TLDR; It seems SEO has to be my primary channel, but I don’t really understand SEO. Time to change that.
I’ve been making things online a looong time. My first website was online in 1996, and I’ve done dozens since. And I don’t know SEO. I mean, I know the basics, have a title with desired keywords, have good text, use tags for the images, get inbound links, that sort of stuff. But it’s mainly in the abstract. I want my new project to work out, and that’s going to need some pretty decent traffic to make it work.
My theory is I put out some very cool stuff that people really like, and I’ve gotten some great feedback from Japanese teachers for my Hiragana drag and drop game, and the new game is going very well to. But what happens then? I’m like the South Park underpants gnomes..
I’m pretty sure the middle bit is something to do with marketing. It doesn’t matter how cool the stuff you’re making is if no one knows about it. The thing about kids learning languages is that they change every year. That offers great opportunities, but it also means that traditional marketing is out of the question for me – my budget is, let me see… Oh, that’s right, nothing! I think that Google is probably full of people looking for things like this, so that’s where I want to try reaching them. Which means I have to make my site visible in Google.
I’ve started with the very basics of SEO, but I know there’s a whole world of stuff I don’t understand yet. I actually know the main question is: “What are people looking for?”. I’m making some guesses, but until I start to see some data, they will remain guesses. So, while I start gathering data, I’m going to spend the next few weeks really digging into SEO a bit more. I think from then on it’s going to be a thing I do some of every week. Worst case scenario, and this turns into nothing, then hey, at least I’ll have some my SEO chops!