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Self Promotion
By Corvus | August 18, 2006
One of the best methods of promoting your game related blog these days is the Carnival of Gamers, the current edition of which is being hosted at Cheap Ass Gamer (link). This month marks the first month I didn’t submit a post to the Carnival. Guess I’ll be making up for it by hosting it next month!
There is also, of course, Game Blogs (link) which aggregates posts from thousands of game related sites. I don’t actually find that many people visit me via Game Blogs. I think it probably averages out to less than 1% of my traffic, possibly even less than .5%. Still, anything that sends even one person my way is good, especially since getting included on Game Blogs is a one step process.
A more time and work intensive, but ultimately more productive, method is routinely visiting other blogs and making insightful and intelligent comments. I find my largest and most permanent traffic increases come from this sort of activity. Sadly, I don’t always have the time to read all the blogs I grab feeds from, much less visit each one and comment.
It can also be helpful to post responses on your own blog and link to the posts you’re referencing. Chris of Only a Game (link) and I established a back and forth posting relationship a year ago and it’s led to an increase in community for both of us. This is less time intensive than visiting every blog and commenting, as long as trackbacks are in place and working. These sorts of exchanges are what the Carnival and Round Table events are built upon and are responsible for maintaining the base of my readership.
Also, just maintaining links to quality sites in your sidebar is a good idea. Reciprocal linkage drives a decent percentage of my traffic.
There are plenty of other tools, of course – Digg, Technorati, del.ico.us. Google drives a lot of traffic my way, but not usually in a method that increases my readership long term. Some of these tools take more work than others. I’m sure I could find WP plugins to help me manage some of them more automatically, but I haven’t taken the time. Perhaps I should. Since I’m starting to talk about design specifics for my game engine and upcoming games, it might be nice to re-troll the web for users who may be more interested in that than they would be in high-falutin’ Games as a Narrative Medium wool-gathering.
It’s not a bad idea to maintain profiles on the various social networking sites either, but that usually just hooks in people looking specifically for you, not new readership.
What’s the point of all this post? Two things.
First off, I’m going to start promoting the Round Table more aggressively. Consequently, the bar for entry is going to be a bit higher than before. My regular contributors needn’t worry, you’ve already met and exceeded that quality mark. You are all, in fact, a solid core group whose existence, I hope, will serve to set an implicit mark of excellence. But you can rest assured that in my efforts to drive more traffic to our sites, we’ll not be accepting all and sundry into the fold. The Round Table is now in its second year, so I think its time for it to grow up a little. This is probably going to include a new look for the IFRAME and, hopefully (eventually), some new tools to manage the submission process.
Secondly, a site I read with great interest every day has just made an offer to drive traffic to other blogs. Juuso Hietalahti runs GameProducer.NET (you can follow the link in the sidebar) and posts innumerable tidbits of sage advice about running a small game design studio. Focused heavily on the business side of things, he might not be of interest to all of you, but I know many of you will find the site a great resource. I don’t agree with 100% of the things he posts, but I find them to be well worth the read regardless (as it is with the majority of the blogs I read daily). Anyway… Juuso, in an effort to increase his own web visibility and linkage, has promised to call out sites which appear in his top Technorati links (link). So there you go, Juuso, a link from me. Thanks for maintaining a great resource at GameProducer.NET!
August 18th, 2006 at 11:00 am
GameProducer.NET lost me when it spent so much time on “How to make money with your blog now! Try Textlinks! (This message brought to you by Textlinks.)” Today’s post is about how GameProducer.NET will link to you if you link to him – therefore making him more attractive to advertisers. What used to be an interesting site with discussion of independent game production has lost all value to me.
I was on a brief hiatus, so my traffic dropped in that period. Now that I am back – and at a new site even – it is very close to its very modest pre-hiatus norm.
August 18th, 2006 at 11:42 am
I’ve been reading GameProducer.NET for a while now. He had a lot of good tips earlier on. Stuff I had never bothered to think about. But lately he has been rather funding focued. I understand that it is part of the “Producer” side of things. Perhaps even something that I’ll have to consider in the future.
Ah well… it is about the producer role, not the developer.
And glad to hear that there are good things coming up for the Round Table. I’ve had a lot of fun the past few months, and gotten to think (and write) about a bunch of stuff I love.
August 18th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Yeah, I’m hoping the Site Ad phase will pass. The signal to noise ratio has been diminishing.
August 19th, 2006 at 11:25 am
I really enjoyed those early exchanges! I feel like I’ve been stuck in something of a rut recently, very much focussed on my philosophy, but the thing is I’m really quite digging this rut (pun intended) so I think perhaps I should let my bicycle run downhill while I’m enjoying the sun in my hair.
I’m a bit worried about plans to make the round table less open. I’m rarely a fan of less open things, even when they make things better. But you know me, I back people’s right to choose over most other things, so do what you have to do and we can see where it takes us!
August 23rd, 2006 at 10:27 am
And not to appear TOO eager, but when will you be accepting submissions for the Carnival? I’ve only just discovered these things, and I’d like to keep the momentum of enthusiasm.
August 26th, 2006 at 2:17 am
[...] Introduction As mentioned in the first blogs roundup, you can get your site appear on GameProducer.NET if you just follow the instructions. If you want to see example about a blog that’s doing exactly what this thing is all about check this blog. [...]