Gaming For A Living - Stacking Skills To Increase Success

Part of the post Gaming For A Living --Lifestyle Design introduced the concept of "talent stacking" briefly. I want to cover that a little bit more in depth regarding the execution of the strategy.

One useful talent is "leverage" You want to strategically leverage popular sites. Another talent is integration. You want to integrate a video into your blog, for example. Another talent is finding demand. Stack these three together and you have leveraged integration of an in demand game.

For example, say you make a video walk through of a specific game for a specific system that you know is popular. You use leverage by using Youtube, the most popular video search engine that also can allow you to easily integrate them into a blog. You may use blogger or wordpress or another content management system to leverage someone else's work formatting posts and tagging and siloing and SEO with the possible additional leverage later of blog networks and directories and search engines once you develop the skills.

You can simply make a post with a similar title to your youtube video, embed the youtube video walkthrough and post it with a few tags and categories which as you'll learn later is good for SEO.

This is a good start. Most people just upload a video and then they're done or make a blog post then they're done. You actually did both. The use of a blog to develop a platform where you have and promote your own content is a great thing and leveraging youtube's platform with perhaps a description to the blog post is even better.

Now let's leverage some more.

Once you've posted the video walkthrough you may make derivative works such as a written walkthrough that may embed the video as well as provide a link to the prior post at the end or beginning of the post. If you want people to click on the video walk through you should have it at the top, otherwise if your goal is to have them read the article, put it at the bottom.

This leverages previous posts and additional posts with new posts and begins the process of leveraging search engines by creating multiple pieces of content, leveraging old content, adding words that people may be able to search for, and help search engines determine if your web page is relevant to the searchers query.

Now maybe you make a handful of posts or break your walkthrough into parts so you can create several follow up posts. You also want more than just walkthroughs so you post secrets, tips, tricks, gameplay, reviews, unboxing of games, strategy, and entertaining highlights. You can also create miniblogs that only focus on the efforts of one single game as well as blogs that focus on entire gaming genres for a system as well as supersites that focus on an entire gaming platform or system, as well as a large supersite that focuses on everything gaming.

Your miniblog will be ready the earliest on and most relevant for people searching an exact term related to a specific game, but have a limited amount of use. Your largest site just on "gaming" in general will require the most work, but eventually carry with it the most authority and once you complete it with perhaps several hundred entries, and you simultaneously link to it from your smaller blogs as well as leverage other skills later on like search engine optimization, your webpage will carry with it more authority on all things gaming and it will be easy to create a new gaming blog, link to it from your super sites, create several posts on your new gaming across your websites and quickly get a lot of viewers to your entire network of blogs.

This is sort of a nice system's approach where each "failure" (videos getting below average views and blogposts getting a low number of views) actually contributes towards building sort of an infrastructure that helps you long term. Failure is literally the engine that powers your gaming "network" in this regard.

You also may leverage facebook and/or twitter and/or other social platforms, article directories, high traffic sites, and so on. Publish to journals and magazines and wherever possible. Conduct press releases about your achievements and launching of your websites. Establish forum profiles with a signature that points people to whatever miniblog you're looking at at the moment as well as referencing your facebook, twitter, etc accounts.

Leverage and integration. create social bookmarking of blog posts and websites to try to "boost" your site's performance and spread it.

So far we've created a strategy for accumulating a large following if you develop and impliment some of the skills mentioned. There's several more such as "entertainment, persuasion, attractveness, site layout, font size, use of images, layout, site structure and linking structure, design, interactiveness of comment section, ability to increase the "quality" of viewers, and so on.

But a successful web empire requires:
1)Accumulating traffic
2)Providing a Product Or Service
3)Monetizing Your Traffic (Using A Service and/or ads)
4)Convertion Rates Traffic To A Service

You could probably merge 2&3 if you wanted since monetization is providing traffic with a source for earnings which is essentially the same. However, monetization can also be: creating back end products, upselling, using text based ads or banner ads.

So persuasion is not only a successful skill in getting people to want to view your blog and/or your video by seeing the title, getting them to subscribe, getting them to click your website and influencing their rate of buying. Persuasion is a huge part of having high clickthrough rates and conversion rates and sale rates and re-subscription rates. You want a quality product or service too, but more than that, you to be able to convince them that they like your product, convince them to tell friends, convince them to get more and convince them that they like it.

Persuasion is influencing over time. The more time you apply a skill, the more likely you are to motivate a larger percentage of the population. With an initial page view, you only have a short amount of time before they click elsewhere. You want to quickly get them to either click on an ad (0-5% is the common range, images that subliminally seem to point to ads or highlight ads as well as a color blend that fits the page and doesn't look spammy or stands out depending on your audience. In some fields, people are used to ignoring ads, where as others they are primed to click on anything that stands out. You have to apply the skills of rapidly testing, tracking, tweaking, improving and moving on when you have enough data to draw a conclusion that is appropriate given your strategy.

However, you will do much better persuading people that are subscribed for a long time to actually purchase. So rather than get 5% of viewers to click on a link and leave your site while making you a dollar or so per click, it may be better to get 1% of customers to subscribe to an email newsletter where you can build a relationship and apply persuasion over a longer period of time.

Of those 1% of viewers who subscribe to your email address, they're already going to want to justify their decision to subscribe to your email list by reading it, and you can prime them to buy with persuasion skills. If you can get 20% of your email subscribers to subscribe to a monthly service, many of those subscriptions will stay longer than a single month and earn you money each month. This may end up being worth far more than a single quick purchase.... however, getting them used to purchasing by making a few $1 purchases and then moving the price up as they go while also rewarding them for purchases by unannounced loyalty offers and free products and perhaps exclusive videos hidden from the public you can reward them and encourage them to buy again and then beginning a process of going for additional sales and subscriptions. You have to test before you can decide which is best.

Remember that some things are going to fail so from the beginning plan on some method towards taking customers with you. By blogging in the structure mentioned, the posts are not in vain if they help get you youtube subscriptions and build link authority to your large supersites and other blogs and pass through credibility to the visitors of your other blogs and video channels.

By building a list of subscribers, you can hopefully maintain the relationship even if they don't buy and funnel them into the next project you are working on that is most similar. You can also practice different methods of persuasion and compare one list vs another when converting them to a new fiedl and bring forward your knowledge you gain from testing.

update:11/28 Scott Adams has a post about talent stacking that you should find interesting.