More successful 1st party content generation

I just posted my second article on my main blog that is based on a dialogue between me and a game developer:
City of Steam preview.

After my initial success with contacting a developer and e-mailing them some questions, I was quick to pounce on an opportunity I saw the other day, for repeating the success.
In a gaming forum that I frequent I saw a small publisher posting about their game, obviously trying to do a little promotion.
I figured that they would probably be interested in an article even on a smaller blog, if they were using game forum posts as a means of promoting their game.

Sure enough, after contacting them by mail, I got an e-mail interview set up and got excellent some excellent responses back that I could use for a preview article.

This time I tried to apply all the knowledge I have picked up about post promoting into really securing traffic for my post.
I submitted the article to reddit. I made sure to do some extra tweets on Twitter. I also used Empire Avenue, posting in their video game community and making an ad.
Then I went on the search for relevant websites that could be interested in this sort of article.

If I could get them to either do a small piece themselves, with a link to my post, or just post a straight up link to my post, then I could get even more traffic.

I submitted my post to Blue's News video gaming site, and then looked for MMO specific sites, since the game I was writing about is an MMO.

Guest Posting

You're writing posts on your own blog, happily spewing out content for your own little crowd, and you're trying the best you can to get some traffic in.

But what about writing posts for other peoples blog and trying to funnel some of their audience into your blog?

That is the power (I hope?) of guest blogging.

I have started dipping my toes into the world of guest blogging and I'm looking forward to seeing the effect on my blog.

Shortly after creating www.lightspeed-gaming.com I was lucky enough to get contacted by a guy from one of the gaming forums that I visit, who was in the process of starting up his own game specific blog.

He complimented me on my writing and asked if I wanted to maybe write some posts for him on this new blog.

And so started my career as guest poster on the Shalesey Cast Blog.

I have actually made quite a few posts on that blog by now, though most of them are not "true" guest posts, in the sense that they are posts that I also have on my own blog, so they are not unique content for this blog.

How do you get users to interact with your blog?

This is not a how-to post, but an actual question..

Light Speed Gaming is now just over a month old.

In that time I've had more than 10.000 visits, which as far as I can gather is actually a pretty decent amount for a brand new blog.

All these 10k visits have left me with less than 20 comments from readers. Probably the number is closer to 10 if you subtract my own comments and a few comments left by people I know.

What I really want to try to do is build a sense of community and user interaction.

I have tried encouraging people to leave comments, provide feedback on the content of my blog or tell me what they'd like to see next, but none of this has been met with more than 1-2 comments.

Getting more quality blog publicity

We already talked a bit about how to get traffic on your blog but I have picked up a couple of new "tricks" recently that I thought I'd share.

If you're blogging about a particular interest that you also explore online, then you probably know some resource sites for that interest.

In my case, where my subject matter is primarily video games, I use the gaming news site Blue's News all the time.
After I created my post based on game developer feedback, as discussed in my previous post, I thought that this might actually be a post that was worthy of being mentioned on Blue's News.

So, again without any hope of success really, I sent a mail off to Blue's News submission address and let them know I had made this post and included the link.

Creating content for your blog - Don't act like the small guy

As I was making posts for my blog I had the mindset that I am just some random nerd sitting in my apartment blogging about my hobby.

Why should anyone pay any attention to the stuff I write or be interested in helping me create content?

Then a couple of weeks ago I was reading up on some game developer sites and I thought to myself that it would be really cool if I could make a post that was actually based on real interaction between me and a game developer, and not just me ranting monologue style.

So with no hope of getting a reply at all, I set about writing to a few game companies, sending out mails with a few relevant questions for their games and asking them if they could possibly take some time out to answer me.

Much to my surprise I actually got a response back the very next day from the "Orcs Must Die!" game developer "Robot Entertainment", where they answered my questions perfectly.

Interconnecting your blog with other social media sites

Once you make a blog you have a platform for expressing yourself.

You'll want to let the world know in as many ways as possible that your blog is out there, for example by using the various methods that I discussed in my post about getting traffic.

Besides this direct promotion to get traffic there are also the more indirect methods, such as setting up a Twitter account, Facebook page or Youtube channel.

None of these outlets will necessarily bring in more readers by themselves, but it gives you presence in social media sites that millions of people visit every day.

Digg it - you're doing it wrong?

While I have had great success with Reddit as a means of driving traffic to my blog, I have had nothing but complete and utter failure with Digg.

Digg seems to be a lot more about creating a network with other users and having followers if you want any chance at all of having your stuff displayed for the general public.