professionals perhaps tackle keywords which are far too competitive which means the client is left waiting even after 6 months for results that give them more traffic and more real gaming players.

I would advocate that gaming organizations try a number of traffic generating avenues simultaneously.

• Seo on non-super competitive keyword phrases
• PPC ( Where allowed and yes there are places )
• Indirect PPC ( Not to the primary gaming site )
• PPV ( while it can still be had )
• Online Press Releases ( PRweb being my favorite )
• Social Media manipulation ( I pulled out several million gaming dollars last year )
• Plus, plus, plus ( No, we are not going to let all the secrets out of the bag here, lol )