Upload not Overload | How to Share your Gaming Content
Over the last couple of decades, the gaming industry has undergone significant evolution. This encompasses a variety of areas, but one of the most interesting and exciting developments has been the relationship between gamers and games. It is no longer a simple case of studios creating products and gamers consuming them. The growth of our digital landscape has meant gamers are playing these titles and sharing their experiences with a diverse community through blogs, podcasts, live streaming, and social media.
If you’re planning on creating and sharing gaming content, you’re likely also aware it can be a tool for a lucrative career path. When you find the right audience, your gaming content can both raise your profile in the industry and become a source of income through monetization. That’s not to say this is necessarily easy. There’s a lot of competition out there — an estimated 40 million gaming channels on YouTube alone — and audiences don’t tend to respond to just another gamer showcasing their playthrough.
Let’s run through a few areas you should consider to share your gaming content successfully.
Encourage Engagement
Whether your goals surround raising your profile or monetizing your gaming, it’s not enough to post your content. Your goal has to be to encourage your target audience to engage with everything you produce. Don’t treat audiences as passive receivers. Rather, give them reasons and opportunities to actively connect with your content. The internet is filled with static gamer content that, particularly on social media, is easy to scroll past — your goal is to provide an incentive to stop them scrolling and interact with you.
One useful method is taking the micro-moment approach that has become popular in marketing over the last several years. Micro-moments revolve around eliciting reflexive, spur-of-moment actions from consumers to trigger their engagement with a brand. In many cases, this is geared toward meeting the needs of your demographic — capitalizing on their desire to answer a question, learn a skill, buy something, or have an experience. When you’re marketing your gaming content, you should therefore review how you can create these micro-moments.
Can you present your walkthrough as a solution to a challenge? Can you connect audiences to information that will help them to make purchasing decisions on a game? Considering how your content can be not just entertaining but useful is a key to engagement.
Get Creative
To break through the noise, you need to put your stamp on your gaming content. Yes, you’ll be providing audiences with blog posts or videos that meet their core needs — whether this is advice or pure entertainment. But you have to be cognizant of the fact they can satisfy these basics with gaming content from a wide variety of producers. You have to give them a reason to specifically come to you. As such, you need to get creative about your presentation.
This is especially important if you’re working in an audiovisual medium, like “let’s play” videos. While the basic format is popular, you can make it more visually compelling with interstitial animation or going further than just performing a commentary voiceover. The same goes for when you’re creating social media videos. Even when your posts are primarily visual, including creative audio aspects can help to make them more engaging. Making your own audio — whether this is music, funny sound effects, or voiceover — is usually the best way to go, as it provides individuality to your content. Not to mention it helps you to steer clear of potential copyright strikes. You can achieve this with some simple equipment, but the important thing is to keep experimenting. Find what best reflects your personality and your content.
However, while you should prioritize individuality, this doesn’t mean you have to go it alone all the time. Gaming podcasts, videos, and blogging can indeed be perfect media for introverts, but collaborating with others is a route to more creative content. Reach out to other creators, perhaps those in a different medium to you — if you’re a podcaster, consider teaming up with a Twitch streamer or review YouTuber. Discuss how you can work together to offer your respective audiences something new and interesting.
Maintain Focus
You’re likely already aware that success will rarely be immediate. Even with this knowledge, though, it can be disheartening if you don’t start gaining the audience or monetization you see other gaming content creators hitting. Sure, you’re not likely to be expecting to surpass Preston Arsement’s $19 million in earnings, but when you put a lot of time and effort into making your content you like to have some impact. When this doesn’t happen, it can be easy to drift away from it entirely. This is the opposite of what you should be doing; you need to maintain focus.
Your most basic action here is keeping a regular schedule of sharing your gaming content. It might seem simple, but this is one of the primary ways to build an audience. It helps viewers, readers, and listeners to know when they can expect new items and how to find them. It also demonstrates consistency when you’re performing promotion. Do your research here. If you already have an audience, look at your analytics to establish when they’re most likely to tune in and engage. Look at other creators in the gaming sphere; what days of the week do similar channels release their content to capture attention?
Part of your focus should also be toward your audience. Remember, they are just as passionate about gaming as you. Talk to them about what they like, what content puts them off, and what they want to see more of.
Conclusion
Gaming content is increasingly popular. This can make it a way to develop your passion into something more creative and lucrative. When sharing your content, it’s important to consider how you can drive audience engagement and think outside of the box to stand out from the crowd. Importantly, while it can be easy to get disheartened, maintaining your focus can help you to capture your audience and help you to contribute meaningfully to an exciting and growing gaming landscape.
