While my last post may not have been very interesting to many, there was a reason behind the post. I wanted to conduct a little experiment and teach myself a thing or two about directing traffic towards my site.
Here is what I did
I saw something that caught my eye. Nothing big, just that Nintendo has decided to release a new Zelda video game. As a little boy I used to play the original and as I got older Nintendo continued to release new games. The last one I played was a game called Ocarina of Time which was terrific.
With my limited Zelda knowledge, I decided this is a simple enough question to post and see if I can think of clever ways to drive traffic.
After writting the post, I googled Zelda Chat rooms and Zelda Forums. There must have been hundreds. So I chose two, registered myself and entered the chat room/forum.
In the chat room
My first stop was a chat room. When I first posed my question, I sensed a little aggression. Lots of comments like, “Where did you come from?”, “We don’t actually discuss Zelda in here”, and “Leave the chat, we don’t want your kind here” ( not sure what they meant by that last one).
After I calmed them down a little and they listened to what I had to say, a huge argument broke out amongst the chat room on this topic. There was name calling, Zelda insults etec. It was a disaster.
So I decided it was probably time to sneak out while I could.
In the Forum
Next I decided to try out a Forum. This was a much better idea. I could post what I want and just let it sit there while people viewed it and commented.
So I posted it under the title “Should Nintendo keep making more Zelda games?”
In less than 24 hours, I had 104 people view it and 13 responses (not the best stats but it was my first time trying it out and didn’t make a very sexy post).
Here are some of the comments I received:
“Seriously, you come to a Zelda fan site and ask if Zelda should stop being made?! How ’bout going back to it’s roots? Nintendo not making Zelda anymore would be worse than Nintendo keeping the Zelda’s this easy. Sure, I’d like them to be hard again, but an easy Zelda is better than no Zelda.”
“Getting rid of Zelda would completely get rid of the purpose of Nintendo, and the reason why we are all here.”
“If you want to dis Zelda games, and in extension, Nintendo, then go to a Zelda-dissing forum or something, but leave teh hardcore Zelda fans to their ranting about timelines and general concepts that after all these years still makes the game series a magnificent success!
“
I didn’t realize my post would get so many people ticked off and I probably should have thought this through a little more before I did it.
In Conclusion/the results
I had a chance to analyze some of the metrics from this post. I saw a huge jump in visitors to my blog and almost all the new viewers came from the one forum I posted it on. So in that regard it was a huge success.
However, I intended to have these people visit my blog and then post their comments onto my page. This did not happen so in this regard I failed.
What I learned
I got many takeaways from this experience:
- Zelda forums are not for discussing Zelda.
- My thought process was good but my delivery was flawed. I should I have put more thought into the experiment before hand ( I will know for next time)
- Driving traffic is very effective. If done properly you can expect to see some high volume brought to your site. With a little more time/effort I could have increased my viewers by huge numbers.
- In order to drive the traffic, you cant just show up and expect people to visit.
You need to build up rapport and establish yourself as an expert or knowledgeable in that space. If you do, they get pretty ticked off. So watch out for that. - I asked people to post responses on my blog and they didn’t. But they did respond on the forum. While they didn’t respond where I wanted, they did respond, which is a start.
- There is a crowd for everything.
I will need to try this a couple more times to really get good at driving traffic to web sites. . .
But I will say that the first attempt was rather successful.