1) Be an EverQuest player of any level, experience, anything. This is the tough step.
2) There is no step 2.
3) Go to WordPress.com or Blogger.com and make a blog. It’s free. Hardest part is coming up with a name. I just went through EverQuest zones until I found one that wasn’t taken. I wanted Freeport or Qeynos 🙂
4) Every couple of days, post about what you’re doing in the game. Just posting something like “We checked out Oceangreen Hills today. Now I can’t decide if I hate bears or zombies more.” is enough. That’s it. “Whole guild was down in the new Kaesora xping. Great drops. XP, not so much.” You don’t need to write a book or include a million pictures — unless you want to 🙂
5) After a couple of weeks, post comments or send email to every MMO blog you read asking them to link to your site.
This works for Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot, too. And Saga of Ryzom and — and for any game that is still a lot of fun but doesn’t get a lot of coverage. People WANT to read about what you’re doing!
22 thoughts on “How to start an EverQuest blog.”
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As someone who reads a lot of blogs, I’ll also add this.
Don’t feel you need to break down serious MMO issues as a new blogger. For one, most have already been covered, and unless you have some really unique view of the issue (rare), you won’t be bringing anything new to the table.
On the other hand, writing about what you did in game x, and how it relates to a nagging issue, that is good reading. As Tipa said, people want to know whats going on in games they don’t play but might be interested in. I have zero interest in playing EQ2 again, but I love reading Tipa’s accounts on what she is doing, because in a way it lets me experience EQ2 without actually playing.
WTB: Good Asheron’s Call blog, pst.
Funny. I did exactly that yesterday! 🙂
@Karic — cool!
Wait, is this post serious? My sarcasm meter is all out of whack. (Really, there’s no whack in it.)
Yes, it is.
I want people who play older games to blog.
Maybe some people think it’s hard, or costs money, or people don’t care what they have to say. That’s not the case. It’s free, easy, and people want to read about the ins and outs of playing lesser-known games.
Totally serious. Seriously! I tag my sarcastic posts with “Humor” or “Not funny”. Or both.
Nice article. Thanks. 🙂 Eugene
Not that we’re as frequent in posting as we should be, but consider this a request to link Gnomedepot then 🙂 We’re pretty much back to playing EQ2, and having someone besides the two of us reading the blog might give me some incentive to post more often.
Great idea Tipa. Blogging about older games is a lonely pursuit because they lack “news worthiness” and are unlikely to get many hits from Google. Some get away with it because the blogs are so good that they can hold on to an audience (Van Hemlock, The Ancient Gaming Noob and yourself come to mind) but for most of us blogging about older games is a recipe for obscurity.
@Syncaine you are right to counsel would be bloggers not to worry about having important things to say but I hope you are not suggesting that newbie bloggers shouldn’t ever pontificate on weightier issues. After all what is the point of keeping a blog if you can’t use it as your own personal soap box?
@Loredana – A password protected blog post??? I didn’t even know that was possible. Explain yourself.
@mbp — I don’t think you have to be a Tobold to get Google love. All you have to do is write about a set number of topics on a regular basis, and make it clear from the post title what the post is about. That won’t help you at all if you’re writing about WoW or Warhammer; the barrier of entry for the hot games is far, far higher. But talking about old games is just the opposite — it won’t be long before queries about this old game point to the blogger.
Writing about older games is the perfect way to break into blogging and get some recognition.
@loredena — will do. Actually, you’re in my feed… I shoulda put you on the blog roll a long time ago!
*sigh* I’m going to have to cull some Warhammer blogs from my blogroll. There’s too many of them. They are all great bloggers, which makes it tough.
@Loredena – Me too! You’re on the nooby blogroll on my site along with this great place and couple or three others. If anyone else would like to be (Seriously, I have a readership reaching into the single digits!!), drop me a line and I would be more than happy.
I’m also after some great EQ2 heavy blogs to add to my feed listings. Doesn’t need to be “all EQ2 all the time” but a nice chunk of EQ2 postings would be great.
I’m thinking about starting my candyland blog. I really need to get some serious rants about that game out of my system.
@Joe Fred — God, yes. Hitting Gumdrop Mountains late in the game is totally unfair and should be nerfed.
MBP — apparently, if you use Live Write to post, and you enter at the bottom your login id and pasword, thinking that you are telling it how to log in… it actually password protects the post. /bemused. I didn’t know that was possible either! It’s now fixed. 😮
@loredena, how disappointing – I was imagining some juicy gossip sufficiently salacious that it had to be kept locked away 😉
@mhb — sorry to disappoint! I’ll see if I can come up with something titillating for next time!
http://orcpawn.wordpress.com/
Now, convince my boss to give me more free time so I can play EQ and then blog about it.
And if you know any good web hosts that understand expats who are paid in dollars and use US credit cards yet have a street and phone number in the UK, please let me know.
hmm, I thought I had pretty well found all the EQ2 blogs, but I just went through your blogroll and found a couple new ones, nifty! 🙂
I’ve been finding blogging a good way to get the word out about some of the lesser known ‘current’ MMOs that are eityher out there ‘under the radar’ or currently engaging in open betas but not getting the oxygen of publicity. Particular faves are a bizarre Snowboarding MMO and an even stranger ‘dance off’ MMO. There’s a world of worlds out there, but not enough magazine space/so-called ‘professional’ journalists to cover them.
Project Powder? I loved that in closed beta, but haven’t been able to get it to load for me since :/ That was a super fun game, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an MMO. I know Outspark calls it one 🙂
Heh, that’s the one. I guess the first ‘M’ really depends on how popular a game gets. The genre as a whole is starting to grow beyond the old-school EQ/virtual world model and towards a much more diverse set of game styles.
In Project Powder’s case, it doesn’t have a persistent world (unless they added one since closed beta), which, when I was at Massively, was really the dividing line between MMOs and something else. It’s just a lobby that leads to the slopes.
Still a heck of a lot of fun, no matter what it’s called.