Contest: Win An Ad For Your RPG Blog
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What You Need To Qualify: You must have your own blog that has a primary focus on pen-and-paper roleplaying games, preferably part of the RPG Bloggers Network. I don’t care about how long your blog has been up, or whether you have 5 subscribers or 5,000 subscribers. If you do not have a roleplaying blog, you can still enter however your prize will be modified (see below).
The Prize: I will post one 125×125 banner advertisement on RoleplayingPro.com to your roleplaying blog during the entire month of April (04/01/09-04/30/09). If you have a nice 125×125 banner to advertise your site, I’ll use that. If not I’ll make one of my own to advertise your site using your site logo or site name. If you do not have a roleplaying blog but you place an entry and win, I will post a 125×125 banner to a roleplaying blog of your choice with the permission of that blog’s owner.
How To Enter The Contest: To enter the contest, you must write a comment in this post that answers the following questions:
(1) What RPGs would you like to see RoleplayingPro talk about more?
(2) What is RoleplayingPro doing well that you’d like to see us keep doing, or focus more on?
(3) What is RoleplayingPro doing poorly or could be fixed about the blog?
(4) Finally, what advice could you give us to help us make RoleplayingPro one of the best pen-and-paper roleplaying blogs on the internet?Choosing The Winner: I will choose one winner by 11:59 PST, Sunday, March 29th, 2009. This will give me two days to either contact the winner for the 125×125 ad, or create one myself for their site.
Obviously this contest is about me asking my peers, my fellow RPG bloggers and blog readers, to give me a critical and honest review of the site. I need to know what we’re doing well, what we’re not doing well, and what readers would like to see out of this blog that will make it a success.
The winner will be chosen at my sole discretion. I’ll choose the winner based off of the best overall responses I get to the four questions.
Final Teaser: This contest is the beginning of a series of contests I’ll be running over the next few months. These contests will be mixed up, some of them requiring you to comment on a post, others to sign-up as a reader, and a couple other ideas I’ve been brewing up in my head. The prizes will include, but are not limited to: more roleplaying books, dice, gaming accessories, miniatures, free ads to your RPG blog, and much, much more. I suggest if you’re interested in being part of this contest series that you should sign-up for our RSS Feed or subscribe to our e-mail list so you don’t miss all the action!
Leave a Comment
March 21, 2009 at 1:12 pm
1. Well, my interests lie in D&D 4th Edition, so I’d like you to keep talking about that.
2. I think your posts on the metagame aspect (building and planning) are pretty insightful.
Going back to 1 again. A lot of people hate this sort of thing, but I really hope you’ll write about your games. Because it lets me see how you put your advice to practice. I’m probably in the minority on this one though. Planning isn’t as important to me as seeing how the game runs, since there is practically an infinitude of time to plan ahead, whereas every DM, DMs “under pressure.” And pressure reveals the best or worst in us.
3. I can’t really say you’re doing anything “bad”, because some things you’ve written which don’t interest me (the Spycraft post) are not because of you, but because of the subject matter. However, they draw interest from other people, so they’re not “bad.” Nor are they really being done “poorly.”
4. Have realistic expectations like “what do I want to write for my readers” and don’t punish yourself if you can’t make every person happy. I don’t get linked a lot across the network nor do I get much turnout, but I write what I think people come to my blog for and most importantly, what I feel I WANT to write. That’s it. That’s all you have to write.
Wyatt’s last blog post..Might of Eden: Additional Class Features
March 21, 2009 at 3:14 pm
(1) I like articles about adventure plotting, adventure pacing, dealing with players, dealing with GMs, why table top games are fun and worth playing – articles that can be used for any pen and paper game, whether it’s Dungeons and Dragons 4th ED or Shadowrun 2nd ED.
(2) Keep writing interesting articles that take a small RPG topic and dig in. Recent examples include John Lewis’s Building Realism: Morals and Ethics, in which he talks about the concepts behind alignments, and thinking through motivations and consequences; and Samuel’s own Stumbling Blocks To Starting A New Campaign, where he talks about things you might want to consider when getting a new game together. It’s stuff we all experience, but don’t spend the time to discuss and debate.
(3) Pictures create visual interest, so it’s great when your articles have them. Ideally you would want to have 1 or 2 images for each article. I know this can be a difficult thing to pull off, so it’s understandable when an article does not have an image. Next, when you do have images, a thumbnail should be shown on the “READ THIS ARTICLE” page. Even using a generic image every time you talk about game rules, for example, is better than nothing.
(4) I have no idea how much of your potential audience you’re reaching. I didn’t come across RoleplayingPro until I was looking to find some feedback for my game @ Spellchrome.com. Once I found RoleplayingPro, I slowly realized that there are a lot of quality articles that I need to go back and read because I missed them the first time. I’m not sure how you overcome this problem. Post over at the rpg.net forums, penandpapergames.com, etc if you’re not already.
If you do figure it out, let us know – I’m sure we could all stand a little more traffic.
spellchrome’s last blog post..Link: Types of RPG Players
March 22, 2009 at 3:05 am
(1) What RPGs would you like to see RoleplayingPro talk about more?
Content that isn’t reviews. Things that can be used, instead of just thought about. You see excellent examples of this at roleplayingtips.com and dungeonmastering.com
(2) What is RoleplayingPro doing well that you’d like to see us keep doing, or focus more on?
See #1, you’ve some excellent posts along those lines but you don’t seem focused. I did a quick look around and it’s not very consistent. Consider setting up a schedule and when you get 3 good ideas, jot them down on Wednesdays (1 idea per week) so that you don’t have a week with nothing useful.
(3) What is RoleplayingPro doing poorly or could be fixed about the blog?
See, #2
Consider this post at ProBlogger. Subscribe to their RSS feed. Mine that site like it’s your best friend.
As I look around the blogosphere, the difference between pro and amatuer seems to have alot more to do with planning and content than anything else. John Fourr is a terrific example of success on a shoestring budget.
(4) Finally, what advice could you give us to help us make RoleplayingPro one of the best pen-and-paper roleplaying blogs on the internet?
Be different. I can’t help you find this (or I’d probably already be doing it
) but find an angle that’s unique.
Don’t post what everyone else is posting. No one is going to read 20 4E reviews, or 20 video reviews. Not even a die hard fan will bother.
Viriatha’s last blog post..Post-Apocalypse: Foraging
March 22, 2009 at 1:56 pm
(1) What RPGs would you like to see RoleplayingPro talk about more?
3.5 and 4E D&D. Also some love for other games just to prove that people can play other stuff. Things like World of Darkness, Spycraft, Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green to name but three.
(2) What is RoleplayingPro doing well that you’d like to see us keep doing, or focus more on?
You ask very intelligent questions – can the 800lb gorilla be beaten? – and you drill down into subjects to get at some really interesting issues.
(3) What is RoleplayingPro doing poorly or could be fixed about the blog?
Nothing. I’m impressed with the ever-changing artwork on the banner and the fact you’re willing to participate on where the blog is going with your audience. A bit of shameless linkspam here Copyblogger is very good if you’re hitting dry.
(4) Finally, what advice could you give us to help us make RoleplayingPro one of the best pen-and-paper roleplaying blogs on the internet?
Find your passions, don’t be afraid to step outside of the comfort zone and most importantly don’t be shy about your opinions on games.
satyre’s last blog post..musing on the analytics game and the story so far…
March 24, 2009 at 5:36 am
Thank you everyone for the information so far.
@ Wyatt – I’m glad I have John on board, because he is INCREDIBLY knowledgable about D&D (all editions). And I like your suggestion about session posts. I stopped doing them because they didn’t seem to generate much interest. However, I think that was partially my fault because of the way I was writing them.
@ spellchrome – More unique, quality pictures is definitely a huge focus for me with the blog. I’ll either be using a new version of One Theme soon, that will include a lot more options for pictures in the theme. Or, I’ll design my own and make it a lot more picture-oriented. I completely agree with you about that. Your comment about previous articles also reminded me that I need to pull up some of my original articles again and give them some love. There were some great articles I wrote months ago (when I had no readers) that most people haven’t seen yet.
@ Viriatha – I think I’ll be dropping reviews altogether, unless it is a fairly unknown product. I see little point to them unless I’m selling something. I agree on setting a posting schedule. I followed one for about two months, but then fell off the wagon with it.
@ satyre – Having a variety of games that I talk about is really paramount for me on this blog. I like talking about D&D because it draws a lot of interest, but honestly I barely played it until 4e came out. The bulk of my experience was with Shadowrun, Star Wars, and Palladium games. John is a D&D beast though, so he brings that mainstream appeal to the blog for me.
Thank you everyone for the replies I’ve received so far!
March 25, 2009 at 3:46 pm
(1) What RPGs would you like to see RoleplayingPro talk about more?
Well, I’m playing mostly 4e D&D, followed by Hero and Nobilis, so I’d obviously like to see more about them, since they’re directly relevant to my games.
However, I also tend to enjoy reading about other games, particularly smaller ones that I might not have heard of before or be only vaguely familiar with. These sorts of posts might spark my interest in another game, but they also tend to give me new ideas for the games I’m already in.
From a purely mercenary standpoint, I would probably suggest a mix of about 90% D&D posts (split, say, 4:3:1 4e:3e/Pathfinder:OD&D/Basic/1e/retroclones) and about 10% quirky stuff.
And from a practical standpoint, I’d say write about the games you like to write about, especially if they’re also the games you like to play.
(2) What is RoleplayingPro doing well that you’d like to see us keep doing, or focus more on?
I like your site design. It’s clean, and it’s easy to find what I might be looking for 99% of the time.
I like your variety of topics. Your posts about GM screens and (although I pretty much entirely disagree with it) house rules are particular favorites. You have a way of getting at an issue in a fairly concise manner.
(3) What is RoleplayingPro doing poorly or could be fixed about the blog?
This is probably somewhat unfair and possibly hypocritical on my part (though I’d like to think not), but since you’re asking… You could be more consistent. You’ve got great content sometimes, but sometimes you offer up a lot of it, and other times there’s not much of it at all.
(4) Finally, what advice could you give us to help us make RoleplayingPro one of the best pen-and-paper roleplaying blogs on the internet?
Have patience. You’re only a couple of months old, things like traffic will continue to get better if you continue to deliver as you have been.
Also, make sure you’re writing what you like, and not just what you think your audience will like. It will be easier on you that way, and, with patience, you’ll build your audience. No matter what your topics are, there’s always someone, somewhere, interested in reading them… that’s the joy and terror of the Internet.