How To/ How I became a freelance gaming writer/blogger

I've been freelance writing for my websites, and other websites for
about a year now. I've been pretty successful with my other sites/blogs
such as Animal Crossing Addict  and iPod Games, News, and Hacks, but I'd like to tell you guys how I did it, and how to pretty much be a successful video game blogger/journalist.
Okay, first off, It doesn't matter what your age is, because I'm
only 14, and am a freshman in high school. I know 12 year olds that do
this. You've just got to be dedicated to it, and not leave one of your
projects/blogs half-assed, or only post every couple of weeks. I
started off with blogger,
not really caring if my blogs get noticed by anyone, but just doing it
for fun and experience. After that, I started working on my own
website, and moved all of my blogs over to WordPress,
because of the praise and traffic that it was getting. Then after finishing my
website, I moved some of my less-traffic blogs over to my own server,
and got a domain for them, but kept some of my more high-traffic blogs
at WordPress (as you can tell with my iPod site). Personally, I think
that WordPress is the best blogging system around not just because it's
easy to use, but it's open source, which means that it's free, and
there's tons of themes, plugins, and modifications that you can do, so
it can pretty much fit any of your needs. Basically you can choose
whatever you want, there's WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Syrendipity,
and many many more.
First off, think of your visitors when you write your articles. You
can't be one-sided, and just write a bunch of bull shit that's not
true, but you write it either because you don't like the console, game,
genre, developer....Whatever! You need to follow by this especially
when your writing reviews, because you really have to think of the game
itself, and not of your personal opinions. Here are some tips on things
that you may write about, and how you should go about doing it:</p>
Reviews: Like I said before, don't be opinionated with
developer, console, genre, or anything like that. If you can't look at
the game for what it is, and how good it is, then just don't review it.
Previews: Don't spoil the game is the #1 thing to remember.
Tell enough to where your going to get the readers interested, then
maybe make a separate page with the spoilers, and warn the readers that
if you go on, this might ruin the game for you.
General News: Just post the news, and the content that it
contains, and don't put a lot of extra crap in between. You've got to
get to the point, with a little bit in the beginning to get the reader
interested, but not too much to distract them from the actual story
itself.
That's about it for most of the articles that you'll be writing for
your site. Next up, is about how to actually attract visitors to your
site, and how to make sure that they'll come back.
Okay, so you want visitors to your site, but you also want them to
come back, and to make sure that they will continue to visit your site,
and to recommend it to people that would like video game news. But how
do you go about doing this?
First off, sign up for SiteMeter, or if your running a blog with WordPress, you can get a plugin that will get you the stats. You can get one from WordPress.org.
This will help you track your stats, and will help you know how your
doing on getting visitors, and see what they're rate of coming back is.
This will also help you figure out what kind of stuff that you may need
to add, edit, or get rid of. Then, after a couple of weeks, or months,
check back at the archives of stats, and see what months had the most
hits, and what content was posted that month, and that would probably
be what you mainly want to post about. Don't let this change everything
that you post, but if your readers like a lot of interesting oddities,
or "out there" stories, then you should probably post some more.
After making these changes, check back after another couple of weeks
or months, and see if you get the results you want. If you do, then
continue with what your doing, and hopefully it will work out.</p>
Next is getting press news and releases. The best place I think is GamesPress,
and there you can get exclusive news from companies, and press
releases. They also have a list of PR contact so that you can maybe get
a couple of PR's from different companies, and then you can get news
straight from them. I'd say wait until you've got a pretty big site, so
then you won't look like some random person just trying to get news.
You should also join sites like IGN, N4G, Destructoid, Joystiq, and Kotaku. They have TONS of gaming news, and are some of the biggest sites about gaming. But ALWAYS link back to your sources, or you can get into a lot of trouble, and it
will also make you look unprofessional, and probably an ass.
That's about it for now. I'm not going to get into detail and
practically write a book, but I've been getting a lot of questions, and
thought that this might help a lot of you. Thanks for reading and I hope this helped a lot of people out.

~SuperMario290~