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Great advice Game producer! I'm guessing the memberships come from people reading the blog? What sorts of call to actions are there for people to buy?
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Glad I could help. Memberships come from people reading the blog - who get there by reading about the blog via forums (like this. indiegamer.com is a forum where I've been participated for years, so I've built some credibility there. It helps to some extent I think). Couple of days ago one game producer from big game company joined the insiders. He said that he didn't know another forum where the discussion would come from producer's point-of-view. There's plenty of game development forums in the net, but not others (or at least not MANY others) coming from this angle.
I'm simply concentrating on giving people a choice to join the Insiders. I have ad in the site, I have written some insider blog entries (about to write another one again as 2 new members joined).
I have a
page that describes the membership benefits - and I'm working on to improve that page. Few days ago I changed PayPal image to number of smaller images showing the payment methods. The payments still go through PayPal, but now intead of telling "pay via paypal" I'm telling that "you can pay using visa, mastercard, paypal.... etc.". People unfamiliar to Paypal aren't unfamiliar with credit cards.
My main interest is to have intelligent discussion without the noise - and there sure is lots of noise in some game development forums - the $50 one time fee keeps away spammers. I'm also adding some advertisement, news sending, eBook (sales guide) and other incentives to make the offer more promising. Basically I'm making sure that when I charge one time $50 payment, the members are sure the get more than their money's worth of advice.
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Other than that, I understand your point about benefits. I spent about an hour planning a new site to be an umbrella and include the buy/benefits/call to actions and so on. Now it's a question of budget and time allocation.
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Small hint: templatemonster.com can provide nice layouts - in case you need some. dreamstime.com is also a great place to find pics. I'm sure there's royalty free images in other places as well. These can help you to make the site look more professional.
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Continuing the conversation, what advice do you guys have for selling services via blogs?
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I continue answering...
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How do you get readers to become customers?
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Well, I think the main idea is to make sure that your customer benefits more about the service you offer. This doesn't mean that you should have a low price, but rather that you should make the offer so that it's sure to benefit the customer. In case you offer advertisement or sponsoring - why not add a permanent link to page 'sponsors' and a blog post (or two) about your sponsor besides the monthly ad slot?
In case of advertisement, I think it's important to give as much as TRUTHFUL statistics as possible. I have added plenty of information to the
sponsor page where I tell what kind of people visit the site, where they come from, what kind of services they need etc. etc. I also visit unique visits & pageviews (be sure to tell if it's Google Analytics or Awstat or whatever software you use). I think it's necessary to give as much as information possible as easily as possible. I wouldn't recommend having only "contact me for details" - at least not if you are a really big corporation. Make it automatic as possible. It's much easier for potential sponsor to simply read your statistics than start an email conversation with you.
Now, that got little off-topic, but regarding services I think it's pretty much the same:
- show what you have done
- show who has benefited from your service
- explain how someone has benefited from your service (exposure? visitors? additional income?)
- show truthful numbers & figures (in X months, the page rank went up to Y and got ranked in the top Z at ranking system Q)
- tell who and what kind of people or companies can benefit
- show how the potential customer can benefit
- include your real name, phone number, email, company address in visible spot (not always necessary, but if you want to sell to companies, they will be interested in knowing with whom they are dealing)
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What does blogging offer that a corporate website wouldn't, for example?
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I think "personalized channel with your readers". There's growing number of corporate blogs coming, but I think the 'cold' corporate world cannot beat the warm, nice feeling & transparency blogs can offer.
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What do you do to find relevant traffic to visit the blog (i.e. those people who could convert...)?
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I concentrate on writing unique content, word-of-mouth and then promoting my site.
Much of my traffic come from:
- Word-of-mouth
- Big game development forums (in my case they are gamedev.net and indiegamer.com)
- Big news sites (search from technorati - there's some high ranked news sites that can bring traffic)
- Press releases (about interesting interviews & sales stats: these catch many sites and bring some peaks in traffic)
- Getting to the news page of major game development companies (when I interviewed game producers, they listed on their news site "link to gameproducer.net interview with..."). They bring some traffic, although I'm not sure how many of the readers actually stick reading the site. Many might simply read the interview and never come back again.
- Syndications (for example Casualgameblogs.com, Planet MicroISV) read my RSS feed and publish my stories at their sites. I have attached a text link "If you found this entry valuable, feel free to visit GameProducer.net for more similar post" to the end of RSS entry. I'm not sure how much this affects (as I did it just a week ago or so) but these kind of RSS syndications have been good source of traffic for me even without the footer. I think this kind of footer is better than having "Copyright XYZ. All rights Reserved!!". That looks like a warning signal to me... have a warm & friendly note for people to visit your site.
The foundation still is: unique content
- Sales stats (people find these extremely interesting and many people tell others to check out my site for sales stats)
- Interviews (these are also quite interesting and bring me nice publicity from unexpected sources. Like with last interview, I got plenty of traffic from Civilization 4 site)
- Daily update (the days I post more, I get more traffic) and staying dedicated to the content I write. I usually dot down ideas, and write the stories on Saturday/Sunday for the whole week. I've found this quite efficient way to keep publishing daily without spending too much time every day on my blog. This way I get time to do other things.
- Concentrating on helping others and giving as much as value to others as possible. I actually wrote an entry
that explains some fundamentals about making money online. I don't have a single affiliate URL or any other 'ads' in the entry, but I'm 100% sure that if I manage to help people writing articles like these - then I'm sure to succeed as well.
Good deeds bring you good rewards
