Today I’ll take time off writing about games and such to bring a subject that’s been on my mind for a while: Maintaining a blog. Yeah, what I’ve been doing for a few months with David. Fun stuff that, but it’s not exactly easy, and we’ve seen that first-hand.

 I’ll go through the basics of maintaining a blog, and the troubles we have encountered and such. 

Writing

Yeah, the most important part in maintaining a blog is writing for it. Always having some new content, not suddenly dying out to come back months later (I see blogs that do that all the time). I feel bad when we’ve had 2 days without new content. 

So of course it’s important for me to get some new content as often as possible. But as much as I’d like to get 1 post a day, it’s not exactly easy. There’s a limit to the number of games I can play, or anime I can watch and such. 1 post a day isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Or sometimes, like now, there are not lots of games coming out. Sure, I have a big backlog (and some upcoming reviews), it’s still kinda hard to get lots of posts when there’s little going on. Sometimes we just have to rely on other things like, say, posts like this one, or features like Valkryst’s cosplay posts. (and you can expect some more features in the coming months, I’m constantly thinking about that)

Real life

This is one of the big “problems” with maintaining a blog: Real life interferes. A lot. Sometimes I’ll start writing a post, and suddenly my friends will come to my home and we’ll start gaming, or go out to the restaurant or things like that. Well, I’m a full-time worker, and Dave is a part-time worker/university student. And add to that the fact that we have some kind of social life out of gaming and anime-watching and writing in a blog. Lots of evenings after work I’m hanging out with friends, which leaves little time to game. And it’s gonna get busier for me as time goes on. I’m currently saving money to eventually buy a house sometime next year, which will eventually take more of my time. 

Needless to say, my time for playing games and writing posts is relatively limited. But that is not the only problem. Finance is also a small problem. We managed to get relatively cheap web hosting and domain names, which is fine, but to review games, you need to buy them, which costs money, and it’s not something you’ll always have handy, or something that you’re trying to save for something else (like me saving for a house). Or just normal things to spend money on like gaz, food, outings with friends, car payments, car insurance, internet, cellphones. With all that, saving money isn’t exactly easy and buying games doesn’t exactly help. Good thing services like gamefly and gameaccess exist, those are pretty nice. 

Real life is indeed quite a “problem” when it comes to blogging, moreso when you’re an adult and have lots of random stuff to deal with. But in the end it’s still not that hard to get time to blog, it’s just that real life sometimes gets in the way. 

Getting people to see you

Yes. That’s hard. We’ve had quite some trouble with that. Though it’s going a lot better since we got our own domain name and hosting, it’s still hard to really become recognized. On the old address, at the beginning it was good if we got 20 visits in a day. Sometimes we got really lucky and passed 40 visitors. And when we posted big stuff like the White Knight Chronicles trophy list or the old preview for Final Fantasy Dissidia, people really visited a lot and we got huge spikes of visits with over 100 people in a day.

Now we got bigger posts, visitors are a lot more plentiful than before, making “huge days” from the previous address, normal days now. As I said, over 50 posts in 1 whole day was huge before, but on here over 50 posts is pretty standard, and during this month there’s only 2 days we got under 100 visitors, and most visitors check out multiple links on the site which  is great. 

But still, we’re not really known, and you don’t hear about Save Points anywhere on the internet. I don’t know if that’s going to happen someday, but it would be nice. We don’t expect to become a household name like Gamespot or IGN or gamefaqs or ScrewAttack or other big gaming sites, heck, we’re doing this because it’s fun, but it would still be really cool. 

There are some good options to get your stuff to be seen, but it’s a lot of work to get anything from those too. You can see the “SHARE” buttons on each post, where you can send our posts to things like Digg, reddit, delicious, StumbleUpon and hundreds of others(really, there’s a bunch that pop up if you click on the down arrow in the box that appears when you rollover that button, most I don’t know about). Barely anyone other than me and Dave “Digged” our articles, and the other sites don’t seem to have any return really.(Digg our reviews/posts if you like them… btw ). 

Conclusion

There’s probably more I could talk about, but let’s keep it at that for now.

Fact is, maintaining a blog isn’t easy. It’s hard to get people to visit you, real life interferes a lot and it’s hard to constantly get content to write about. Add to that our complete lack of equipment to make any interesting (or original) audio/video content (so we can’t capture gameplay videos or even film ourselves), that doesn’t really help; though I’m hoping we get something to eventually do fun videos for Save Points. 

So yeah… If you’re thinking of starting a blog up, I say go for it, if you have the writing skills to back it up, or an interesting vlogging concept. Or whatever. You’ll probably have fun doing it. But don’t expect things to pick up awesomely from the get-go, unless you’re a badass like the Nostalgia Critic(and other people on his website of course) or the Angry Video Game Nerd, or have something that will really draw people in like those 2 did. 

And expect Save Points to expand in the future, of course.

jobocan Random, Rant, sexy