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.

I found a lot of MMO news sites, and wrote to maybe 5-6 of them.
One of them actually picked up my mail and created their own small article on the game, linking back to my post for further details.
Since this was actually a fairly reputable gaming site, this spawned twitter messages and Russian, Polish and Italian gaming sites actually wrote a small story of their own. All linking back to my post!

My post also went up under "previews" in Blue's News, and the game developers themselves did some promotion of the article on their end, so I have gotten very good traffic on my site from this post.

I think that this is a very good example of how I am trying to learn from my traffic experiences and thinking about how I can continue to find new relevant ways to get more traffic.

I probably used at least as much time promoting my post through the various channels as I did on actually writing it. And it paid off!
This just goes to show that it is worth it to put in the effort of really promoting your material.
And keep on thinking about new ways to drive in traffic. Don't let yourself fall into the trap of just using the same 2-3 traffic channels that you know work. Keep looking for new opportunities!