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Are we underutilizing our advertisement options?


Grimscythe
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Hey guys! So, here's my thought for today: are we, as forum rpg creators, underutilizing the advertisement methods available to us? I ask this because as I poke around the internet more and more using the methods I typically use to find things, discovering a forum rp is next to impossible to do (outside any of the directories). While that is fantastic for us, and no doubt makes directories near vital for our exposure, I can't help but wonder how many roleplayers are simply oblivious to our games not because of the mediums we employ for roleplay, but because we're simply not reaching them.

 

I had a side project a few months ago that I chose not to continue with, but used for the basis of my current game (though I've not employed the same advertising methods thus far, and I am seeing a difference). Without going into details, I advertised this forum not as I see forums advertised through tumblr and directories, but via Discord directories (namely Disboard*). While I failed to properly advertise the board in terms of the type of players I wanted, I did see some success in gaining new members (many of which were discord rpers and entirely new to, but willing to learn, forums). Furthermore, as I look for more and more content to share on twitter, I've noticed that the platform as a whole is startlingly vacant of forum rp advertisements (using such keywords to search one). 

 

What I'm trying to figure out really is whether there is a reason to this--has it been proven to be largely ineffective?

 

*For those unfamiliar with what Disboard is, it's a discord directory where you can list your discord server with several keywords and an associated description. By adding a bot to your server, you're able to bump these listings (every two hours) and it gives users an option upon finding you in the directory to learn more about your Discord server and/or game and select whether to join your discord (yes, this gives it more public visibility) or not.

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I think it's just because a lot of staffers just aren't aware that advertising on Discord is a viable option. I've been roleplaying for over ten years and staffing for three. I've never advertised via Discord servers. The most I've done has been linking the sites I'm on to friends via DMs. Maybe I just live under a rock when it comes to advertising, but I'd also never heard of Disboard until about a week ago, and I don't know of any other Discord advertising servers out there.

 

Even now that I know they exist, I still have no idea how Discord advertising works and what I have to do. Am I supposed to join a bunch of servers and copy and paste my ad in every couple hours? Do I just invite a bot that advertises for me? Will people look through on their own like on a forum directory? I have limited time and energy. I don't want to spend either on learning completely new things when the existing things are working well for me. 

 

Maybe I'm just old school. But I'd rather stick with the advertising venues that I know how to use, that I know bring in members, and that don't give me yet another thing to keep track of as an admin. Advertising outside of forum directories has never been efficient for me, so I'm not inclined to try yet another way when everything like it has fallen through.

 

And honestly, I don't want to advertise in a place where the people who see that advertisement will be coming from a vastly different rp culture and won't know how to do anything on my site. I just don't. I'm happy to help out the occasional newbie where they're stuck on things and new to forum rp, like all admins should. But frankly, the idea of getting half a dozen clueless newbies at once makes me want to run away screaming. I make my forums to plot and post, not to handhold and mother a bunch of people who will probably end up flaking on my site anyway. 

 

So I guess this all comes down to two things - not wanting to make more work for myself, and not wanting to modify how I do something when the existing way gets satisfactory results. 

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I do use a few servers to advertise on but haven't seen any major influx of guest that stay around as our discord is used for updates, tags, quick information but not for rping but yet I'll post them weekly or so. Willing to try.

Have started advertising on Tumblr as well, but that is not a quick post, some don't get "submitted" until at the most I've seen, nearly a week later. 

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Honestly I just started to do ads on like one discord server, and I am not sure how much of a difference it had made versus traditional ads. I probably should take a survey or something, I would guess it doesn't make that much of a difference though but if people have had success in other areas, I would love to hear too. But like others have pointed out Discord RP tends to be a bit different from Forum RP so you do have people that find the site that need to be shown the ropes a bit more. If you have patience for that, probably isn't an issue. 

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3 hours ago, Karebear said:

I do use a few servers to advertise on but haven't seen any major influx of guest that stay around as our discord is used for updates, tags, quick information but not for rping but yet I'll post them weekly or so. Willing to try.

Have started advertising on Tumblr as well, but that is not a quick post, some don't get "submitted" until at the most I've seen, nearly a week later. 

 

Honestly, I have this awkwardness with tumblr because I was never shown how to properly use it as a tool, so I did not know this about the approximate waiting time. I still open it up and stare blankly at it. I should probably look through the guides, because I imagine there's probably something there.

 

2 hours ago, Toastie said:

Honestly I just started to do ads on like one discord server, and I am not sure how much of a difference it had made versus traditional ads. I probably should take a survey or something, I would guess it doesn't make that much of a difference though but if people have had success in other areas, I would love to hear too. But like others have pointed out Discord RP tends to be a bit different from Forum RP so you do have people that find the site that need to be shown the ropes a bit more. If you have patience for that, probably isn't an issue. 

 

Yes, that's a definite outcome from my experience, as I spent hours explaining to some individuals the basics of how forums work. I personally don't mind doing it, as I've always had the patience necessary to help new members/players wherever I go. This stemmed from the lack of patience those around me showed, and I was/am okay with that.

 

I can't really speak for an experience through advertising via individual discord servers is, as I haven't gone that far into it, but it's a medium I'm far more familiar with than others (I started out on Slack before Discord came out). I'm a twitter/discord kinda gal, more so than I'm a tumblr one. However, I will spend hours browsing games on tumblr. I'm more of a mimicry person. If I can't figure it out, I mimic what I see, cross my fingers, and hope for the best.

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Discord is absolutely a valid platform to advertise on. My friend and I met in discord RP, and then discovered a jcink forum through those advertising servers and have moved over to forum rp fully now. I'd never rp'd on forums before, but I'm liking them a lot more! There are plenty of good rp discords, like grand central, the roleplayer's hub, the roleplayground. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/9/2020 at 12:38 AM, Grimscythe said:

 

Honestly, I have this awkwardness with tumblr because I was never shown how to properly use it as a tool, so I did not know this about the approximate waiting time. I still open it up and stare blankly at it. I should probably look through the guides, because I imagine there's probably something there.

 

 

Yes, that's a definite outcome from my experience, as I spent hours explaining to some individuals the basics of how forums work. I personally don't mind doing it, as I've always had the patience necessary to help new members/players wherever I go. This stemmed from the lack of patience those around me showed, and I was/am okay with that.

 

I can't really speak for an experience through advertising via individual discord servers is, as I haven't gone that far into it, but it's a medium I'm far more familiar with than others (I started out on Slack before Discord came out). I'm a twitter/discord kinda gal, more so than I'm a tumblr one. However, I will spend hours browsing games on tumblr. I'm more of a mimicry person. If I can't figure it out, I mimic what I see, cross my fingers, and hope for the best.

 

Grimscythe, I can give you a few pointers if you'd like.

 

I think I botched the first round (or two) and they were deleted, but got it down to a less painful measure. BUT... I only post ads weekly as I don't see a huge impact from it yet.

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  • 3 weeks later...

So, I'm going to be honest -- I've never even heard of Disboard or any sort of Discord related advertising until I happened across this thread. I looked into it and really, it couldn't hurt. I think any form of advertising that you can get your forums' name out into is helpful. Finding a new RP forum is so difficult as it is, especially if you aren't relying heavily on resource forum advertisements -- and getting your name out there feels next to impossible most days.

 

I mainly advertise on resource sites and any of the RP forums I find through there. I haven't really utilized tumblr because I'm not sure how to use it yet, lol. For advertising, at least!

 

But I'm definitely going to give Disboard a try. But I was wondering, what category do you guys put your sites under? Other? What sort of tags do you use? Is there specifics we should be using to be found easier, or? Any help would be appreciated!

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7 hours ago, blindxsecrets said:

So, I'm going to be honest -- I've never even heard of Disboard or any sort of Discord related advertising until I happened across this thread. I looked into it and really, it couldn't hurt. I think any form of advertising that you can get your forums' name out into is helpful. Finding a new RP forum is so difficult as it is, especially if you aren't relying heavily on resource forum advertisements -- and getting your name out there feels next to impossible most days.

 

I mainly advertise on resource sites and any of the RP forums I find through there. I haven't really utilized tumblr because I'm not sure how to use it yet, lol. For advertising, at least!

 

But I'm definitely going to give Disboard a try. But I was wondering, what category do you guys put your sites under? Other? What sort of tags do you use? Is there specifics we should be using to be found easier, or? Any help would be appreciated!

 

With disboard, when I am actively using it, I use forum-roleplay, forum, rp, and then a couple tags to describe the site. Or if necessary, I remove one of the first three to add an extra description one. You're also able to type a description and it gives you a little page to describe your discord's purpose.

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  • 1 month later...

I am all for trying new avenues of advertising and Honestly I try to do a lot of it.  I was on disboard for 6 months.  The people we got in I would hand hold through the process and show them the site, but they were most often very immature (likely teens) and never stuck around so I pulled my ad.  It just wasn't worth it to me.  I've found my most productive avenues are resource servers, site to site advertising (yes I still get stragglers this way) having my affiliates tag EVERYwhere, and Toprpsites.  I get a LOT of people from that because its the only damned thing that comes up when you google anything RP related.  

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I use resource sites, Toprp and similar as well as Tumblr.  I am using reddit but so far am not overly impressed.

 

With Tumblr I've got into a good rythm and I advertise every other day. A tip to making it less work; once you have set the body of your message with all the links for rules, claims, wanteds etc, copy and paste the info into a word doc.  From then on you have the body already written and ready to paste.   All you need to do from there is add you title pic, and tags.  So adding an ad there now takes me about 2 mins. I'm not sure I've had much traffic from it, but that's one way to make it an easier thing to do.

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"You tie the knot, I'll start the fire."

~ The Amity Affliction

 

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The World Withing - Modern Supernatural Roleplay (JCINK 18+)

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Flahme said:

I use resource sites, Toprp and similar as well as Tumblr.  I am using reddit but so far am not overly impressed.

 

Reddit is tough to advertise and get people from I've found. Most of them have never roleplayed on forums and only want to use Discord. I've gotten maybe two or three people from there, but they're used to more of a chat-style it seems.

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I ended up setting up a poll on my site so people can tell me how they found us. I was surprised one was from reddit. So I will keep that going but I agree with @LunarScorpio it seems slow.

"You tie the knot, I'll start the fire."

~ The Amity Affliction

 

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The World Withing - Modern Supernatural Roleplay (JCINK 18+)

 

 

 

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I've moved from proboards to jcink and haven't really branched out much. My advertising tends to stay between those two sites, tumblr, and directories — I haven't really thought of using reddit!

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On 3/7/2020 at 3:41 AM, SithLordOfSnark said:

I use Disboard on a BDSM server I run and we use ID verification to verify people are 18 or over. I couldn't imagine using it for my RP sites, since they're ALL 18+, because people lie about their age on the internet and too many RPers would find this form of verification too intrusive, so I'd rather advertise places where I know the majority of people I'll end up getting are definitely older then 18.

 

I can concur on this. Our forum is 18 +, and its sometimes tricky discovering ages. We had a close call with an applicant that was 17 and we explained we could not approve their application because of this.  I tend to affiliate with people and forums I know are of the same mind set with age restrictions.

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