Since I don’t have any game walkthroughs to write about for the last few days, I think I’m going to blog about how to make money in the arcade industry whether as a part-time hobby like most or as a full-time job like myself. There are two reasons to make an arcade site, they are:

1. To make a quality site with lots of gizmos and features
2. To make alot of money

Make sure you know which reason you are going in for because they will lead you in different directions. The big portals that sponsor games and have alot of features and gizmos are not the ones that make the most profit. It takes a lot of money to sponsor games and pay people to develop features unless you know how to develop them yourself. It is also a very long-term project unless you have lots of money to market your site right away. Getting visitors is not something you can do quickly and this type of site faces tough competition and larger barriers to entry than arcade sites that are mainly for making large profits. Visitors will enjoy your site but most won’t return as your average visitors just want to play a game and will not remember where he or she played it.

If you starting this kind of site, pick a good key-rich domain name, do a few link exchanges, submit game pages to popular social bookmarking sites, and sponsor a few games and hope for good long term results. However, if your going this route and you can’t develop games yourself nor do you have large amounts of money to promote it via sponsorships and advertising, don’t quit your dayjob, it going to take a long time before you can make any kind of decent income off your portal.

The 2nd type of site is one that is not focused on quality but on making maximum profit. This basically entails pushing the maximum number of visitors per day through your site. The focus is not to keep them coming back but rather just to push the maximum amount of traffic per day. This type of site often takes little to no money investment and the profit margin is far higher. In this type of arcade, it is very important to pick a key-word rich domain name for SEO purposes and link exchange with relevant sites to crawl up the search engine rankings. It is best to pick a niche like “car games” or “shooting games” and focus on getting good search results for that term. I repeat, link exchanging is key.

The other key to this type of site is traffic trading, a system where you send other sites hits in return for hits from their site(s). This way, you can turn 1 visitor into 5 and push a lot more traffic each day than a non traffic-trading site. Some of the best sites at doing this are sites like ballerarcade.com, meltgames.com, and bootyarcade.com.

You will need to program your own traffic trading script or buy one. You can get good ones off of talkarcades.com, as many members there sell traffic trading scripts. In this type of site, keep in contact with your big trading partners and watch your search engine results carefully and it does not take long(a few months) before you have a decently profitable arcade.

Whichever route you choose is your decision, but make sure you know your goal and go straight in that direction.