One of the goals I set for myself this year has been to get a reliable readership of this blog. So far this year, I have not really paid much attention to this goal. Not because it isn’t important, but because it is an uncomfortable area for me. And it isn’t marketing that really makes me uncomfortable, it is having people read what I write. Having others pass judgment on your work is a little scary. Ultimately though, I am here to give and to provide value. The only way to do that is to have people read what I write and to get feedback on what they find is valuable.

Some Blog Marketing Basics

For Christmas, my wife bought me several books that I had been wanting to read. Among them was Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual by John Sonmez. John runs Simple Programmer and does a fantastic job of giving advice to developers.

In his book, he has a few chapters on blogging and how to build a successful blog. (He also has a blogging course that I mentioned at the end of this post about putting your work online.

John has built a successful brand and even has a premium course on how to market yourself. And one thing I have learned already this year, if you want to be successful at something, study others who are successful.

Consistency Is the Key

Of all the things that are listed in the book, consistency is by far stressed the most. If you want consistent readership, you have to write consistently. Sometimes you won’t feel like it and it won’t feel like your best work, but it is super important to have a schedule and stick to it. This is one of the areas I did poorly in last year and have been able to do okay in this year.

Often beginning bloggers don’t post because they don’t know what to write about. Here are a few tips from the book and some of my own.

Have a conversation, debate, or argument with a friend or coworker about a particular technology or idea that you want to write about and turn that into a post. This a great way to find something to write about. And if your friend and you have fairly strong differing opinions on the topic, it is likely the post will be slightly controversial and get people to comment and respond.
Write a response to a blog post you have read and agree or disagree with. While this should probably not be the majority of your posts, it will help fill out those days where you just draw a blank.
Do interesting things. One of the most difficult times I have writing is when I have not been doing interesting things. I haven’t been working on games, and I haven’t been learning about games and game design. When you do interesting things, you can write about you own experience doing it. That is one of the purposes for this blog, to share the experience of learning to design, create and market video games.
Keep a list of blog topics. Do a brainstorming session and write down ideas of topics you can research and write about. Whenever you don’t have any ideas for a blog post, go to this list and pick a topic.

High Quality = High Sharing

After you get the consistency down, you want to increase the quality of your posts. Whenever someone reads a high quality post with valuable information, they are more likely to want to read other things you have wrote and come back for more. Also they are likely to tell a friend and share it with others.

In addition to repeat visitors and their friends, another important side effect of quality content is backlinks. Many search engines use links to your site from other authoritative sites as a measure of quality and authority. This will give you a higher rank when people search for that topic. Also you will get a percentage of the readers from the site linking to your post.

Add Value on Other Blogs

Search engine traffic and other people posting links to your blog are not very likely when you start out. So what do you do about it? You comment on other people’s blogs.

Now don’t just leave a useless little drive by comment with a link to your blog. Actually try to provide value. This will net you goodwill with other bloggers and help you make connections. In his book, John suggests leaving a few comments a day on different blogs.

Share With Your Network

Use the power of social media to share your blog posts. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and everything else. It probably won’t get much traffic, but it is a place to start.

If You Are Brave

Sites like Hacker News and Reddit can get you a lot of readers, at least temporarily. And if the content is good or controversial, some will stick around. A few of the blogs I read are ones I found on Hacker News. The section title is because there are some trolls and hateful people who will leave angry comments or at least try to say something harmful. Thick skin is needed for this and a good amount of confidence in what you are writing.

Create Value

If you create value where you are and leave some behind where you go, you will have no trouble developing a readership for your blog. This is just another example of the universal law of “give and it will be given to you.”

This week, go find somewhere on the Internet to add value so that value will come back to you.

When we make games, it’s so people can see them, play them, and hopefully get some form of enjoyment out of them.

That does not happen if they never make it somewhere that people can find out about your games and then access them.

Therefore, you need to:
A. Tell people about your games.
B. Put your games where people can get to them.

We’ll tackle the second one First

Putting Your Games Out There

Used to, if you made a game, you needed a way to distribute it. This meant physical forms of distribution and lots of money. Thankfully, the Internet has made it extremely easy to put you games in front of a large audience. There are lots of free and inexpensive methods of putting your game out there for people to see and get at.

Game Hosting Specialty Sites

There are several sites that allow you to host your HTML5 game on them free of charge and a couple that have an add revenue sharing model. This is not a comprehensive list, just a few places to get started.

I put my first HTML5 game out on Itch.io and it was incredibly simple. After creating an account, you just need to upload a zip file containing your game and its assets. Just make sure the game has an index.html file.

Heroku

Heroku is a great hosting option if you are playing around with some server side code, or if you want to host your game their temporarily while you are testing it.

A Heroku app is free as long as it is only using limited resources, you can see more about their pricing model here. I use it all the time for testing little ideas.

You can use it to host your HTML5 games while you are testing them. However when you are ready to show them to the public, I recommend either putting them on at least one (read as ALL) of the free game hosting sites mentioned above or hosting the games yourself.

Self Hosting

If you are an extreme do-it-yourself type, or maybe you just want to learn more about the server side of things, you can pay to host the game on your own server somewhere. Almost any hosting provider will do, but I would probably recommend that you use something like Digital Ocean.

A nice simple server will run you about $5 USD a month. In addition, they have a ton of free tutorials on setting up almost any type of server you could want to set up.

Now time for the slightly harder part.

Telling People About Your Game

This is really important. If nobody knows about the awesome game you just made and put online, then nobody will ever get the joyful experience that you carefully designed and constructed for them.

Start With Friends And Family

Tell everybody you know about your game. Don’t be shy about it.

Also, make them play you game and ask for their honest feedback. This may be difficult to get, especially from your mom (who only ever wants to say nice things), but you should be able to tell if they are ready to put it down pretty quick, or if they seem to actually enjoy the experience.

Build An Online Audience And Tell Them About It

Start a blog and put your games and your progress on it.

This is a perfect place to build an audience of people that you can tell about your new games and get feedback from. Once you make a game you want to sell, it can be the place where you market first to people who already like what you do. Additionally if you ever decide you want a career in game programming or game design, it can become a showcase or portfolio of your work.

To get your blog set up, I recommend signing up for the Dev Career Boost blog email course put out by John Sonmez. This is email course is an easy to follow guide to setting up you blog and preparing it to be successful. I found all of the advice to very helpful, especially for deciding on a blogging schedule.

Also, John has a great site dedicated to advice for programmers at simpleprogrammer.com

Now go make some games and put them online!

Category Archives: Marketing

Beginner Blog Growth Tactics