Following Trends

In the gaming world, there are plenty of things going on. There are new companies coming into the business, new artists modelling minis, new rulebooks being launched, models being released, new systems and so on. If your blog talks about these things, you'll end up seeing benefits in a number of ways. It does mean a little work - signing up with newsletters, reading forums and keeping up with news. (But maybe you already do all this)

The age of Internet inundates us - there's an information overload in progress. You indexing all this stuff takes a load off your readers shoulders. People like news, geeks like geek news. You keep them interested. It's another form of content that you can deliver. This is the positive way of looking at following trends and it builds loyalty from the people who know they can come to you for that information.

A more selfish way of looking at following trends is search engine traffic. Now keep in mind, I don't get a lot of random traffic from Google - most comes from the awesomess that is everyone reading and following Wargaming Tradecraft and spreading the love. Search engine traffic, while a factor, is a very small source of readers for me. (But I'm not a news site)

You can find these stats and others by visiting http://draft.blogger.com and clicking "Stats". I wrote a single post on New Eldar Unit Rumours (cause I totally taste the rainbow) and look at this list of top all time search keywords - and that's from one post. These days, a single Grey Knight post could net you a few new visitors.

By the way, don't forget to credit where you get your news from - more on that in a later post though.

There are a few things to watch out for when you're the person reporting news. First and foremost, is to watch out for rumours. If nobody trusts your information, it doesn't matter how much you talk about new stuff. To solve this, you'll have to determine the credibility of your sources. Talking about a press release from Games Workshop is one thing, but if you heard it from some guy on a forum who's father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate used to work for Games Workshop... maybe you shouldn't race to be the first to report it.

Secondly, keep in mind that there's a lot of sites out there talking about news. You might actually alienate your readers when they have to read through a bunch of blogs all reporting the exact same information. Sure, you can add your own unique view on the information and being the first to report something can be kind of cool, but by the time most get around to reading it, you'd still be just one of many. One way to temper this would be to only report on larger news pieces, so you're not constantly pouring out news.

UPDATE

As Old School Terminator also points out, images are another way to gain extra traffic through this method. Just as many people search for images of this stuff as they look for textual information.