Hello everyone!
I have something to share with you today. A bit of history first and my plans for future as well.
The road from a private notebook to a fully-fledged resource
I’ve started this website to keep some internal notes for my alliance mates to simplify our daily tasks and make sure every member knows what to do during the in-game recurring events. I kept looking for some decent knowledge base about the game, but couldn’t find any. Official SoS Discord had a lot of answers hidden between numerous conversations and some spreadsheets, shared as an image almost impossible to read on a mobile device.
So I thought – why not make my website public? And add extra guides covering those questions I ran across multiple times on official SoS Discord, unofficial Reddit page and some random sites over the Internet.
That’s how website became public on June 25th, 2020.
At the same time, I produced a couple of videos to help out the very beginners. Once again, I couldn’t find any up-to-date ones covering topics of my interest. I’ve even applied for official SoS content creator opening but received no feedback 🙂
While producing the content I stick to several simple rules:
- Easy to read and understand both for beginners and experienced players;
- Cover both F2P and P2P aspects;
- Do not write about topics I have no experience in;
- And, of course, no spreadsheets-in-images that are impossible to read on a small screen of the mobile device 🙂
Within the next 2 weeks, a few hundred people started visiting daily and checking some of the guides. While I posted those guide links in the official SoS Facebook page (because I wasn’t allowed sharing them on the SoS Discord), the majority of visitors came from Google searches – I assume they were trying to find some guides the very same way as I did.
On July 13th, one of my videos was featured on the official Facebook page. I was extremely happy my work was finally noticed and it has motivated me to create more guides!
To date (July 28th), I’ve created 20 guides and 8 video-guides. It’s not much, but I’ve always preferred quality over quantity and usually won’t post anything just for the sake of posting. Since I’m doing all the work at my free time, trying to keep work-life balance is quite demanding when attempting to produce some quality content.
Nonetheless, since I made this website public within a month time it was viewed over 20,000 times by several thousand (!) of unique visitors coming from 50 (!) different countries.
I’m very happy to have each of you here and would like to share my plans for the future.
- More game-related content
My goal is at least 1 written guide and 1 video per week. 99% of the content will remain accessible to all. 1% will be offered for a small fee – mostly to cover website hosting bills. - Personal blog
I’d like to share my progress regularly and some challenges I ran across. I’m also considering to add my private life insights because I’d like to stay connected with my readers as a personality and not as a soul-less content-creating robot 🙂 - Member’s zone
There are plenty of things that can be improved for the reader’s comfort: i.e. better website appearance and plugins support would allow me to format content in a mobile-friendly manner. I’m also planning to do more video-guides and, unfortunately, my current PC struggles with that. So I thought sharing these plans and getting some support is a good idea. I find it natural, similar to leaving a tip in the restaurant when you’re happy with the service provided. - Tech-related content
Apart from gaming, I’m also interested in the underlying hardware and mobile devices. Getting maximum out of your current mobile phone while gaming or choosing a new phone to upgrade your playing experience. Troubleshooting most common issues, causing your favorite game to crash. Maybe assembling your custom PC or purchasing a laptop with the best performance/$ ratio. Something like that: might be just an experiment to see if such information would be interesting or not.
That’s all my plans for now.
If you have more ideas/suggestions – rest assured I will respond to everyone, feel free to share them on the feedback page. You can also reach me out directly via this contact form.
I hope you will enjoy your time here!
Sincerely yours, Serhiy Botulidze