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Episode 143: Creative Content Creation w/ DeQuan
144 Plays3 years ago
Welcome back to the Goblin Lore Podcast and welcome back to our special guest DeQuan Watson (one of the hosts of the Color of Magic podcast). In part one of a two part series Hobbes and DeQuan discuss Content Creation and the need for Intentionality and Marketing. When DeQuan met with the cast back in 2020 he had moved to full time content creation and continues in this role. We approached DeQuan after the SCG announcement cutting back on their competitive content in particular. While this is more of the focus of Pt 2 (sorry DeQuan hi-jacked the show!) today we look at ways for content creators to expand their audiences and improve their product!
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
This episode is sponsored by Zencastr. They provide a crystal clear sound and allows for recording separate audio and video tracks for the guests and the hosts. Plus, there is a secured cloud backup, so you never lose your interviews. It is super easy to use, and there is nothing to download. My guests just click on the link, and we start recording. Click here to get 30% off your first three months with a PRO account.
On another new note we continue our partnership with The Fireside Alliance. From their main page: "An independent media network and a progressive community of progressive communities". Please check them out!
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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You can find the hosts on Twitt
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorships
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. You have just hobskew with the guest today. Alex is unfortunately feeling a little under the weather and not able to join us. But before we get started, I just wanted to do a couple of quick announcements. I wanted to say thank you. This episode is sponsored again by Zencaster. If you go to zen.ai forward slash goblin lore pod, you can get three months off of a pro subscription, 30%
00:00:59
Speaker
off of a three months for a pro subscription. And why I like the pro subscription, which is what we use on this show is it allows for kind of post production that I don't have to do. This includes auto leveling, it allows me to kind of take out pauses or gaps within the software. And, you know, this is one of the things I've talked a lot on the show about when I took over kind of editing
00:01:20
Speaker
This is just nothing I had any experience with. And it was taking me hours and hours just to even get levels consistent, to get kind of that content to a place where I felt comfortable pushing out kind of the quality that we were getting before. Zencaster has really made that a lot more possible for me. And I think it's great for anybody that kind of maybe doesn't have the stronger just experience with editing. You can also record your guest on their own end, which is a huge piece.
00:01:48
Speaker
because you don't have to worry about losing audio or files dropping because it will be recording on each person's end. You just send a link and they get it. We want to thank Grinding Coffee Company. So once again, we are goblins and we function and fuel ourselves predominantly off of caffeine and Grinding Coffee Company makes that possible. They also, as we always say, are just such good partners. They're LGBT and minority owned in Rand.
00:02:14
Speaker
And one of the things that they've done is they set up themselves to be a coffee company for gamers. And that comes from everything to do with their promotions, to do with the blends that they come up with. And they have allowed us to be able to do our mental health charity events and to have more giveaway options that are just not the same necessarily standard thing that everybody has given away. So we want to say thank you to them. And then I will say I am Hobbskew, pronouns he, him.
Guest Introduction and Reflections
00:02:42
Speaker
and I'm gonna introduce a returning guest, Daquan. Daquan, how are you doing? It's been a while since we last had you on the show. Yeah, I feel, I don't know, was it nine months or something? I feel like it's been a bit. I think it's been even longer.
00:02:58
Speaker
It was actually shortly, I can speak to the fact that I know that it was shortly after George Floyd, because I think it was at least a year and a couple of months at least. Yeah, because yeah, it was before the election. I can tell you that for sure. So it's been a bit. I think it's kind of funny that you said at least a couple of months because I think that that's, you know,
00:03:20
Speaker
how my brain functions during pandemic times. Yeah, everything was just a couple of months ago. Yeah, exactly. So welcome back.
00:03:29
Speaker
that's good to be back. Yeah, like, I think there's just been so much going on. And it's kind of interesting to start making the rounds with people on their projects and podcasts again, as we're kind of starting to settle in a little bit. Yeah, as you say, so when we talked to you last, you know, that was kind of you guys have been doing the color of MTG. And you had made a decision, like right before the pandemic started, that you were going to move to full time content creation. So
00:03:58
Speaker
that's now been like, well, you know, over two years. Because you were talking a little bit offline beforehand, but it is that's that's what you're doing. Yeah, full time, man. And
00:04:13
Speaker
I think one of the things that's made it possible is I've been very fortunate, like I said, kind of my previous life, you know, having run a business, you know, know how to analyze things or whatever a little bit differently. And it's helped out a lot while I'm doing gaming content, because even when we talk about like, you know, the beginning of the pandemic, where everybody's panicking and looking for what to do, my first thought was, okay,
00:04:37
Speaker
don't just look at what's happening, look at how behaviors are going to change. Right? So I remember having to talk with my co host and saying, Okay, we're gonna lose some listens on our podcasts. Yeah. And I was trying to tell other people that and he said, Well, why I said, Well, when do you listen to podcasts?
Audience Behavior and Content Strategy
00:04:50
Speaker
when you're at the airport waiting on a plane, when you're commuting to work in your car, when you're on a train, you know, like, yeah, we're not gonna be doing any of those things, right? So expect a 20, 30% drop, but let's double down on things on YouTube, because people are gonna be at home watching Hulu, watching YouTube, watching Netflix, because they can't go anywhere and do anything, right? And I think people were just kind of like, okay, well, I'm just gonna do a lot in my space, but like having to understand that like your space might be affected one way or the other.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know, even little stuff like that really went a long way to helping me out during the pandemic. I was gonna say, you know, we saw definitely, like you said, kind of that that drop off from that. And because we do only audio, right? And that's kind of the main function. And we have found the people who have stayed are people that were kind of very loyal, the people who are very engaged with our content, it's been difficult to pick up for this, the type of content we do. We've had to look at ways to get kind of creative with that, even if it's just
00:05:49
Speaker
getting our name out there by doing things like charity events or kind of looking for different ways to get involved with other people's content knowing that ours is kind of it's an audio only format. It's a podcast. It's going to be hard for us to grow. And the other thing that I saw during this was you also had everybody that now was at home and had maybe potentially some more time on their hands or weren't going as many places, weren't commuting.
00:06:18
Speaker
There was an explosion of just the number of people that decided to start doing content. Oh, sure. And I actually planned for that as well, you know, and understand, okay, what are you going to do that's different? Because everybody that's coming in is going to be at level one.
00:06:35
Speaker
effectively, like I'm going to turn a camera on or a microphone on and I'm going to hope people show up because they don't really have a plan. They're not expecting to do this for a long time. Like a few have thought about it. And now they're going to give it a try just because they have some extra time. But what are you going to do to be at level two or three or four because those people are going to bring others because they all everybody knows somebody you don't know.
00:06:56
Speaker
Right. They're going to bring some number of people into your space that are going to get dropped off because you know, as well as I do, like when people do podcasts, they're lucky to make it past our fifth episode.
00:07:05
Speaker
You know, when people start doing YouTube, a lot of them drop off after that second month. Yeah. So it's like these people are going to get used to being in this habit of going and looking for stuff in that space and then they're gone. So what are you doing to be interesting to those people? And that was a lot of what we had to consider to talk about. And even on our podcast, we said, okay, though we're going to lose some viewers or listeners. What are some topics we can talk about that are
00:07:31
Speaker
on the public consciousness, but still we can relate them to gaming. And then we had to just, I guess you'll call it both the fortunate and unfortunate circumstance of all the stuff that went down with George Floyd and everything else and happening to be two black guys running a gaming podcast.
00:07:49
Speaker
That was just like, well, here we go. This, this is the thing, you know, and, and we saw that, right. And that's kind of one of the things we talked about too, because there's other magic content creators, like the guys over at like one more, manna, as fire, six, you know, some of these other guys. And they also saw a spike during that time. But we also, I tried to talk to some of them and say, look, there's also going to be a drop off.
00:08:11
Speaker
because it's a thing, and not to like call out anybody, but it's just everybody was in a mode where they're like, hey, you're right. I don't know the other black people in our space. So everybody's looking for that. But the minute it's off of public consciousness, it's kind of going to go back to normal.
00:08:26
Speaker
How do you capitalize on those moments?
Viral Engagement and Business Skills
00:08:29
Speaker
I think being aware of that from business has allowed me to take advantage of a lot of that because I was just talking to somebody the other day actually about when I had my store, if we had an abnormally successful weekend for no reason, I immediately asked my employees, okay, what caused this? Was there something going on in town? Was there a thing with the local universities? Was there a thing we didn't know about? We could double down on it the next time it's happening.
00:08:52
Speaker
Because I think too many people panic just when things are going bad. And it's like, no, I also want to know why things are going well. What can we capitalize off of? I talk a lot sometimes about chaos theory. And one of the things about chaos theory, there's actually a theory as it relates to jobs and to vocation, which is this idea that abnormal events happen. We know that they happen. We know that infrequent events happen.
00:09:21
Speaker
The key is you have to be able to capitalize on them when they do. So part of that is, am I in the right place at the right time? If I know that by going to tons of game stores, I'm going to be more likely that somebody sees a goblin lore sticker and maybe asks me about it, am I doing something like that? Do I put myself into a situation where I can capitalize on an infrequent event happening? And as you're kind of saying, you have to be ready for, okay, that spike is going to happen.
00:09:51
Speaker
How are we going to keep people around? How are we going to do things? Like you said, I think that idea of not just when things went bad, but when things went well, is there something that's repeatable? Is there something that we can build off of? I think the best definition I've heard for luck is preparation meeting opportunity. You have to do everything to be ready that for when that moment arises, you can get right into it.
00:10:19
Speaker
And I think too often people are like, ah, I kind of hope this thing happens or I'm aiming for this thing. And I'm like, okay, well, when it happens, what do you do with it?
00:10:29
Speaker
Well, it's actually, I don't know if I got to tell you about this at the time when I was last on, but I had a post go viral, which was really crazy. And this is around the time. I guess they had done the first arena open because I had, cause I, and actually it was a little bit after the George Floyd thing. Cause we were trying to figure out like, how do people get in situations where this tension or these racial issues come from?
00:10:54
Speaker
And I started thinking about how many people have a black person in a position of authority in their life growing up. So I actually thought about asking, and I truly honestly just thought I would ask some people on Twitter, ask some people in my Facebook groups, and they'll just see what the responses are. But I asked, how many of you had a black teacher growing up? And if you did, what grade was it?
00:11:16
Speaker
So I just posted that I went off to play magic, you know, I play my thing, which, by the way, I actually won some money. So that was cool. But then I come back and I look at my phone and I had like, literally, I've maxed out my my responses or whatever, you know, my notifications. Yeah. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? So I go look.
00:11:34
Speaker
And I've got like 4000, like interactions on this post on Twitter. And I'm like, Oh God, what happened? Because I'm thinking like, somebody took this the wrong way, it got shared on something. And it was the craziest thing because I literally had like, Chelsea Clinton was responding to me.
00:11:52
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like, you know, news reporters. I find out later they talked about it on a show on ESPN, the one where they play like the dumb game where, you know, the talking heads respond and they get fake points or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Around the Horn, I think is what it is. It is around the Horn. Is it? I think so. Either way, you know the one I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was that it was talked to. It was like some Canadian newspaper picked it up and I'm like, this is insane. Right. Even to this day, I had somebody just respond to it like two weeks ago.
00:12:21
Speaker
And it finishes, I think it has like 7,000 responses with like something like, I don't know, some insane number of views and interactions, like in the hundreds of thousands. But about that is I immediately thought, okay, this is a moment I got to jump on this.
00:12:37
Speaker
Right. So I immediately started responding to as many as I could. And I might literally stayed up until like two in the morning. Like not even joking. And at the time I saw it, it was maybe like six or seven o'clock in the evening. And I'm responding to as many things as I can. I'm collecting the data from both sites.
00:12:54
Speaker
I put it all together the next more I literally I go to sleep late, I wake up early, I put together some information so I can make little charts and show people like, hey, here's how many people had a black teacher in my college and junior high, you know, whatever. Just so I'm like, I'm not gonna waste the opportunity. And this is something people respond to. So then I was able to get more reach out of that. Because I now took this thing people have shown an emotional investment in.
00:13:17
Speaker
And now I can turn it into data they can use and talk about and teach people with or whatever. And that got a lot of engagements. And then that led to people following me on other things because people were just discovering that like, Oh, you do gaming content or whatever. That's cool. And yeah, so that was another big jumping off point, but I'm glad it happened to me.
00:13:34
Speaker
because now I can tell other people like, hey, here's how to manage a viral moment, you know, where I've seen other people get that and they just post like, hey, here's my SoundCloud, you know, whatever. And I'm like, you know, you have 10,000 people paying attention to you, like, do more, right? You're not going to get this opportunity. Like, this is a chance you can really raise your profile. So that's funny. I think we talked about it a little bit last time. And what I was just thinking about the fact that I don't know if it was now the person
00:14:04
Speaker
that necro the your post or if I've just seen kind of that post make the rounds as people probably saw how successful it was and we'll see kind of that you know like I'll recycle a Content that worked before or you know yeah that happens all the time on social media So I was just thinking the other day that I had seen that um
00:14:25
Speaker
But it's making me think of like, when you sat down and decided kind of towards the beginning of all this, that you were going to do content full time. Like you said, we know that with Color of MPG,
00:14:37
Speaker
The stuff that with George Floyd and kind of just all of the awareness that did – like you said, I remember when we had talked about it last time, that idea that people would eventually stop talking about it, right? I mean, I think that that's what we knew kind of what happened, kind of one of those things that's been frustrating to see things get brought up, and then they do get put to the side. I mean, people move on.
00:15:01
Speaker
You had to be in kind of a position to capitalize off of that. But when you were sitting down and already deciding that you were going to do this full-time, what were some of the things that you were planning on? What was the work that you were doing to even be able to start this? Because you made that decision right away. You went into it head first. I was released from my last job.
00:15:25
Speaker
I mean, they say release. I mean, release fired, whatever, whatever language you want to use, but I no longer had that job. Um, back around, it was, it was the week before Thanksgiving in 2019. Right. So I had been at that point. We had the podcast. We were maybe on like episode six or eight. It was still really early and I'd maybe been streaming for maybe just a few weeks less than that, or maybe a couple of weeks more might've been two months into streaming.
00:15:52
Speaker
And I had some nice severance pay, you know, I had some money saved up and I was like, okay, let me take a week or two to just think about this. So no hurry. Holidays are coming up. And somewhere
Unique Value Proposition for Streamers
00:16:05
Speaker
mid January, I feel like I had the talk with my significant other and said, look, I'm going to give this a go full time because I see a lot of gaps in the market. I see that gamers are bad at business.
00:16:18
Speaker
They just are. And I'm not saying magic player, I mean gamers. I mean I looked at people playing video games, people doing board game reviews, whatever. Like a lot of them are just bad at business. I said okay, there's definitely room. I'm gonna just take us off this tangent right now because I want to know what you mean when you say that because it's something that I 100% believe I agree with because I've seen kind of these gaps in
00:16:45
Speaker
how people are able to market themselves. But I'm curious what you were seeing that makes it universal that gamers seem to be bad at business. Oh, man, are you giving me permission to hijack the show? Because I could literally do this for like, five hours. I'm not gonna give you five hours just because I would if I had it. But I am giving you permission to hijack. Yeah, okay. So I'm gonna from the most basic thing, if you
00:17:11
Speaker
I'm trying to, let me take something people can relate to. So let's just say streaming, because there's a bunch of people that stream a bunch of different stuff. If you go look at the average person who starts streaming, well, one, I find out there's a bunch of people who, because I literally research stuff all the time. I actually dedicate time every week to watch stuff in different industries I know nothing about, just to see if I can learn something from my presentation and my content that they do. And I can talk to that later.
00:17:38
Speaker
One of the things is you look around and some of these people are streaming to like five people for three years, you know, and they're doing nothing different. They're literally doing things the same on day 700 that they did on day one. And I'm like, why, you know, you're, of course you're not growing. Like something's not working, but you're not adjusting it. You're not AB testing anything. You're not.
00:18:00
Speaker
reaching out to people to figure out what you're doing wrong. There's so many things. And at the end of the day, I tell people, if you're getting on doing the exact same thing that everybody else is doing, why is somebody going to watch you over someone else? Because the other person already has an audience. They're already doing it better. Their cameras are going to be better. They have a whole gimmick and probably a website and a marketing machine.
00:18:22
Speaker
If you're doing the exact same thing, they're not gonna come watch you. There's already two or three other people doing that. Like you have to have your own message, your own unique value proposition. Like if you can't tell somebody in two or three sentences why somebody should come watch you over somebody else, then you probably haven't figured out what your messaging is. So you're not gonna have a focus and it's gonna be hard to grow. And that's just like business 101. That's not anything special. That's not something I figured out. It's just I'm looking around and going,
00:18:52
Speaker
These people aren't doing anything. They're just sitting there barely even engaging with their chat. They have a camera on and literally nothing. They haven't done any framing. There's no music. There's nothing special that makes them different than anyone else. And it's like, you're not going to grow during doing that. And everything's the safest, simplest option. And it's hard to grow that way. But you see it across the board where you're looking at, like I said, it doesn't matter if people playing video games or whatever.
00:19:19
Speaker
You go look at a game, you go look at a category, and 90% of the stuff is the same. And there's a reason all those other people are at the bottom.
00:19:28
Speaker
I would say even just kind of outside of streaming, I'm thinking back to when we started this cast. So we're going on, we're going to hit our four-year anniversary in June. Which is you. Yeah, it's like nothing that I never, I ever would have thought would be possible. It does, it makes me feel awkward because I just don't feel, in the sense of like, I don't feel like that what I do, yeah.
00:19:54
Speaker
I have my own kind of concerns about myself that are just like not confidence at times. But part of it is just that surrealty to me that I'm doing a podcast and that there are people that are still listening and that I get to do what I enjoy doing and be engaged with magic. When we started out,
00:20:12
Speaker
The only reason that I even agreed with Joe who started the cast to come on was because he presented an idea to me of something that seemed very different than anything else I had heard. There seemed to be kind of, he talked about this idea of where does lore meet the real world? How could we explain some lore based concept or how do we take some real world things that are important to us? Social issues, mental health.
00:20:35
Speaker
like maybe bring it to a wider audience or bring it into a magic discussion. We'll use the lore to frame it. We'll use kind of maybe some elements that are not really related to gameplay. When he pitched it and started talking about it, all of a sudden it was like, okay, this is not something that I know of that is being done. Because I had thought numerous times about like, oh, maybe I could write articles, right? And I did, like way back in like 2010, I wrote articles.
00:21:03
Speaker
Well, it was easy then. There was like five of us playing. I mean, yeah, there wasn't me having to find a niche. In that time, that was the whole thing. I'd be like, wow, it'd be fun to make magic content. But until Joe kind of presented an idea that then I could run with, that I felt very comfortable with, and then since he's left, Alex and I have made our own.
00:21:30
Speaker
I don't think that we would have been able to do it because we would have just been kind of three guys with a microphone in front of us talking about magic.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, and that's what a lot of podcasts are. It's hard to listen to a podcast where they don't have a plan, the topic's not fully decided before they go on. You don't know what you're tuning in for or whatever. And I get you as far as wanting to do something different. Because that was the one thing me and Brian talked about, was like, okay, can we talk about
00:22:03
Speaker
different type of personal experiences, racial issues, you know, whatever, as they affect gamers and magic players without just being like, Hey, we're going to play the race card every week, but you know, still bring awareness to different categories and maybe not even just us. Cause we've talked about like issues for women, issues with the trans community that have come up, you know, and we can relate it all to gaming and say like, no, these are things that do affect you on your space.
00:22:28
Speaker
You know, and have some of them on his guests so they can talk about things or whatever that they may not get to on other shows because people dodge those topics. And as it turns out, it works for us, right? Like we, we get, I don't know, not a ton, but we get like 2000 downloads a week, you know, like, which is strong for us. So, I mean, that's awesome.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, and we've been slowly and steadily growing it, but it's we only did it because we knew we could do something different. And because we even talked about this, I don't really want to do this if it's just another show. But this is a whole category that nobody is really addressing. So it's like, why don't we be the ones? So with that, you kind of saw that you guys were already jumping off with that.
00:23:12
Speaker
you came in though with kind of your at that point when you moved to full-time you like you said you were doing you started with i believe streaming you had youtube well no actually at that point i didn't even have youtube yet i actually started oh wow okay february 2020 because it was just before the oh yeah okay so since we i'm gonna jump topics a lot i have so many things but so we move into like i said january made the decision gonna do this full time and decided
00:23:41
Speaker
If I can make at least 70% of my bills off of just the content, I will continue doing this. Because I figured if something happened to my significant other's income, then I have other things that I could make up the 30% pretty easy. But can I make the bulk of what we would need off of this?
00:24:00
Speaker
So I went ahead and
Pandemic Adaptations and Sponsorships
00:24:02
Speaker
did it. And my initial plan was actually to come at it to show the business side of gaming and magic, because obviously I'd done that in my previous life and I knew a bunch of people. So I had already started contacting people that had some of the best game stores in the country. I started talking with people running conventions, seeing if I could get interviews with people at different places. So I'd already started lining up. I was a step away from starting to book all the plane tickets.
00:24:26
Speaker
for the year. Cause I was like, okay, got all this stuff. Like I can do cool things. I can do stuff from shows. I'm, you know, I was getting put on lists so I could try to get badges or whatever. And then of course, you know, into February, mid March, it was, well, we're shutting everything down.
00:24:43
Speaker
So then it was like, well, okay. Obviously what I wanted to do is not going to work because I can do interviews online, but I can only do so much with a zoom call, right? I can't do walkthroughs of people's stores. I can't show what's happening on convention spaces or special meetings where people are showing off stuff. Like that's not really going to be a thing. So I was like, okay.
00:25:03
Speaker
What can I do with this? So in the beginning, I actually used that to say, let me visit one or two stores and let's talk about how people are trying to be safer during COVID so they can still operate. So I did a couple of videos like that. I still did a couple of interviews with a couple of store owners, but it was like talking about, okay, how is this affecting your store or not? And giving people that perspective while I worked into other content. So I use that as like my kind of draw because I knew COVID awareness was going to be top of mind.
00:25:32
Speaker
But I also knew that people aren't going to want to talk about COVID 24 seven, right? You're just going to get burnout. So I said, OK, people are going to be home playing magic, playing arena. Let me use that as my hook. And then I will still use that as a way to educate people on other things. So I moved from just doing the straight business and to OK, let's play games. But occasionally I throw in videos like, hey, here's why you can't make as much selling your cards as other people.
00:25:59
Speaker
Here's why you don't win as often as you do and just educating on different aspects of the game, while also playing the game. And that's actually worked out great. Yeah, as a building off of your knowledge base as a business owner or convention runner, we've talked, you know, we talked about those last time you were kind of here. You know, you've had these different hats that you've worn that bring you into the gaming industry, even into the content creation and content creation field in kind of a different jumping off point because of that background.
00:26:26
Speaker
part of what you're not as bad as business is because you've done business. And I think that that's something that most of us who do content creation have very little experience with. Oh, yeah, one of the biggest things, you know, one of my if you follow me on socials, you know, I have a partnership deal with ultra pro. And that kind of came about from like project into another project that happened to work with ultra pro and then I just reached out to him directly.
00:26:50
Speaker
But the first thing when I reached out to them is I basically had a two pager that was, here's what my content's about. Here's what I'm aiming to do. Here's what my current reach is. Here are my goals. This is what I can do for you. Here's what I want from a business partner. And first response I got back from them was, we never get this type of information from anybody. And immediately we were talking about a deal within 48 hours.
00:27:19
Speaker
You know, and that's before I had like my, my growth, my nothing, everything was like a quarter of what it is now at that point. And they were still willing to do a deal because they could see that like, okay, this is somebody who's got their crap together. This is a person that if we do a promotional deal or something, we don't have to worry about them following up. And it's been great ever since they've been great to me. I've done a lot of work for them, you know, but
00:27:44
Speaker
I think too many people say, okay, I want to get a sponsor and I'm like, okay, cool. How are you making yourself an asset to them? They're not just going to give you money for this. I could give you money because their names on your stuff, right? That's not good. Now, if you're a, it works for pro athletes because you're a pro athlete. You're on a sports team. You're on TV in front of tens of millions of people, you know, whatever. Yeah. That's not going to work for you and me that if we're on a good day, we get like 2000 people watching us.
00:28:11
Speaker
or watching a video we put up or something, right? It's just not the same market. But there is money to be made. And matter of fact, one of the recent things I've been trying and I've gotten into where I'm doing some small time consulting for people, by the way. So if you want consulting for your content on how to make it better, look me up.
00:28:28
Speaker
Do you want to let them know where to find you, just in case? Yeah, everywhere on socials. You can just find me Power Dragon. P-O-W-R-D-R-A-G-N on literally just about every platform. I was laughing because we kind of just jumped right in with it. That's okay. We didn't actually give you a chance to even say where to find you. I'd rather show my knowledge and if people like it, they'll find me. They'll follow me.
00:28:52
Speaker
But yeah, one of the things I've been telling people is one of the other mistakes I think people make is, you know, especially being a gamer. I'll use that because, you know, most people listening to your show are going to be gamers. If I go out and reach out to say like Logitech, that makes a ton or Elgato better because I use a lot of Elgato gear for my recording and stuff. They aren't necessarily going to be in a hurry to sponsor my content because they already sponsor a ton of people in the game space.
00:29:17
Speaker
Right. People that are easily 10 to 20 times larger than I am, if not more. So I don't have as much, I don't carry as much value to them. But recently I reached out to paying glasses because I went looking around because again, did my research that there's almost no gamers I could find doing anything for eyewear.
00:29:35
Speaker
there was a few i found that do like some the blue like blocking glasses or whatever that's what the one thing i would think of yeah yeah but i found out that paying glasses also offers that in normal glass frames and stuff so great so i reached out to them and literally wrote my proposal exactly like that like hey i use your stuff i've ordered from your site i think you're great
00:29:55
Speaker
I noticed this in the game space. I would like to do a deal with you and promote because I would literally be the only person in the magic space, probably in the entire game space talking about regular eyewear and it's affordable. And right now with people not having jobs and pandemic and whatever, they're going to be looking for cheap eyeglass wear. Within a week, they responded like, yes, we'd love to work with you, blah, blah, let's get together. And I've already done a couple of projects for them and we're talking about doing stuff monthly going forward.
00:30:23
Speaker
And people would look and go like, really? You reached out to an eyeglass thing? I'm like, why not? I prove to them that there's a market here, even though I'm not huge, getting my network of, I don't know, a few 10,000 people is better than zero. And as long as it's not crazy expensive for them.
00:30:38
Speaker
They're willing to pay for it.
Commitment and Self-Promotion in Content Creation
00:30:40
Speaker
Right. Like if they don't have to do – if you show what the utility is, you kind of tell them how you can be beneficial, why you. Once again, I think that whether we're talking sponsorships or we're talking about content creation just in general, why you is kind of the biggest question. Always.
00:30:58
Speaker
why should people listen? Why should somebody want to give you money or give you a discount or give you something in order to market and even if it's not a huge payoff for them. If the return of investment is kind of like they get some eyes on in a field that they don't know. Exactly all upside. I mean, it's like, right? Yeah, they if you're small, they might just go, okay, let we'll do a small promotion and we'll toss you 100 bucks, you know, maybe 200 bucks.
00:31:24
Speaker
But if you may say you get your whole social media reach is maybe 5,000, 10,000 people. If you can get even 20 people, 30 people to go order from their website, they're going to get their money back and then some. Because those people are probably going to become future return customers, at least half of them. So that's worth paying you a couple hundred bucks that you wouldn't have had before. And the thing is, if they say no, you're just out the time it took to put together an email to them.
00:31:51
Speaker
It's all upside. Well, and I am guessing based on kind of the work, we've talked before, the amount of time and effort you're willing to put into this business, this is your job, right? This is the same thing as if you were doing a nine to five, you may have different hours, you are still putting in those hours every single week. It's not just kind of a
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'll make sure I have a regular streaming time. It's everything that you're doing outside of that. Part of that is you're going to get better at writing those business letters once they're written. So as you're saying, you know, like the first couple of times you're gonna have to put all that time effort, get that data, get all of that pulled.
00:32:29
Speaker
but it's like it's easy then from like you're saying it's the cost is an email if it doesn't go well okay i look at different avenue if i need to go that route because even now it's easier now because now i have a media kit it's just a three pager i can just send to him that shows all my stats on all my socials talks about my background what i'm available for and then it shows all the brands i've worked with
00:32:50
Speaker
What I was thinking is I've seen people that have really tried to move to doing content creation full time. I know people who have been successful. I know people that it's been a lot of work with. Hearing about things like media kits, hearing about things like having a mission statement in some ways or just what your actually business does, who you are, seems to be one of those areas that maybe gamers could improve upon.
00:33:19
Speaker
Here's the thing I'm going to tell people that's going to make it way easy for them. And it's going to be the opposite of everything you've been told in life. Which by the way, our adult lives just prove that our childhoods were were lies. Like, completely tell you don't get in car with strangers, but then we call an Uber, you know, like,
00:33:36
Speaker
Don't talk too much in class, but people pay me to talk now. Things change. We're living a different life. But one of the biggest things is, and this is hard, and I've told this to entrepreneurs, business owners well before I was doing content, is you can't afford to be humble when working for yourself. And that's exactly what you're doing when you're making content. You have to be willing to talk about yourself. You have to be willing to put yourself out there to companies.
00:34:03
Speaker
You have to be active on social media. You have to go to events. You have to engage people. If that is not what you are willing to do, this is not for you. You're going to be miserable. You're going to have to work 10 times as hard as everybody else. Can you do it? Yes, but it is going to be a rough, worse journey for you if you're not willing to accept that. Because just like with the business, and this is why I ask business owners,
00:34:29
Speaker
why should somebody come to your business or in this case of making content, come view you over somebody else. You're either doing something that you believe is not being presented, offered, sold, whatever in your market, or you're doing something more entertaining or different or better than what's out there. If you don't believe one of those two things,
00:34:52
Speaker
then you probably shouldn't be doing what you're doing. Or if you haven't even thought of this, I mean, I think that's the other area that you don't know what you don't know. I'm hoping that people maybe if you're looking at going this route to the quad is just offering kind of these like ballpark things like you may not even be aware that that is something that you need to be thinking of. That's a sign, right? Like there's a lot goes into just the forethought that I think people miss. Yeah, and this is the stuff like
00:35:18
Speaker
I give, it sounds kind of pompous, but like, this is the stuff I just give to people for free. Like after that, we niche down. If I'm doing consulting for people, it's like, hey, all right, let's talk about specifics of you and your specific content. But this is like level one stuff that I'll kind of like ask people beforehand of like, have you thought about all these things? So we can just talk about that going in, because that makes a difference. Yeah, if you haven't considered this at all, you're, you're as a consultant are starting at a very different spot.
00:35:45
Speaker
Because if you tell me, okay, I'm in my content for the sake of just being entertaining. I want to be funny, you know, whatever. Okay, cool. We'll talk about how can you integrate weird looks, hats, makeup, maybe music or whatever, right? To make your stuff different to meet that goal.
00:36:00
Speaker
That isn't for me, right? I'm very much a very chill, laid back, just matter of fact kind of person. I have fun, but I'm not an over the top character. That's not what I'm selling, right? I'm selling a chill mood, lots of information, almost an educator level thing. So I know that right. So what I would do for some of my content is not what I would necessarily recommend for somebody else. And different things will work exceptionally well for different people.
Diverse Approaches in Gaming Content
00:36:25
Speaker
So that's why sometimes copying people can be really bad because there's a reason sometimes that works for one person, not for another. Like an example, I would say for magic, if you watch arena content online,
00:36:38
Speaker
and you watch somebody like, actually I'll use three examples, myself, Covert Go Blue and Legend VD, right? Covert Go Blue is very much, he enjoys playing the role of the anti-hero, right? He plays up that pseudo bad guy role a little bit or whatever, and his audience is into that, right? Like that doesn't really work for me. I've kind of become the educator sort of good guy, so I can't just play that kind of pseudo snarky role or whatever. Not that he's a bad person, he's on my stream team, he's a good dude, but that's just kind of the person he plays on camera.
00:37:07
Speaker
Whereas LVD doesn't even use a camera at all and is all voice and very matter of fact and whatever, but he's got a pretty good radio voice and it works for his content. For me, I have to be on camera because one, I make faces and make fun of myself or whatever sometimes and seeing that visual helps, but also being a
00:37:29
Speaker
visual representation of a black person in the gaming space is important, right? So each of us has something different that we're using to our advantage to sell our content, even though we're all in the same space. But what each of us does, I wouldn't recommend the other ones copy because it just wouldn't work for them or their audiences.
00:37:49
Speaker
You know, even, even to a point of how we film stuff, I tell people I purposely open and close my content on my daily gameplay videos with me being full screen. So people get used to having a conversation with a black person, which I know in the game space, there's not a lot of us. So you make that more of a normal thing that people get used to, right? That's actually.
00:38:09
Speaker
something very intentional about how I present my content. I'm always adding little intentional things that are nothing I ever call out, but it's all purposeful by design. You made me feel bad. I was going to just go buy a yellow hat and assume that that was going to get me Gabriel to receive type numbers. But you know what? If you played up the man in the yellow hat in Curious George, that could be funny.
00:38:32
Speaker
You know, it probably would be, but I don't have the playing skill. Once again, I would have to be going a very different direction for that. But you know what? That's the other thing, right? There's people who are known, like you're saying, like Gabriel Nassif or even Paulo Vitor and some of these guys that do content that are known for being very good players. So they don't have to have as much of a personality. Not saying like Paulo actually does have a lot of personality. But the thing is, they're not marketing a personality. They're marketing their skill.
00:39:03
Speaker
So if you're not at that level, people aren't gonna tune in just to watch you play. I make mistakes all the time, but that's not what I'm selling. I'm selling, hey, look, I'm gonna show you a new deck or a different idea or something in the format that you may not have thought of, a deck maybe you thought was bad, but here's a different way to play it. I'm showcasing ideas and teaching people how to be better more than just saying, hey, I'm gonna play this deck you know is good and I'm gonna show you the best way to play it.
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you're not technical know how and, you know, how to run through very just like very strong, smart play in the same sense is not what you're, you're, this isn't, this is how you're going to win a tournament. This is what you need to be doing in prep for that. And that applies to every game, mind you, like if you you're a League of Legends player, you're a
00:39:53
Speaker
I don't know, CS go play or whatever. Same thing. Some people will get a lot of views because they are known as being one of the best at the thing they do. Others are going to be terrible at the game, but people are going to have a good time hanging out with them and watching them play, watching them get blown up and freak out over things or whatever. And that's how they're going to market themselves. And both can be equally successful.
00:40:16
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HotzQ can be found at HotzQ, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel underscore. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at gmail.com.
00:40:35
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood goblin, the task can be found at patreon.com. Opening and closing music by Vindergotten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergotten, or online at vindergotten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaele, who can be found on twitter at Steve Raffaele.
00:40:57
Speaker
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing Vorthos content as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmtg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.