This video was prompted by some of the stats and figures I was reading comparing DriveThru to Lulu and Itch.
The short version is that a) DTRPG will generate a ton more traffic to your products and you will earn more money from them, without having to do any advertising or marketing yourself. b) you will earn more money per sale from Itch than you will from DTRPG.
Both are true, getting 65%-70% of a big pie is better than getting about 85% of a cupcake.
Some stats show that Itch converts visitors into customers better than DTRPG. This I can believe. DTRPG gives customers many options on every product page that can distract people away from your products. That sounds bad, but it also means that your products appear on other people’s product pages, so it is swings and roundabouts.
With everything that is not DTRPG the secret is that you have to drive the traffic to the website, once their the site will handle the payments and fulfilment. That is what you are paying them a share for.
If I am going to have to drive traffic myself it make more sense to drive that traffic to my own store. There I get nearly 95% of the sales value, not 65%-85%.
So, how do I drive that traffic?
My answer to that question is through organic traffic, the free search engine results from Google and Bing. About 8,000 people search for terms related to Star Wars RPG each month. I can tap into that by creating free content about the game, and solo playing it. Then I can rinse and repeat but this time talking about Alien RPG, then Star Trek, and so on.
What Google likes is longer, indepth articles. A full set of solo rules on a single page will tick that box.
I did a search before I started this, and I do not feature in the search results at all, which is no surprise as I have never done anything with Star Wars before. Having a blank slate means that if I do feature next week or the week after, it is proof that the search engines have picked up on the solo rules and are serving those pages to people searching.
Every free visitor from Google is a potential customer.
That is how I intend it to work for me. For any other publisher, you can do something very similar, decide what really describes your game, or supplements, such as Swords and Sorcery, or Space Opera, and write something that goes on for a few thousand words, like an entire adventure, that is rich in those words, and variations of it, but something that also showcases the best of your game or supplement.
You can even repurpose existing stuff that has passed its best. If you have a supplement that hasn’t sold a copy in months, why not make it into free web content?
So, that is my general plan.