How I grew my gaming blog from 0 to 500k monthly pageviews in 6 months
From Jan to June of 2019 I was hard at work at growing the blog of our gaming website through good old content marketing. Bellow I’ll explain what I did and where I was (or wasn’t) successful in somewhat of a case study form.
A quick summary: I created educational gaming content and focused my efforts on organic growth through Reddit and SEO. The most valuable thing I found is the great synergy between the two channels, which allowed me to secure good backlinks and grow the website. I believe this practice is highly transferrable to other content projects. I also talk about the opportunities and risk of relying on trends.
TABLE OF CONTENT:
- Circumstances Shaping our Strategy & Goals
- Choice of Channels
- Choice of Content
- Results
Circumstances Shaping our Strategy
It’s important to mention my circumstance because they shaped the choice of content strategy to a large degree:
- No money: We had no money so the only option was organic growth.
- No team: one person needed to be able to do this alone. Running out of money meant we had to let people go and it also meant we couldn’t afford freelancers. Consequently, the workload of the campaign had to be manageable for someone working on their own (and doing additional business-related work).
- The website already had a target market (players and viewers of the Dota 2 competitive video game), which comes with its specificities. It was offering an educational service, so it would make the most sense for the content to be (at least remotely) educational as well in order to keep things consistent and to build a non-confusing brand.
- We weren’t selling a service through the content (yet): the service we were offering had 0 traction, so we had written it off and weren’t trying to sell it.
> Content Strategy Goals
Understanding why you want to put content out there is vital for choosing the right what and where. Our goals were to:
- Reach a wider audience within our niche.
- Build a brand: the community should associate our website with high-quality educational content.
- Find partners: use the visitor growth and the positive reception from the community to reach advertisers for a source of revenue, content creators & influencers for new product development & marketing campaigns, etc.
- Find a working service & business model: In the long run, get the needed resources (enough funds and an engaged audience) to run validation experiments.
Choice of Channels
To a degree, each channel requires different types of content to get the best results, and as I was working alone I simply didn’t have the option to spread myself thin. So, a choice had to be made. The viable candidates (based on where our target audience hangs out on the internet) were Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Google (SEO).
> Facebook & Twitter:
We already had some following on our social media channels (around 9.5k likes on our Facebook page and 2.5k Twitter followers), so it was the easiest option to pour most of my efforts into these channels to grow them. While this is a viable path forward to grow brand awareness and reach, it had two problems:
- High-quality content, especially educational, wasn’t a hot commodity on FB and Twitter for our niche.
- Memes are terrible ad carriers and finding an ads partner/sponsor was one of our top short-term goals.
So, I still posted my content on the two social media sites just to keep the pages alive and to get the occasional share by an influencer in our niche when appropriate, but I didn’t spend more than 5 minutes per day on these channels.
> YouTube:
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, YouTube was a good fit for what we were trying to do. YouTube is a great platform for gaming content. Moreover, videos as a whole are quite decent for in-depth educational content as well as for monetization through sponsorships. That said, I had very little experience with video editing (compared to a lot of experience writing articles), which meant a steeper learning curve and risking lower quality content early on. This was something I couldn’t afford as time wasn’t on my side (and I couldn’t afford to pay a video editor either).
I decided YouTube was something I’d use for easy to edit content (interviews) opportunistically and I’d leave more ambitions YouTube content for the future.
This left me with Reddit and Google (SEO) as the two main channels I’d focus on:
> Reddit:
The greatest advantage of Reddit for new brands/sites is that you don’t have to gradually build an audience of your own — the audience is already there in the relevant subreddits. You just have to create the right content and post it, and it has a decent chance of attracting attention. You can quickly test for content/audience fit if there are subreddits about your niche.
The drawback is that you can’t build an audience on Reddit itself (a simplification, but in Reddit, the subreddits get followers, not the people who make the posts), which means that your content efforts on Reddit are not cumulative unlike your efforts on other social media sites (or SEO). Moreover, you cannot spam a ton of self-promotional content or the sub mods will ban your account.
The good thing in our case was that there were three active subreddits very relevant to our target audience. I was aware that Reddit wouldn’t be our main source of traffic in the long run. Yet, it was the perfect place to get the first eyeballs on my content and to get valuable reader feedback.
> Google (SEO):
The great thing about Google (SEO) is that it could be a constant source of traffic. While an average social media post has a very short lifespan, an SEO optimized article could bring in (mostly new) visitors for years. The bad thing about SEO is that it requires time to build the needed domain strength to rank your content pieces, especially if you are fighting for competitive keywords (which is the case for most lucrative and/or older niches) and if you are a new website.
There are two main important factors to ranking content:
- Content Quality: does it provide the best answers on the internet for the search query?
- Backlinks: do you have high-quality websites linking to your content?
> Synergy between SEO & Reddit:
Posting my SEO content on Reddit proved to be very synergistic for three major reasons:
First, the most active users on the subs on the topic/niche are likely highly-engaged in it, which means they will often provide extremely valuable feedback (although you need to have hard skin). You can use this to improve the individual content you’re posting (and give it a better chance to rank higher), but it also gives you a chance to refine the whole concept and content creation process for the type of content for long-term results.
Second, most businesses (websites, content creators, influencers, etc.) in your niche will be reading the subreddit at least occasionally. This means that if you need to reach out in the future for any reason (collaborations, guest posts, shares), they are going to recognize you, which makes things easier. Moreover, they are more likely to have seen your most popular work (it reaches the top of the subreddit) rather than your “failed” content experiments that don’t get good traction.
Third, news sites (including large ones) on the internet use niche subreddits to quickly gain info about any newsworthy event and to judge the reaction of the people close to it. This makes their job of writing news about topics that they aren’t intimately familiar with easier. If they use your content as a source of info, some of them would be decent enough to link back at you. This will happen rarely, but it will be the source of your best backlinks.
For example, one of my guides got a backlink from pcgamer.com — one of the biggest websites in the gaming industry. As a small website in a small niche, getting a backlink from a site as huge as PC Gamer would be close to impossible with any other conventional linkbuilding method.Another example: sometimes my content would get translated into other languages and reposted on other sites. Most of them ware decent enough to give credit with a link, and if they weren’t you can always reach out to ask nicely (if you can find them).
Historically, above 75% of our traffic has come through Google while Reddit holds less than 7%. Yet, I believe my efforts on Reddit were key for finding success on Google. This synergy should apply to any active online community in any niche (if your content is good), it just happens that Reddit nowadays has most such communities.
Choice of Content
The content had to:
- Be useful to players who want to improve and be competitive (educational).
- Complement the chosen channels.
- Carry advertising well, since I wanted to find a paying advertising partner (discussed in-depth here).
After considering several options, I chose three main types of content I’d focus my efforts on:
> Analytical/educational pieces about esports matches/events:
- Pros: easy to produce if you are (or have access to) a high-level player and you are following the esports scene; carries ads very well for our purposes (the major reason I was able to land a $30k advertising contract); attracts interest on Reddit as its related to the hot topic of the day — any ongoing tournament;
- Cons: short lifespan and not particularly useful for SEO; not particularly shareable on social media;
Example: TI9: Day 1 Meta Recap & Analysis
Reception: Reddit
Traction: 12,500 Pageviews, mostly from Reddit
> Interviews with an analytical/educational focus:
- Pros: great for getting attention on Reddit; easy to get shares on social media;
- Cons: lots of effort required to organize and produce; short lifespan;
Example: A Conversation with Dendi
Reception: Reddit
Traction: 13,600 Pageviews, mostly from Reddit, some from Twitter and FB, but wasn’t retweeted by the interviewee so it had the potential for more
> Evergreen educational articles:
- Pros: great for SEO; long lifespan;
- Cons: (possibly) high effort to get them ranked in Google; not particularly shareable on social media; harder to gain traction on Reddit if they don’t say anything new;
Example: Dota Underlords Tier List: Best Alliances and Builds
Reception: Reddit (the article has been modified and reposted since then)
Traction: ~396,000 Pageviews, almost all from organic search, continues to attract readers
Content lessons:
It’s quite clear from the examples above which type of content brought the best results in terms of traffic. The educational content with a long lifespan that provides an answer to popular Google queries became by far our biggest traffic driver.
The analytical articles about esports matches and events, however, were the most original pieces of content I created. Even though they did bring considerably less traffic than the SEO optimized educational articles, they were the main reason we were able to secure an advertising contract and they were the most recognizable content series, helping us build brand recognition in our market.
The last content type — the interviews, were the most problematic. They brought comparable traffic to the analytical series, but they required a lot more effort to produce. Due to my limited resources, I decided to stop doing interviews and focus only on the other two.
That said, I don’t think interviews are bad for content marketing — on the contrary. With more experience on my part to be able to do them better and a touch of originality to be able to differentiate them, they might have grown in popularity. This would have required a lot of effort, however, and given our circumstances, I decided to invest my energy elsewhere.The Opportunities and Dangers of Trends
Since we were a startup with investors, our long-term goal wasn’t to become a gaming blog. The blog was simply a tool to grow our audience, and the end-game was to pivot and improve our subscription service.
In the middle of our content marketing campaign, a new opportunity appeared. A game mode in Dota started gaining a lot of popularity (Auto Chess) and eventually, Valve (the creators of Dota) did a standalone game based on it — Dota Underlords.
Now, the Dota 2 niche is very competitive in SEO terms — Dota is ancient and there is tons of content out there by high-authority websites. The content supply certainly exceeded the demand (on Google) by the time we entered the scene, and content marketing is subservient to the basic economic principles as much as anything else.
Auto Chess and Dota Underlords, however, were something new, and there was a content gap. We decided to jump on board with two feet because it gave us a chance to become THE authority site on those topics without damaging our initial goals and brand (Dota Underlords is still closely connected to Dota 2 and has largely the same players). If Dota Underlords continued growing, this would provide us with good business opportunities in the long run.
We achieved this goal to a large degree — the website ranked on the 1st position in SERPs for a lot of Dota Underlords related keywords.
This helped us grow in the short term (in fact our peak month is when the Dota Underlords beta launched), but sadly for us, in the long run, the bet didn’t work out.
Dota Underlords started shrinking quite rapidly and in a few months, the concurrent players fell from a peak of above 200k to less than 10k.
Naturally, since we had invested most of our content efforts in Dota Underlords, this was reflected in our traffic. A shrinking audience meant a negative feedback loop that we didn’t have the resources to fight against (i.e. to start from scratch), so the project was left on pause and the involved people moved onto other things.
From a business standpoint, shifting heavily towards Dota Underlords was the right move for us, albeit very risky. (I discuss this in my 5 Lessons from 2 Failed Startups article).
From a content marketing standpoint, this is a great example of the opportunities and risks that trends provide. New trends are your best bet to find rapid growth, especially if you are well-positioned to be the first one to make a move. Yet, the ultimate size and longevity of these trends are always suspect. From a content strategy standpoint, good diversification or the ability to continually jump on new trends (which is e.g. the business of most news websites) is quite vital.
Results
So, let’s go over the goals and see which ones we were able to achieve:
- Reach a wider audience within our niche: this is quite subjective. We found growth, but it wasn’t sustainable enough in the long term thanks to the risky decisions to go all-in on a topic/trend.
- Build a brand: some content series started to gain recognition and the website — return visitors.
- Use the visitor growth and the positive reception of the content to find partners: we managed to land an advertising deal and to find some influencer partners for joint projects.
- New validation experiments and a working product/service: we managed to test one new idea for a service. Sadly, we didn’t have the resources to run the experiment properly and the results were not good enough to sustain it.
Albeit the story of the project doesn’t have a happy ending, I believe it has some great content marketing lessons. I hope you found all of the above useful! Cheers!
