For many people, the idea of running a website about videogames is an attractive one. They see the likes of the IGN, Gamespot and Eurogamer teams becoming minor celebrities in the gaming universe, and want a piece of that action. Some look on it as being a career choice.

Whatever your reasoning, I’m hoping to draw on my experience of editing, building and running game sites – some successful, others not so much – in order to provide a guide that shows you what to do in order to build your gaming brand, what to expect, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls on your path. So, let’s look at what you need – mentally, more than anything – to run your own online gaming publication.

1. Realistic Expectations

This is, far and away, most people’s stumbling point. A lot of people who decide to run their own site do so under a massive misapprehension. Their idea is simply that if they a) set up a website, b) copy and paste a few news stories for it and c) email a few game publishers, that they’ll d) end up with free games dropping through their letterbox every other day.

This. Does. Not. Happen.

You should check out my article on dealing with publishing companies’ PR teams here:- http://rewiredmind.com/gaming/the-sixteen-stages-of-pr-hell/

It just isn’t that easy. If your goal is simply to get new games to play each week, you should probably join LoveFilm, or get a job that pays you enough so that you can splash the cash every 7 days on all the new releases. The simple fact is – despite the dismissive article that I linked to above – that PR teams only have so much in terms of resource to distribute, meaning that they – for the greater part – have to try to get the greatest return on their investment that they can. In short, if you don’t have the raw traffic coming to your website, a lot of public relations folks will turn their nose up at you, and rightly so. Their job is to get the product they’re promoting to be seen in a positive light by as many people as possible, so that it’ll sell more. If they have one promotional copy of FIFA 12 left, and they have the choice of sending it to your site with its 100 visitors a week, or another site that has 700 visitors a day – which do you think they’ll pick? Bingo.

If you’re looking for a gravy train, look elsewhere. It will generally be a long-assed time before you can even think of getting your hands on anything “free” that you actually want. You need to be looking at around 500 unique visitors PER DAY before you should even think about asking for anything to review. That’ll sound high to most small game site owners, and low to most big game site owners, but before you hit that magic 500, your time is much better spent link-building and networking than it is firing off emails to PR teams.

You have to be willing to put in the hours.

You need to bear in mind that running a videogame site is NOT easy, no matter what anyone tells you. In a lot of cases, you’ll be expected to be a Jack-of-all-trades. You’ll be the guy everyone comes to for writing advice, the greatest diplomat in the world, the PR guru, the advertising salesperson, the website designer, the editor, the newscaster, the interviewer, the dolly-bird spinning the tombola at the raffle, the bug-fixer, the chief wit, and – of course – the expert gamer. Oh, and did I mention that when you tell a friend, family member, or colleague that you run a game site, they’ll expect you to know everything about every game ever released, and they’ll also expect you to be able to get your hands on cheap or free games, consoles and accessories for them, too?

Think of it as being forced to ride a unicycle while whistling the theme from Miami Vice, balancing a ball on your head, speaking to your mother on the phone, reading three textbooks and saluting the flag – all the time keeping an eye on the baby crawling towards the live electrical cable draped across the floor, and trying not to wet yourself whilst you haggle over worthless items like you’re conning tourists at a Turkish market.

3. The Ability to Learn

If you’re a big fan of shooters and never really enjoyed driving games, but the only titles coming out this week are indeed driving games, you have to be able to learn about – you guessed it – driving games. Its absolutely essential to know the ins and outs of what you’re writing about, when you’re writing about it. You don’t have to like it persay, but knowing your Scandanavian flick from your double-apex, and your double-apex from your chicane will put you head and shoulders above the lazier sites out there.

It also helps when you’re editing the work of your writers. If they don’t know what they’re talking about, you need to be able to pull them up on it before the article goes live because – and you can bet your bottom dollar on this – someone out there will point out your site’s mistake quicker than a hiccup. An innocent comment about how the “Live Seasons” mode is one of the most important parts of FIFA 12 will make about 4 million FIFA players all instantly deem you to be an idiot.

And even if you want to run a “specialist” site that just cover driving games, or soccer games, or Japanese tennis simulations featuring cartoon characters, you still need to be able to learn about other genres. Crossovers happen – more often than ever before.

You’ll also need to learn how to plan your time wisely, how to promote your site, how to actually put your site together, and much more. If you’re unable to accept that someone else knows more than you about a subject – even a game that you consider yourself to be an “expert” in, say – you may as well stop right now.

Say it with me now…A – Always, B – Be, L – Learning.

4. The Ability to Put The Site First

For some reason, you just bought Bodycount. You want to play it. You’ve been waiting all day to have a go. Someone else is reviewing it for your site. You have ICO/Shadow of The Colossus HD to review – which is launched today – and you also have exclusive early access to the Battlefield 3 beta, which you’ll need to write about.

You have to be able to put the game you WANT to play to one side, so that you can get your site work done in a timely manner. If you want your site to be successful, you should treat it as if its a job. You can’t play Bodycount when you’re sitting in an office answering phone calls, or hammering nails in on a building site – so you can’t play it now. The work comes first.

That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t have regular breaks or do anything fun. Just that you should be aware that if you want readers to come and see what you have to offer, you should give them a reason to do so. One massive way of doing that, is by providing timely content. You only need to look at the facts to determine that. A review published before a game is released, or on release day, will ALWAYS get more traffic than a review published after the game’s been on the shelves for a week.

5. The Ability to Multitask

If you put aside time between 8PM and 10PM to write a review, say, you have to be able to break away from that when a news story leaks at 9PM and nobody on your team is free to cover it – all the while bearing in mind that the review still needs to be done, your emails need to be answered, you have some promotion to do, and that episode of Game of Thrones to watch. If you can’t keep three or four balls in the air, you’re going to have a tough time.

6. A Thick Skin

You’re going to need a thick skin. I didn’t have one to start with, and it caused me no end of problems. I’d review a game, find someone on a forum disagreed with it and was calling me an idiot, and go in with all guns blazing. It hurt my brand, and made me look like a bit of an asshole. To be fair, I AM a bit of an asshole – some would say that “a bit” is underselling it somewhat, in fact – but I’d rather prove it in other ways.

When people comment on your articles, they’re helping you. Even if they’re flaming you to death, they’re liable to incite responses from other members of your community, or even from folks that are just casually visiting and that wouldn’t normally have commented. That’s a good thing. If they’re talking about your site in a forum, they will have linked to your article – providing you with more visitors. That’s a good thing, too.

Your thick skin will come in handy for dealing with PR staff, as well. It can be tough when you’ve been chatting to a PR person at an event, and they’ve told you to your face that they’ll definitely support your site with screenshots, videos, interviews, review code and press day invites and that you should email them to confirm your details, and then they act as if it never happened as soon as they’re behind the relative safety of their computer screen. I would need to take my shoes off to count how many times this has happened to me over the years – and you need a thick skin to deal with it.

Repeat: There Is No Gravy Train

There. Is. No. Gravy. Train. Get it into your head, NOW. Running a gaming site is hard work. If you go to a trade show or public gaming event, you have to run around grabbing footage, conducting interviews, and taking photos rather than playing as much of the games on display as you want to. When the next big thing hits the shelves, you’ll be stuck reviewing something that only two thousand people will ever play. You’ll take a chance on a writer that looks to have potential, and he or she will completely screw you over by taking off with your one review copy of a game, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do with the PR guys – since no matter what happens at your end, they’re still expecting you to provide coverage. And brace yourself, because this will happen time and again if your writers aren’t writing for cash.

However, running a site is also great fun, and really rewarding. The purpose of this article is to try to make you understand that if you want to run a successful site, or even one that just doesn’t totally suck, you need to put in a LOT of work. You’ll meet some pretty cool new friends along the way, but if you think that it’s all “free” games and press events, you have completely the wrong attitude for the job, and there’s no way I can say that any more clearly than I have.

In the next article, I’ll give you an overview of the basic technical nuts and bolts that you’ll need in order to get your site running, using nothing but a model of Tracy Island that I’ve constructed out of sticky-backed plastic and dog hair.