Review of My Brother's Gaming Review Site

[TaxGuy]

I posted a link in my signature of the gaming review site my brother started about a month ago. He started this with little to no knowledge of building a site, thus it is hosted on Blogger instead of Wordpress, however, he did get a good .com domain for it and has already gotten business cards for his site.

So far he has driven about 40k visitors, mostly through linking to reviews he's left on major gaming sites and has driven some Ad-Sense revenue, however, I keep harping on him to sign up for The Challenge so he can better promote through SEO and create better affiliate links on there to better monetize his traffic.

In addition, he's reaching out to the major gaming companies to get products to review and has already had success with Nyko in getting the new Raven controller to review and he is also looking into major gaming conventions that he can register for as a vendor.

At the moment I am proud of him for creating quality and unique content as well as understanding the need for going "niche"(we discussed today how he goes after the 2nd level games instead of the games that everyone is reviewing), however, I know that this can grow to be a nice fastlane venture, which I would like to join up as a consultant with an agreement for equity in exchange for doing some promotional work and helping to monetize this considering that I will be very busy with the tax business coming this winter.

So with that in mind, what are your initial impressions of this site and what should he do in the short-term to:

-keep driving traffic
-better monetize the traffic

As far as the long-term, I have already discussed creating an eBook and reaching out to top affiliate marketers to help promote and sell through the major networks(Clickbank, CJ, Paydotcom, etc).

Thanks!

 

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[biophase]

I just read his review of the Niko Raven controller. I felt it was a decent review and most importantly it had many comments from others. This tells me that there was a need for his review. Also the fact that he will retest it with MW2 based on reader comments shows that he's going into the right direction.

He should get rid of ther blogger favicon. Also I believe he is using a free blog? He should get off that and get his own hosting.

His site main image does not make any sense. It's a rocket?? and it's also not proportional. It's too big height wise and too short lengthwise and not centered.

He has too many widgets on the right side. Also some are too big and screw up the layout. I would think that adding a simple adsense block someone above the fold would bring in a little money.

Is he making any amazon affiliate sales?

 

[TaxGuy]

Thanks for the input Kenric.

1) I told him about the favicon and this will hopefully be changed soon. As far as hosting, do you think he should go with a HostGator plan for now? It doesn't seem that there has been any server load issues with the free hosting, however, that is not a problem he would want as it would bottleneck his traffic.

2) The rocket is the symbol as ASG stands for "All Systems Go", just a cheap image he got off of Google Images, I guess he could do a 99Designs logo in the near future or design his own, he's always been artistically gifted, the issue would be designing it on the computer or getting a quality scan from a hand drawn piece.

3) He's acknowledged that there are too many affiliate links on the side, but I don't think he knows how to remove them, cleaning that up would make the site a lot more user friendly and focused for true affiliate clicks

4) He has an Amazon Affiliates account, however, I don't know what his conversion is at the moment. I think having some hyper-text links in the posts as well as clickable images would improve the flow of the site.

 

[biophase]

Thanks for the input Kenric.

1) I told him about the favicon and this will hopefully be changed soon. As far as hosting, do you think he should go with a HostGator plan for now? It doesn't seem that there has been any server load issues with the free hosting, however, that is not a problem he would want as it would bottleneck his traffic.

2) The rocket is the symbol as ASG stands for "All Systems Go", just a cheap image he got off of Google Images, I guess he could do a 99Designs logo in the near future or design his own, he's always been artistically gifted, the issue would be designing it on the computer or getting a quality scan from a hand drawn piece.

3) He's acknowledged that there are too many affiliate links on the side, but I don't think he knows how to remove them, cleaning that up would make the site a lot more user friendly and focused for true affiliate clicks

4) He has an Amazon Affiliates account, however, I don't know what his conversion is at the moment. I think having some hyper-text links in the posts as well as clickable images would improve the flow of the site.

It's not due to load that I say he should get his own server. It's due to the blogger platform that he's on. He needs to get off of that if he's seriously going to blog.

There's no need to get a real logo done. Just put a better one up. I would recommend no image at all.

Are those his affiliate links? How did he get them up there?

 

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[FDJustin]

So, uhm. What's wrong with the blogger platform?

If/when he changes, will he be able to 301 his links?

 

[biophase]

Here's are a few reasons from the terms or service agreement:

Termination; Suspension. Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system for some time for back-up purposes.


By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services.


Google disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Service or any other client software. Google also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you.

 

[LightHouse]

I would get off Blogger ASAP like kenric mentioned. Since he doesnt have many posts yet he can put up pages with the same link structure that 301 to the new blog or posts. it can also be done in htaccess but would need someone with experienece to set it up. At that point he can remove the post date folders from the URL's and just keep it at %postname% in wordpress.

Then he can start cleaning it up and doing something with his traffic.

 

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[mavwrx]

Yea, I'd get off blogger. Use godaddy, dreamhost or bluehost. PM if you want a coupon for godaddy.