Two months together – thank you! Giveaway for readers!

Following the tradition of the first monthly update, here comes the second one!

Unexpected attention

When I was wondering about several thousand views across the whole July month period, in August the views just sky-rocketed. More than 30,000 people visited zegaming.club during the month, having viewed the website over 100,000 times. I couldn’t believe these figures, especially while doing little to zero promotion. Few posts on Reddit about my new guides and sharing the links with some players over discord I wouldn’t call a marketing campaign either.

I started looking into statistics and figured out most of the people are coming here organically via the search. Turns out unexpected attention to the website came with Google’s help, that ranked certain articles above anything else.

Unexpected load

Creating a small blog focused on a particular game seemed to be an easy task with all the modern tools. But as long as I kept adding more and more data-heavy content while making my posts mobile-friendly, it caused the website to slow down at a certain point.

I was not happy with the slowness myself and decided to change hosting provider. As a result, between Aug 27^th to 29^th website was either not accessible at all or working partially due to domain & content transfer.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to find another theme, allowing to add certain widgets and more content formatting options. Its free version is missing featured content option, but would gladly purchase it as a priority in case you decide to support further website development 😉

Unexpected content issues

Creating unique content is a quite hard and time-consuming task when it comes to high-quality standards I have in my mind. Writing an article requires collecting, proofing and writing down bits and pieces of information into a nice, visually attractive, easy to read and understand guide. But sometimes you’re in a hurry and things might slip through.

I respect each author’s work and keep in mind to add credits every time I use someone’s input. I think it is part of the writer’s profession to do that.

One day I’ve used some screenshots made out of a Youtube video for my upcoming event guide, without giving credit to its author. My bad, no doubts about that. Thankfully, video author informed me in a private message about it and I fixed it immediately, together with my apologies.

But that’s not the end of story 🙂 Karma boomerang stroke me back and a few weeks later one of the readers told me about my recent guides being distributed on their discord server without any credits and/or links to the author.

It’s nice that someone’s work getting recognized and shared, I don’t mind it. I would appreciate if the author’s name still comes along. Another reason is quickly evolving game meta – some things become obsolete while others get buffed or updated. So I review my guides time-to-time to make sure they are up-to-date.

Now let’s talk about something I would like to expect! 🙂

Plans for the next 3 months

1. The new game covered: AFK Arena
   While AFK Arena is completely different from the State of Survival, one thing those two have in common is in-depth game mechanics and a huge area for exploration. I hope they would co-exist well on the same website.
   
   I’m not a big AFK Arena expert myself, that’s why game page will be curated by Adam Abramov a.k.a. Linker. Adam has been playing the game since its launch in 2019 and knows all the mechanics inside out!
   
   Adam also runs his Youtube Channel and Discord server (that one has limited invites, so watch out for the next batch coming soon!)
   
2. To do ADS or not to do ADS
   I think literally every website’s author (I’m not talking about company representatives) has to decide whether he covers minimum costs through donations, through ads or through some other way (unknown to me at this stage). I’d like to experiment and see what is the best way.
   
3. Member’s zone Ze Patrons
   In August, I’ve launched my Patreon page, providing some bonuses and special features for my Patrons. Altogether, you are now able to support the website and all the content here in 3 different ways – via PayPal, Patreon and Stripe.
   
4. Giveaways and contests
   I’d like to build a community around the topics covered on the website and going old-fashioned discussion forum might not be a bad idea. However, I prefer doing one step at a time and run a few random giveaways to start with. Later on, maybe a bigger contest.
   
   And here’s the first one – any comment under this page will add you to the participant’s pool. On Sep 5th 00:00 I will take all the comments left here and pick one random winner of a $10 gift card (Apple Store / Google Store – your choice).

That’s all for now!

Sincerely yours, Serhiy Botulidze