I was looking through my web stats today. What I found surprised me. My ideas are changing about the value of things Caravel is doing to get people to know about DROD.
So earlier this year I got
DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold listed on Tucows, which isn't a big deal--if you have a software title and some patience, you can get it on Tucows. Tucows has really high traffic (about 2.5 million visitors/month) and has been around for a long time. How many people came to our site from Tucows this month? Well, we got 5 hits.
Of all the places that link drod.net and caravelgames.com, which would bring in the most visitors? download.com? filefront.com? Google? Nope, none of these.
By a wide, wide margin it is the
Kingdom of Loathing forum with 14,694 hits in October so far. Google is next in line at 7,782 hits in October. Keep in mind that one visitor can easily generate hundreds of hits in a trip to drod.net, so 14,694 hits might be something like 100 visits.
So who do I have to thank? I searched the KoL forum a little. There's
Dork Cheese, Egg Egg, swann_88, MasonJason, and probably others I missed that have uttered the name "
DROD"
here and there. When swann_88 mentions that he found out about KoL from DROD.net, that little post is worth more to Caravel than my game listing on Tucows.
Knowing how powerful this is, immediately I start thinking how I can exploit it as a marketing tool. Sorry, I gotta be evil like this to survive! But here's all I can do, ethically and practically speaking:
* Encourage people here who are active on other forums to mention DROD at there other homes. (But only if it is relevant and appropriate where you are posting.)
* And also encourage people to blog DROD, link DROD, tag DROD, ePimp DROD, or whatever else the internet has to put us out there. Many people have done these things already, and I see it helping in the traffic reports.
* Spend more time keeping the fans happy and interested in DROD stuff. Because at one level, this is a marketing task, I can justify making the site better, getting deep into contests, and... well, some other secret things, as opposed to low-value marketing tasks like submitting games to Tucows where they will be buried in obscurity.
This is not some scammy multi-level marketing pitch. If you feel comfy mentioning DROD somewhere, then I appreciate it. Attention is what we need!
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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