Building your own website or blog is made relatively easy with the swarms of free templates and plugins and widgets and gadgets floating around these days. If you have just a little bit of knowhow and a few minutes to spend cleaning up your design features, you can have a great-looking website for little to no cost.

Many times, people are making their websites a personal thing, strictly to keep in contact with folks. But let’s be honest: that’s what social media sites are for, and you can steal their bandwidth and use their features and add-ons to gussy the place up. If you want something really personal, however, it’s all about making your own site. And if you want to make some extra dough in the process, it’s all about monetizing that site.

There are a few ways you can go about monetizing your blog or website. You can check out Google AdSense, find various sponsors, go for the link-exchange route with “lesser” sites whose webmasters may slide you a few bucks, or many other methods out there. But it all comes down to one thing: traffic.

Your site needs traffic, and in order to get the most of your traffic, turning visitors into repeat customers, you’ll need something to draw them in and keep them coming back.

This is where online games can come in. The market for old arcade-style games is absolutely huge. If you think about what really made Facebook famous, it’s certainly not the profiles. MySpace and a dozen other sites had them. It’s actually the low-rent, old-style games offered that made the place explode.

If you want some return traffic, adding a “Games” tab to your blog or website is a great idea. Using some free Flash software, you can install games like Pacman, Star Wars, Flight Sim, and many, many more arcade-style games that are 100% free to download and always free to play.

A great idea that some sites out there are using: they’re installing forum software on their sites and building a small community focused on these games. People chat about their high scores, the nostalgia factor, and the atmosphere is welcoming and invites people to return.

Even if you’re starting a site to sell weight-loss eBooks, offering people a place to play roulette online is still a great way to branch out and to attract a few more people to your website.

Overall, there are literally thousands of gadgets out there you could add which would all lend some flair to your website, but games are certainly more addictive than most written content or fish-feeding software you can load up.