How to start a Gaming Blog site: A Step-by-Step Guide

 If you’re a huge gaming fan and enjoy writing, why not combine the two and start a gaming web site?

There’s no better time to create a gaming web site than now. In this step-by-step guideline we’ll walk you through ways to begin a web site, including these key steps:

Ready to make your blogging dreams a reality? Here’s our ultimate information on the way to begin a gaming weblog today.

Why Begin a Gaming Blog?

The gaming industry continues to grow in strength and both niche and mainstream interest, especially with the growing popularity of esports. This makes now the perfect time to get started on your gaming website.

For many, a gaming site can mean a new career — for others it’s the possibility to create a hobby from a blend of their passions. Here are some of the best reasons to begin a gaming blog site this year:

• Create a career and personal brand for yourself in the gaming or esports industry
• Grow a community around a topic you’re passionate about
• Understand more about gaming to support a future career
• Get exclusive access to new technology, hardware, and games before they launch
• Attend invite-only press events and gaming conferences
• Monetize your website and make money from doing something you love

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Here’s how you can make it happen.

Step 1: Make a Plan

The first action when you commence your own gaming website can often take the longest. All through life it’s important to plan and prepare, and blogging is no exception. When you take the time now to get all your ideas down on paper, you’ll avoid distractions and stay focused as you make your way through the web site setup process.

When planning your web site, here are some useful questions to consider:

Why Do You Want to Website?

Your “why” should always guideline your decisions, so it’s really important to be as clear as you can on this from the beginning. Do you want to inspire others? Create a community of passionate fans? Launch a profitable blogging media empire?

It’s helpful to remember that you can have more than one purpose — it’s possible to create a thriving community and be profitable, for example.

What Do You Want to Website About?

There’s lots of talk in the blogging world about finding your niche and how this can help you to find your audience. What this means is that in case you can figure out what’s unique about your web site and where it fits into the gaming web site community, you’ll find it easier to promote your blog site and attract the kind of readers that you want.

To help you find your niche, work out which aspects of gaming you’re passionate about. Do you favor a particular game or type of game? Are you interested in esports? Do you want to blog about the gaming industry? Are you a huge technology and hardware fan? Blogging about your interests is a great place to get started on, so make a list of the topics or themes you want to cover on your website.

Who Will Read Your Gaming Blog?

We often begin a website as a hobby, so sometimes we don’t always consider our audience. When you want to grow a successful website and monetize it, your audience becomes your number one priority.

Take some time to build up a picture of your ideal reader. Make notes about who they are, where they live, what they’re interested in, and where they like to spend their time. This will help you to create high quality content that will interest them and also help you work out where to promote your blog.

What Should You Name Your Gaming Blog site?

After you’ve decided what you want to website about, the next move is to find a name. This can be tricky, especially as common words and phrases may already be taken. You also have to watch out for any trademarked phrases, especially in case you web site about one game, publisher, or platform only.

When it comes to naming your site, the choice is up to you. You could go for a generic, widely-appealing name like That Video Game Web site, or something more creative like Destructoid.

We’ve created a guide on how you can find creative blog site names and how you can name your site — these are a great place to begin when you want some inspiration.

Step 2: Buy a Domain Name

Now that you’ve found the right name, it’s time to get your blog online.

The next move in the process to begin your site is to register your domain name. Your domain name is also known as your web address or URL — for example, ours is www.bloggingtips.com.

It’s good practice to have a domain name that’s exactly the same as, or very similar to, the name of your website. Should you can, register yourblogname.com — this makes it instantly recognizable as your weblog, helps build your brand, and is easy to remember.

Our favorite place to buy domain names is Bluehost. The service is great and the pricing is really affordable — around $11.99 per year for a .com domain.

Once you’ve registered your domain name, have a look at our information on the way to set up a custom email address to use for your weblog.

Step 3: Buy Web Hosting

The next stage in starting your gaming blog is to buy some web hosting. This is where your content will be stored, or hosted. When your domain name and hosting are linked together, your visitors will be able to see your website and enjoy your content.

Our recommend web hosting company for bloggers is Bluehost. While we’ve reviewed a number of competitors like HostGator and DreamHost, Bluehost remains our favorite. They offer affordable plans, reliable service, and an easy-to-use control panel.

For most bloggers, we recommend you invest in the Basic plan from Bluehost. This gives you all the functionality you need and plenty of space to start a gaming blog site, plus the ability to upgrade should you need to in the future.

Step 4: Install WordPress

Every website needs a content management system, also known as a CMS, to power their blog site and content.

There are several popular content management systems available, but our favorite and the one we recommend for bloggers is WordPress. WordPress is an industry leader that offers all the functionality you need straight out the box. It’s a free software, supported by a community of developers and experts, so it’s always being updated and improved.

If you choose to use Bluehost as your hosting company, the fastest way to install WordPress in a few clicks is from your dashboard. Like any software, if you’re new to WordPress we recommend you take a look around and familiarize yourself, but with a WordPress website it’s easy to learn as you go.

Step 5: Customize Your Blog

You now officially have a site, but it’s not time to release it to the world just yet. Before you launch your blog site you’ll want to customize your WordPress website to suit your brand, appeal to your audience, and look the way you want it to.

Install a Custom Theme

Although WordPress comes with a few free themes pre-installed, it’s a great idea to invest in a third-party theme if your budget allows.

Third-party themes are often designed with a particular purpose or theme in mind, so you’ll find themes designed for businesses, for lifestyle blogs, for online magazines, and for any niche you can think of.

On Themeforest you can browse through these gaming themes, or head to another popular resource like StudioPress for more inspiration.

It’s easy to install a WordPress theme, but all themes come with a “readme” file with instructions if you need them.

Install Plugins

WordPress is a brilliant CMS, but you can also install plugins to add extra functionality or to help make it easier to grow or promote your blog.

A popular plugin for bloggers is Yoast SEO. This plugin will help you to understand search engine optimization (SEO) and apply best practices to your weblog to help your content be discovered more easily by readers.

Another useful plugin is Jetpack, from the creators of WordPress. This handy plugin adds security features, stats, marketing tools, and design options to help you customize and protect your weblog.

If you write gaming or hardware reviews, you may find WP Review useful. With this plugin you can add star or points ratings to weblog posts, which will also appear in the snippets displayed for your posts in search results on Google.

Brand Your Blog

Once you’re happy with your theme and plugins, now’s a good time to customize the way your weblog looks. Small changes like switching the colors on your theme to match the colors of your logo can help to create a more “branded” or attractive presence.

If you have a logo for your weblog, make sure it’s prominent as part of your header so that it’s one of the first things people see when they land on your weblog. When you don’t have a logo, you could create your own using templates from Creative Market, or hire a freelancer from a marketplace like Fiverr.

Step 6: Write Content for Your Blog

By now your website looks professional and ready to launch. You’ve probably also filled in some of the pages, like your “About Me” page, and added your contact details or social media links.

The next action, and one of the most essential, is to write content to publish on your new gaming website.

Plan and Write Your Content

The most successful blogs are those which publish new content regularly, so it’s a good habit to plan your content in advance. Not only will you be more consistent, but you’ll find it easier to write a great blog site post if you’re not under pressure to publish right away.

We all like to plan differently, so find a system that works for you. This could mean you write your website post ideas in a journal, plan directly in WordPress using a tool like CoSchedule, or use Trello or Asana to create projects with deadlines.

How often you website is up to you, and it’s always a good idea to create a schedule that you can stick to. This might be one post per week, or even one per month to begin with. If you blog site about the latest gaming news you could find yourself writing and publishing new website posts several times a day.

Game Reviews

One of the most popular types of content for gaming blogs is reviews. Depending on your niche, this could include reviews of newly launched games, hardware, accessories, and even reviews of gaming conferences or esports tournaments.

The great thing about reviews is that they’re often interesting to people for a long time. Although sales are higher and interest peaks around launch dates, people love to pick up a bargain from the store so your reviews will receive hits throughout the year.

As you become more prominent in the gaming industry, you may be invited to press events or exclusive launches, or even review games ahead of launch day. This can all create engaging content for your readers.

Gaming News

While there are already big players in the gaming news arena like Gamespot, that’s not to say that your fledgling weblog can’t grow into a destination for gaming news — especially in case you write about very specific gaming topics.

Unlike reviews, gaming news tends to only be relevant for a short time. This makes it better for promotion across your social media channels, where it’s likely to be shared, read, and commented on by readers. For those who cover breaking news in an interesting way, or you have an exclusive, this can attract a real surge of views for your web site.

Walkthrough Guides

Gaming is an acquired skill, and even for the most seasoned of gamers there’ll be a point where we put down the controller and search for a walkthrough or manual.

Walkthrough guides can be one of the most popular types of content for gaming blogs, as they serve a direct need. In the event you become known for creating excellent, helpful, and thorough walkthroughs, people will bookmark your website and return every time they get stuck.

Community Insights

If you want to build a strong community and brand around your gaming website, it helps to write about the gaming community — especially within your niche or area of expertise.

Community means different things to everyone, and is as simple as writing about gaming meetups in your local area. It can also be more related to the topics you write about, like an in-depth tutorial on what’s happening in the esports community or what’s popular on Twitch. A great way to grow and involve your community is through user-generated content — you could ask people what their favorite thing about a new game is and include these in a write-up.

Interviews and Behind the Scenes

We all love to see behind the scenes and find out what really goes on, and that’s true for the gaming niche too. This can be an especially powerful type of content if you blog about the gaming industry, or you focus on the often-forgotten aspects that make a successful game like sound, design, and marketing.

When you’re just starting out, you could interview some of your favorite gaming bloggers for a feature. As you build your influence, you could approach games studios, designers, and artists for interviews or exclusives visit this.

Step 7: Launch Your Blog

Your weblog looks professional, you have a handful of posts up, and you have a schedule of blog posts ready to publish. It’s time to launch your gaming web site!

Until now your gaming blog has been a secret project or a blog that’s been hidden from the world, and now it’s live and ready to be shared.

To help your ideal readers find your weblog and keep coming back, here are some tips on the way to attract people to your weblog:

• Tell your friends and family and ask them to visit the blog
• Email your network, especially if they are in the gaming industry or are fans
• Promote your blog site posts on your social media channels
• Join blogger groups and become part of the community
• Pin your website posts to Pinterest
• Optimize your content for search engines using search engine optimization (SEO)
• Look for guest blogging opportunities
• Join gaming communities online and start out to contribute to discussions
• Keep an eye out for media or promotional opportunities
• Invest in paid social media advertising

It takes time to grow your website into a successful venture that makes money, so stay positive and focused on your goals.

Do You Want to Grow and Monetize Your New Site?

Congratulations on launching your new gaming web site! This is an exciting time, so while you feel the enthusiasm for blogging, why not continue to learn and grow your blog?

For our latest blogging tips from experts, make sure you sign up to our newsletter. You’ll receive an email every week with advice and insights on ways to grow and monetize your weblog, including how to get started with affiliate marketing. It’s a great way to continually improve your blog without searching through Pinterest or Google for ideas.