#virtualescape marsshuttlemission onlineescaperooms Ihatetags blogs

[codecandyblue]

My First Blog Post

I am Gregory Anderson, designer of virtual escape adventures for CodeCandyBlue.  All the marketing guys say that I need to have a blog to perform better on Google search results, get higher domain authority and bring visitors to my page.  

The problem is that people don’t come to my site to read a blog post.  They come to buy a virtual escape adventure that they can play online with their friends from the comfort of their home, anytime, day or night.  So what could I possibly write about that would provide value to my audience?

Suggestions from various SEO sites include: how to tie a tie, a fresh new recipe, something about your pets, etc.  Um, no.  So I have decided to write about whatever I damn well please, related to my business, codecandyblue.com, and my games, including The Mars Shuttle Mission, The Mayan Temple Mission, Amnesia!, The Cryptographer, and our free starter game: Cadets - Training Day.  

I promise this blog will be unfiltered, will include tidbits about the storylines for my virtual escape adventures, as well as airing of grievances about running an online business in the age of Google.  You may be entertained, and you may learn a few things about the SEO and online marketing biz - not because I am an expert, but because I am learning as a go and need to vent about the ridiculousness of algorithm-determined validity.

First up - blogging!  Apparently, you need to provide new, well-written content to your site on a monthly basis to move up the Google search rankings.  After I protested that a blog seemed incompatible with my business goals, it was suggested that my blog could even be hidden from my customers, but as long as the Google crawling bots found it and saw that it contained the right key words and was updated frequently, that my site would do better in Google search.  I have decided for now to blog on Tumblr, then import my Tumblr posts into a blog page on my site.  I won’t hide it, but am not promoting it either - I need the most highly-visible portions of my site to be the virtual escape games that I am selling.

I also found out that the ideal blog post size is around 1500 words!  I’m getting close to 400 so far in this post, so no, I will not be getting anywhere new 1500 words.

Given the recommended length and frequency of posts, I first looked into AI Copywriting to help generate some crap to post.  Unfortunately, crap is exactly what they delivered.  Apparently these online AI writing programs take your input, scour the web for related content, merge the two into grammatically-correct sentences, and voila! you have a blog post.  

First problem - the one I tried didn’t have any options for a 1500 word blog post.  The most it generated was 400 characters, and that was using the “Product Description” setting.  They had other settings for Blog Titles, Blog Outlines, etc., but nothing that would attempt to generate a complete blog post.

Second problem - when I entered in information about The Mars Shuttle Mission, they pulled really inappropriate stuff from their related-content web search, like the names of the designers of a game, or the description of a specific plot point, all of which had nothing to do with my game, and would probably get me sued if the parties this text was stolen from ever read my blog.

I do have to say that some of the options were well-written.  They give you like 10 different paragraphs from your single input, so you can use the ones you like and discard the rest.  I deleted all the crazy ones unfortunately, but did copy out some decent ones.  Here is an AI-generated product description for my games:

“Virtual Escape Adventures let you embark on an epic, highly-interactive adventure with your friends, solving puzzles and riddling your brain to escape each scene. Uncover hidden clues, solve mysteries, make it to the end of the mission alive - all from the comfort of your own home!”

So, AI writing can generate some decent stuff, but the short stuff they do well is also easy and quick for me to write myself.  Once they can generate 1500 words that make sense and are relevant, I may jump on the AI writing bandwagon, but for now no AI writing for my blog!  You can rest assured that nothing you have read so far was written by an algorithm (except for the above quote, which is explicitly AI generated.

Hey!  I just wrote a blog post, and boy are my arms tired!  Almost 800 words!  Until next time...

Gregory Anderson

CodeCandyBlue - Virtual Escape Adventures

https://codecandyblue.com