Midnight Oil

Advertising on a teeny budget usually means doing a lot of legwork and posting site material in a lot of places. In many cases, you’re bordering on spam, which is kind of depressing. Plus, it can seem that no matter how much you write, no one ever reads it or follows the links to your site. There is no secret to it, but you just have to keep trying.

Recently, I found TreasureTables, a blog for tabletop RPG Game Masters (GM). In the forums, there is a section devoted to GM resources. Since Obsidian Portal is definitely a resource for GM’s, I went ahead and put up the pitch statement, along with a call for feedback.

Within a day, there were two new campaigns signed up (Dark Skies and Shadows of Skullport), and several people had posted specific, useful feedback regarding the site. Some had even commented on the possible commercial aspect of the site and how much they would pay to use it. Of course, that has to be taken with a grain of salt because it’s much easier to say you’ll pay than it is to actually drop the money.

From the 20 minutes to create the forum posting, and the probably 1-1.5 hours since then updating it as people ask questions, I have been able to generate 2 campaigns and probably 5-6 signups. That may seem small, but for a small site trying to grow, that’s a big deal.

The moral of the story is to keep hammering away at blog comments, forums, and the like. I have learned that “word of mouth” advertising often means your words, your mouth. It can seem frustrating, constantly searching for new places to regurgitate the same pitch over and over, but it is necessary at this stage. Keep marching on and eventually someone will bite.