Passion! Excitement! Reliability!

by Sanya Weathers

When you think of words that get your blood pumping, you don’t usually think “reliability.” I’ll bet “dependability” isn’t on the list either. But the fact is, if you want to build passion and excitement about your product, you’ve first got to be reliable and dependable.

I’ve said before on this blog that the best way to build traffic to a blog or a website is to post on a regular schedule. If you’ve always got something new to say on, oh, I don’t know, Monday and Wednesday, people will come and read it.

What I may not have said is that the same thing works for your products, especially virtual worlds.

If you always do a live chat on Tuesdays at 1:30 PM, you’ll find people will schedule their lunch hours in order to attend. If you always have a new quest event on the first Friday of every month, even your casual users will start logging in on first Fridays. If you always patch on Tuesday, you’ll start seeing traffic spike on Tuesday night – even if you don’t actually patch that day.

Why?

– Your customers have jobs. They have deadlines, assignments, and a lot of demands on their time. But they want to make time for you. Make it easy for them by reliably having something fun to do on a schedule they can predict, and plan around.

– Your customers don’t exist in a vacuum. They have families, friends, and other hobbies. The stories you read about people who spend 17 hours on Facebook, or eleven straight hours playing one game, those people make the news because they are news – or at least outliers. They aren’t the norm. Don’t cater to outliers. If you’ve made concrete announcements, you’ve made it easy for you customers to communicate their plans to people they love.

– Your product is part of your customers’ lives, if you’ve done it right. Your ultimate goal is to make whatever you have to offer an integral part of the lives of your customers. The best way to do that isn’t to be constantly running around screaming for attention. Long term customers have made you part of their routine. Come home, feed the dog, log into (your product here).

Being reliable and dependable doesn’t sound dramatic, but the results can be.