Hi.
Thanks for joining me for the CareerGamers Q3 2022 Update. This is the first – because I’m lazy – quarterly update here on CareerGamers.
You’re probably wondering why I’m writing an update like this. Well, basically, I want to make CareerGamers a little more personal.
You see, up until recently, I’ve been trying to grow CareerGamers as quickly as I could. I’d speed through articles, I’d pay ghostwriters to crank out first drafts for me to rewrite, and I’d skimp on creating images. My goal was simple: sacrifice everything for fast production of articles to increase profit. Guess what… It didn’t work.
Rewind time 2 years to the beginning of the covid pandemic, and you’d find I was writing all of the articles myself with care, attention, and a huge dose of love.
Once the pandemic ended, something changed in me. I think the pandemic made me over-eager to speed up. Many people’s lives were cut short by Covid. Perhaps I wrongly thought I had to grow the website faster in order to succeed. But I was wrong.
Sadly, my quest for speed only forced the CareerGamers’ engine to overheat and sputter to a halt.
Fortunately, I’ve learned my lesson.
But, before I start talking about the future, I want to talk about the past. The past quarter, Q3 2022, to be exact. That way, you’ll get a clear idea of where the website is in terms of articles and income.
In the second section, I’ll change gears and look forward to Q4 and CareerGamers’ goals.
Finally, I’ll round everything off with a sort of call to arms if you will. Pick up your weapon of choice, be it a mouse, keyboard, or controller, and join me on this renewed journey.
2022 and Q3 Update
First, what’s happened over the past quarter?
Well, the four horsemen of the gaming apocalypse have come stampeding out of the mists to slash CareerGamers down.
These are:
The pandemic
The post-covid economic environment plus the war in Ukraine has hit the gaming industry, along with every other industry, pretty hard.
Since the beginning of the year, CareerGamer’s income has dropped by 2/3rds. To give you an idea, the site used to make around $4000 a month. Now, it’s making around $1500. I know, $1500 is a lot and I’m incredibly grateful for the money. However, CareerGamers isn’t some pie-in-the-sky passive income site. CareerGamers takes 12 hours 6 days a week to run including all offsite marketing, social media, and other things. It’s more than a full-time job, it’s a lifestyle. So having such a drop was emotionally hard to take after so much work was put into the site.
The Economy
Secondly, I’ve noticed a slow decrease in the amount of traffic we’ve generated as the year has progressed. This decrease is not because articles have lost rank. The decrease has happened because people are simply buying games less, and in turn searching for gaming topics less.
As a business owner, I see firsthand how a slow economy that threatens recession affects a business. You can see the numbers dropping week after week. And you are helpless to do anything about it.
It’s tough to take. But CareerGamers has survived.
Bad Business Choices
Lastly, as you know, the original goal of CareerGamers was to help gamers turn their gaming into a viable career. However, I’ve learned that the articles that target Twitch gaming, Youtube gaming, and game streaming simply do not perform as well as articles about games and gaming hardware.
The problem, from what I can tell, is that people who game on Twitch search for generic articles about Twitch, not game-centric articles. As my articles only target gaming, they get a very low amount of traffic.
For example, I have one article about Elden Ring that outperforms all of the articles I’ve written about Twitch.
Personal Taste
I have a huge preference for playing single-player games.
When I first started CG, I wanted the website to play a part in helping to grow my own game streaming channel. However, the channel never worked out.
I’m an introvert by nature. This has caused me no end of problems when it comes to streaming and making YouTube videos.
The feeling of being put on display while streaming was not something I have ever felt comfortable with. I practiced for months and never felt comfortable. I put videos of myself talking about games on YouTube. But after many attempts, I still didn’t feel comfortable.
It’s only now, that I’ve learned how to make faceless youtube videos, that I’m exploring that avenue again.
So that brings me to the future of CareerGamers.
Q4 2022 and beyond: A new direction
Given the current economic climate and my personal introversion, it would be in the best interest of CareerGamers, myself, and you if I changed direction.
But which direction should I take?
Having given this question a lot of thought over the past few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that CareerGamers needs to turn back toward games. Whether that is hints and tips, reviews, previews, or hardware, I want to talk about games again.
I want to inject some passion, pizzaz, and personality back into the website. I want to write about games I love, that you love, that the world loves. And write about them in a way that thrills you, that rushing home excitedly after a hard day’s work to switch on your console and start gaming.
I don’t want to be writing articles about “How to delete your credit card off Twitch”, or “Whether or not you need a TV license to view Twitch streams”. Sadly, in my quest to make CareerGamers live up to its name, these are the type of brain-blitzing articles I thought would develop the brand and speed up growth. How wrong I was!
My goal, therefore, for Q4 is simple: I’ll write more about the games and gaming hardware I love.
I’ll be starting off this new era with a number of collections. These include but are not limited to:
- Focus on answering your questions about games and hardware so you can enjoy your hobby even more.
- Other game articles (I have an eclectic taste in games, so I’ll be writing articles about games I play)
- What I’m playing. I’ll do a weekly roundup of what I’ve been playing and anything cool I’ve done in regards to gaming.
- Opinion articles. I’ve written a few opinion articles over the years and each of them has proved very popular.
- News articles. I’ll test out writing news articles. But instead of just writing the news with zero bias, I’ll be full of bias and give my opinion and call out any bulls*it.
- I’d like to do some fun articles about asking odd questions in regard to gaming. Again this is to try and help create a more personable feel to the website.
- I’ll include more of these updated articles.
Word count be gone!
I plan on finally decoupling articles from the word count.
In the past, content marketers, like myself, have always thought that Google prioritized articles with higher word counts. We know now that this is untrue because Google in a recent search engine update said so themselves.
In the future, articles will be however long they need to be. No more adding in answers to questions that are roughly related in order to bloat out the article’s word count. If an article delivers exactly what it needs with 400 words, it gets published with 400 words. If an article needs 4000 words, then that’s exactly what it’ll get.
Instead of some mechanical word number being used to determine an article’s length, the length will be determined by my planning, outlining, and gut instinct.
Graphical Goodness
I’ll focus on making the articles more graphical with infographics, images, quotes, and videos. I think that visuals are important. But, I know there are a lot of people out there who still prefer reading over watching vids, I’m one of them.
However, in spite of my own taste, I’d be a fool to ignore the trends of ever-increasing videos and images across the internet. Heck, even Google has started including YouTube results directly in Google results.
So another one of my goals is to start making the articles more graphical. I can’t promise I’ll be making more videos. Making videos is simply not something I enjoy. However, maybe in the future, when I can employ somebody to make videos for me, CareerGamers will make the jump to YouTube. But for now, CareerGamers will continue to embrace the written word and will try to include more images and graphics.
Social media
I’ve been making an attempt to grow CareerGamer’s social media following. It’s not been going well. The problem is, I’m not a social media user in real life, I don’t use Twitter or Facebook. The only social media I use is LinkedIn because I have to for my professional life. If I didn’t have to be on it, I wouldn’t.
However, again, I do understand the importance of social media. In the short term, my goal is to use an AI tool called MissingLettr to upload Tweets and Facebook updates for me, automatically. I’m not expecting this to grow a massive following, but it’s better than nothing.
In the future, I’m hoping to hire a social media manager who loves all things social and can grow CareerGamer’s social channels.
But that’s not going to happen until the website grows a little bit.
Finally, I know email is incredibly important to any and all websites. Up until this point, I’ve sadly neglected it.
But I’m going to look into how to set up an automated email system so every week people who sign up to the website will get all the latest articles directly into their inboxes.
I want to keep this email system simple. I don not want to sell anything. All I want to do is have a simple email that gives a roundup to all readers on what articles have been published.
Conclusion
Overall, I know this is the right move for CareerGamers, for myself, and for you.
I want to turn CareerGamers into a gaming website that writes about what gaming is truly all about: the games.
By writing different types of articles, decoupling articles from the word count, and adding more graphics, social media, and email, I think I can start to grow CareerGamers in the right direction again so it can offer amazing content just for you.
I hope this change of direction is as exciting to you as it is for me. And hope you’ll join me on this journey.
All the very best and stay safe.
Nick.
PS. In the future, I hope to increase the quality of these updates. This one is is a little all over the place. I’d like to eventually have a template so that when you see the words update on the article feed, you know what to expect.