Anyone here actively blog?

kinger8938

kinger8938

kinger8938

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I'm not a great writer, but I often wonder if I would benefit from just writing a blog based around gaming as I finish a game write a bit about it etc. Maybe some impressions or perhaps a personal review. I have a good group of gamer mates but I always feel I could keep talking about a game for much longer than a few comments back and forth on facebook

Anyone here got one? Never really looked much in to it but could become a small hobby

Any advice and tips welcome. Like how do you get readers :D
 
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When you say 'benefit', you would have course do so in most ways, but not financially. Why not though, no reason not too if you have things you want to talk about and will get some satisfaction out of it. That's a good enough reason to do anything IMO, should be for yourself first and foremost. :)
 
I've run a news / review / benchmark site from 2013 to 2016.

What you need to do is find your unique angle, see what works and pump out the quality.

In terms of traffic, (Im an SEO so it's basically my second nature) you need to first have the quality/unique angle as mentioned above then become a marketer and see where it gets you, other than the basic on-page SEO tweaks that is.

I've hit the reddit homepage, got links from sites I use to read when I was younger and many other spotlights (XFactorGamer featured a blog post of mine on his youtube channel).

Here's a few thoughts of mine:

Why would they read your blog vs IGN or Polygon etc ?

Finishing a game that is already out won't get you far (most game websites get the game pre-release) and will have their review up when NDA drops. Those game will be extensively reviewed already. When/If you get better the playing field will level out when you start getting pre-release copies.

You might not be a good writer but you get better the more you write.

Love for the hobby first, money later usually works out.
 
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kinger8938 said:
I'm not a great writer, but I often wonder if I would benefit from just writing a blog based around gaming as I finish a game write a bit about it etc. Maybe some impressions or perhaps a personal review. I have a good group of gamer mates but I always feel I could keep talking about a game for much longer than a few comments back and forth on facebook

Anyone here got one? Never really looked much in to it but could become a small hobby

Any advice and tips welcome. Like how do you get readers :D
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The harsh reality here is years of dedication as you wont get people reading over night. ( a friend of mine has published 3 books and they progressively seem to sell more but still the following is tiny )

The main thing to do it keep things interesting and different. And to NOT do things for other people. Do it for you and enjoy doing it. For example i make really **** YouTube videos that are for ME and then for my friends. I hope anyone else who watches them might enjoy them but the reality is they tend to be " inside " videos where they are funnier if you were there at the time. There is nothing more boring than watching content that is " forced " i would rather watch/read something where the creator had fun opposed to boring script.

Don't be disheartened by any negative criticisms. Embrace them and don't take anything personally. The internet is full of ********.
 
Thanks for the comments, not to sure if I will go for it or. It but I guess there's no harm in doing it just to see if I hit some sort of flow. I guess then finding the time to write becomes an issue too :D
 
has the traditional blog turned into let's plays / youtube / twitch casts of games now?

It's a more fun way of doing it i feel, play a game, point a webcam at yourself and talk **** :D?
 
I've revived my blog as a One-A-Day and plan on working through my Steam backlog this year instead of just playing the same game over and over!

Whilst I'm guessing almost no one reads it I find at least writing allows me to create something and gives me something to do after work so I don't just sit refreshing the forums!
 
I have a blog but lost interest recently and the same with my Youtube channel. I put a lot of work in but because I didn't know what direction I wanted to take, my site/channel suffered for it. I do prefer to read real players views on games and hardware over paid off reviews, so go for it.
 
Psymonkee said:
I've revived my blog as a One-A-Day and plan on working through my Steam backlog this year instead of just playing the same game over and over!

Whilst I'm guessing almost no one reads it I find at least writing allows me to create something and gives me something to do after work so I don't just sit refreshing the forums!
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This isn't pretty much what I want to do, play a game at a time maybe write a little bit about it as I go and maybe others may read about an older game that's no longer in the spot light perhaps.

Probably not a post a day but maybe as I progress through a game. So finish a chapter and write about it etc

Not too sure, I guess the hard part is choosing my first game, or maybe doing something light like a short game of the year list etc though I imagine that's quite common

I will check yours out!

I do agree that YouTube and twitch probably has made blogs a bit old fashioned but I don't know if I have the guts to get anything across over video :D
 
The hard part I found when doing a gaming blog is getting the news from the source as soon as it was released. I found I ended up looking at other gaming websites and re-writing their news articles in my own style as I didn't have access to the insiders news for the industry and didn't really have any contacts in the game industry to exploit. Getting to the point where you are popular enough to get game companies to send you news directly is a lot of hard work.

My suggestion would be to find something to write about that isn't news related so you can pump out original and engaging content without having to wait for games companies to tell you about things. I won't be more specific because I'll end up giving my own plans away and of course I want to be successful but if you sit down for 15 minutes or so and think about it you should be able to come up with some original content.
 
I've thought about doing it purely as a hobby, mainly my opinions on games/gaming/tech that I use so obviously it wouldn't gather many readers (if any) outside of the topics they are also interested in, i.e a gamer who purely played anime games wouldnt be reading my blog about FPS games all the time.

Plus that my opinion is purely that and would largely be uninteresting to the vast majority of people, hence why I haven't bothered youtubing or anything.
 
I think for me at the start it would be about just having a platform to talk about a game or something I enjoy. Even if it doesn't get read I imagine just writing about it will help drive you to enjoy the game/writing even more. Not sure as it's my first foray in to such a thing!

I imagine Wordpress is the way to go?

Are we allowed to use screenshots from games taken by ourselves? I assume so!
 
kinger8938 said:
I think for me at the start it would be about just having a platform to talk about a game or something I enjoy. Even if it doesn't get read I imagine just writing about it will help drive you to enjoy the game/writing even more. Not sure as it's my first foray in to such a thing!

I imagine Wordpress is the way to go?

Are we allowed to use screenshots from games taken by ourselves? I assume so!
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Wordpress is pretty feature rich so you can certainly set up a decent blog with it. Also it is very easy to use so give it a shot and see how you get on.

I imagine you can use screenshots from the game if you want. I certainly don't think there are any laws against it (unless the game is under NDA of course).

I just blog for fun. I'm not really looking to make a massively popular blog or anything but sometimes it is fun to sit down and write an article.
 
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