Written by: Calvin Kammer

Today I’m writing about the most meta blogpost I can think of:

Why you should think about starting a blog for your board game project.

Reader beware: as someone who writes blogs I’m an advocate for blog writing.

1. Writing

1. I’m writing a blog once a day about being a game designer. As it stands, I feel like there’s a million ideas about the business or game I’m working on, and it’s hard to juggle all of those ideas at the same time. Writing a blog will help with organizing my thoughts on various topics, all the while improving my writing skills. As a game designer, I always want better writing skills. 
2. I’m not always successful with what I’m writing. Sometimes I don’t get a blog a day done, but I do my best to make it an average of one blog  a day. Writing any more than a sub 500 word a day blog seems draining, and it’s not exactly guaranteed that anyone will read this! I’d rather have that extra effort be put towards whatever project i’m working on at the time being.
3. A great part is that I already feel more confident in my writing. Whether or not my writing has improved is open for debate, but I can tell that I am writing faster and getting my thoughts out easier than when I started just two weeks ago. It reminds me of writing in college, except for all the negatives like worrying about being graded.

2. Create value for others

1. When they want to look something up and find your blog, it could help them. E-Newsletters are great for staying up-to-date, but blogs are better for their archivableness. That’s a word? If someone ever has a particular question about your game, they will type certain keywords such as (YOUR GAME+RULES) and hopefully find relevant content for it. Here’s the thing; unless you are the one creating that content those search results can take your potential website viewers anywhere! By creating relevant blogs that are helpful to viewers, you are creating content that will create value for you far more than the time it takes to write it.
2. Thats probably how you got to this blog, if I had to guess. There are a few keywords hidden within this board game blog. When web surfers lookup key phrases or questions and they find a relevant post about it, they are likely to click onto the website. If it’s ugly, unoptimized, or isn’t relevant to the searched term, viewers are likely to click away or otherwise “bounce” from your page. This is not good, so make sure your content is relevant.
3. Keywords
4. Jamey Steigmeier’s blog has been great for answering certain questions about the Kickstarter process I had. This isn’t really an endorsement, though I can see how others would get value from his blog. He seems to know what he is doing, though I’m not exactly sure if his process is still reliable in 2022.

3. Helps boost my online presense

1. Search Engine Optimization
1. Any business that uses the internet should have an online presence. Having traffic go to your site improves your site’s scoring which will increase the odds that your website will be at the top of the search results. The top search result is exponentially higher than the next two, and being anywhere below the third result is now equivalent to being on the second page of Google. If you compete for the “Best board game for two 2022” keywords, you will want to do your best to be as close to the top of the page as possible, to obtain the highest amount of traffic from that search!
2. Shows that the website is active. An active website, that attracts new and previous visitors perform better. New content is a reason for them to come back, and allows your website to attract different visitors via differing keywords.
2. Content marketing
1. Not what I’m doing now, but what I did for my escape room. Content marketing is solely focussing on hitting keywords, less so about offering personalized content and insights like what I’m attempting now with Blurps from the Bloated Toad.
2. I don’t like content marketing. It feels less organic and purely informational. Content marketing reframes from the author trying to relate, in favor of offering keyword matches that search algorithms use to display results.
3. Might eventually go back to it just because it does work, though it takes time to see any results. For example, my best performing blogs are posts I wrote over two years ago… and they only starting to gain traction about six months ago.
4. For example, my “Solo Escape Room” blogpost is my top performer with 100 monthly views I wouldn’t have otherwise. Not a lot, but every bit helps. It’s something that took me an hour to write over two years ago that is still helping me out today.

4. “Top 10 games” lists are fine because they are content, but uninteresting to me.

1. Good for SEO, but audiences don’t like to be tricked. Make sure the content is relevant and trustworthy. Google will surely ding you if you mislead viewers!
2. Competition is higher for these. Viewers typically look up these kinds of keywords when they are far enough down the sales funnel to where they might make a purchase. This is relevant because the closer you are to the end of the sales funnel, IE closer you are to making a purchase, the higher potential you have to be a customer. If you are searching for these keywords you are going to be very close to making a purchasing decision, and as such more companies will aggressively target those keywords in blogs and search ads to ensure they are within the top three results on a search page.

5. People don’t typically engage unless you have a value proposition.

1. Viewers won’t comment
1. Creating an account and everything, c’mon man no one wants to do that.
2. Viewers won’t share
1. I’ve never seen people other than the blog’s author share a blog
2. Just because they don’t use the share button doesn’t necessarily mean it has not been shared. That’s a triple negative I refuse to correct.
3. I’ve also never really attempted to have audiences engage
1. Once I have a compelling enough reason for them to want to engage, I will revisit this sentiment.
2. Engagement will undoubtedly improve SEO performance, but to what extent I have no idea.
3. If it’s not on a social media platform, is it worth even making?
1. Making yes, if you derived value by writing it without needing an immediate audience
2. If it’s an especially “good” post, share it to the appropriate channels!

Thanks for reading! If you found this to be engaging please engage in the conversation by commenting or sharing this post. I'm always open to feedback, and am looking forward to continuing expanding on Blurbs from the Bloated Toad. -Calvin