If you asked me two years ago if I thought my writing would ever get a million views on any site, I’d have laughed. If you asked if I’d get 2 million, I’d call you crazy. But here we are with me sitting at 2 million views, baybee. NO STOPPING THIS TRAIN.
Since I don’t expect most people will read this (much less the entire thing), I’m going to lay out a bit on how I got here just as I did with the 1 million views post, which was much more exciting.
My claim to fame has been my Final Fantasy XIV guide set, which I initially launched in either September or October. Prior to this I was at over 300k views, and reached the first million mark in early November. Now we’re in early February and I’m at 2 million.
My initial goal was to reach the 2 million mark by New Years, but the big FFXIV 2.1 patch ruined the viability of the types of quests my most popular guides covered. I spent late December and almost all of January trying to pick up the pieces and stave off the inevitable uselessness of my guides to the FFXIV community.
Put your eggs in separate baskets
What I’ve learned during this time is to not put all your eggs in one basket when content writing, especially when writing on an industry as fickle as the games industry.
Shortly after the FFXIV content crash of December 17th 2013, I pumped out some easy Starbound guides that kept me afloat much longer than simply relying on one game could ever.
There are a few other game guide examples I could point to as an example of branching out being a good thing, but I don’t feel like looking through my dashboard. The long and the short of it is: if I had prepared for the inevitable comedown of my biggest niche and stuck my flag into another, I would have reached 2 million views much sooner.
I highly recommend any gaming-oriented writer looking to reach a broad audience to step outside of their comfort zone and try new things. Play games you normally wouldn’t, step into communities you have no interest in, and pull from them information you can use to get yourself some extra exposure.
Your comfort zone is nice and warm. You must adapt to a new climate when the need arises, and take what seem like small opportunities and force them to become big ones.
There isn’t much more I can say here because there isn’t much to say aside from “Congratulations, me!”
Congratulations, me!
