Having your own 32 man public server comes with many advantages… power to kick, ban, choose maps, put fun mods, give admin rights, have private server slots, put up a password for private matches, basically everything a gamer wants.

The downfall however, is the cost of operation of a gaming server!

As you know by now, servers take up a LOT of bandwidth, 2000 GB per months if they are full time 32 man servers. That doesn’t come cheap and servers survive on donations from team members, players and the odd private slot sale. As we all know, usually donations don’t cover the entire cost of the server and you usually end up paying for the rest yourself.

But..

What if it was possible to actually reverse that and actually GENERATE money from the server?

Not only would the server pay for itself, thus making it essentially a free server, but could even give you extra income every month for whatever YOU want. Better yet, once you have a self-sufficient server, you can put up another one.. and another one…etc. Imagine having a fleet of 15 servers all owned by you, all generating income for you.

I’m telling you, once you start having 3-4 servers, EVERYONE knows your name. I know there’s a little ego in there, but when people know you run a few servers, you immediately become THE MAN. If you have a team, this allows you to recruit better players, and if you don’t, then you better believe it’s easy to join pretty much ANY team shall you choose to do so. Who wouldn’t want a server admin that runs 3-4 servers on their team?

The method

The one thing that gaming servers have is… gamers. A huge audience of gamers. On a typical day, a server can see upwards to 800 different players, all competing to be the best. They all want the top score, they all want to be the best player on the server and up until now, it was just a matter of spending a lot of time playing. You’re going to capitalize on this and generate a lot of revenue for yourself.

You’re going to give them what they want, and make money in the process!

In your server message of the day, server description, welcome screen, server website and even IRC channel, you have massive areas that you can use to recommend products.

When you recommend a product to a gamer and he purchases it, you get a cut of the profits.

This is called affiliate marketing and it is one of the most under exploited venues in the gaming world!

Here’s the process:

1. Recommend a gaming product and direct the traffic via your affiliate link.
2. Gamer visits your recommended product and purchases the product
3. You generate money that pays for servers, upgrades and gaming hardware.

The absolutely best product to generate huge amounts of revenue is the gaming book called Fragging Fundamentals written by Eric Lancheres.  This is an excellent book geared specifically towards FPS gamers that want to improve their game to the professional level. It’s THE reference & training manual for gamers. A review can be found here.

It also happens to have the LARGEST affiliate payout of all gaming products available, which is GREAT for generating revenue. For each sale that you recommend, you make $17 USD. Using some simple math… if you have 800 gamers that play on your server daily, and out of those, 50 visit your recommendation daily, and of those 50 you have 2 that purchase the book, you just generated $34 in a day.

At $34 per day X 30 days, that’s $1020 generated by your server per month!

What if you had 4 servers? That’s $4080 per month of revenue and close to $48960 a YEAR just from running 4 gaming servers. Not bad…

Doesn’t that sound better than the alternative? Where you have to beg people to donate and pay out of your own pocket to keep the server alive? I’d rather make close to $50000 per year than spend hundreds every month for a server.

The Setup

Step 1 – Sign Up.

First, you sign up for the Fragging Fundamentals affiliate program, it’s simple, free and takes only a few minutes to sign up. If you have ANY problems signing up you can simply send an email to the affiliate manager and you’ll get immediate assistance. (The reason you have to sign up is to get your own link and to tell them where to send the money!)

Sign up for the Fragging Fundamentals Affiliate Program

Step 2 – Get the link & Code.

Once you signed up, you get your own personalized link and affiliate code. Whenever you recommend the Fragging Fundamentals book, you must use the link provided in order to track your sales. This is what says: “I sent you this customer!”.

Your affiliate code should look something like this:
http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=###

Where the ### at the end is your affiliate number. When you recommend visitors, you must use this link (with your code) in order to identify that you sent the customer.

Step 3 – Tweaking your Link.

Tweak your own link code to maximize sales and make it easier for people to type. There are two ways to do this and both have the same result.

Method one: Create a simple redirect on your own server. Open up a notepad document and paste the following into it (replacing your ### with your ID):

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh”
CONTENT=”0; URL=http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=###”>

Then save that file as index.php and place it in any directory you want on your webserver. For example, if your team’s website is: http://www.supereliteteam.com, then you would create a directory called frag at http://www.supereliteteam.com/frag/ and place the index.php in the frag directory.

Then instead of sending people to:
http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=###

You send them to
http://www.supereliteteam.com/frag/

This makes it easier for them to remember and to type.

Method two (easier): Simply Email Eric at Fragging Fundamentals and ask him to set up a custom directory for you on the Fragging Fundamentals domain. What you’ll get is a special URL just for yourself, for example, if your server is called Northern Resistance, you would get a custom link made for you at:
http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/northern/

So you could send traffic to that easy to remember URL instead of having to remember the long http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=### code.

Here’s a template of an email you can send Eric.

“Hello Eric,

My name is <insert name> and I just signed up for your affiliate program, Fragging Fundamentals. I would like to have a redirect link created for me on your domain to further promote your book.

My affiliate link is: http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=###
and if possible, I would like to have http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/<insert name here> as a redirect URL.

Thanks,

<insert name>
<insert email>”

Send Email Eric at Fragging Fundamentals an email to request your custom redirect.

Step 4 – Server Title & Description.

Once you have your special URL, you should put it in your server title and description.
For example, if your server description is:

“Super Clan- 32 Man Server – Pro Maps ONLY”

You would change it to

“Super Clan – 32 Man Server – Pro Maps ONLY – Go Get www.fraggingfundamentals.com/SuperClan/“
or even
“Super Clan 32 Man – Recommends www.fraggingfundamentals.com/SuperClan/“
or even
“Super Clan 32 Man – Improve Your Game www.fraggingfundamentals.com/SuperClan/”

Step 5 – MOTD – Message of The Day.

Similarly, you can get creative with your message of the day by using one of our sample messages:
“Play every day? Want to get better? http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/SuperClan/“
or
“Want to improve your game? Read http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/SuperClan/”

Step 6 – IRC Channel.

A great way to generate revenue for your team is using your IRC channel. You can put your link there as well, in the title or even the welcome message.
” SuperClan is proud to recommend http://www.fraggingfundamentals.com/SuperClan/ “

Step 7 – Website.

Finally, if you have a website or even a forum, you can post a link in there recommending the book. This is one of the best ways to generate revenue for your team.
Sample messages you can put on your website:

” If you want to improve your game, make sure you read Fragging Fundamentals ”
” Rated one of the best books on gaming, Fragging Fundamentals is the key to improving your game”
” The FPS bible, Fragging Fundamentals takes a novice player through the steps to becoming a pro.”

That’s it! You should be on your way to generating massive revenue from these simple steps!

Update: A lot of people have been asking where to sign up….

Sign up for the Fragging Fundamentals Affiliate Program here