Need cash? Love gaming?
Here is how to make money using skills you already have.
Money Master’s Guide
Game Mastering For Fun and Profit
by Raymond J.Hicks
Genre: Nonfiction, Self-Help, Gaming, Business
Is there a better feeling than getting paid for something you already enjoy doing for fun?
In Money Master's Guide we will show you several ways to pivot your already creative skills as a game master into a profitable side-hustle. In today's world everyone needs a little side money to help make ends meet. Why not find ways to use your gaming hobby to help pay those bills?
In this guide we will look at several different pathways for using skills you already possess to find financial freedom. The Money Master's Guide will explore:
*Selling Fiction
*Streaming and Podcasting
*Running Paid Games
*Hobby Blogging
*Running Kickstarters
*And many more methods from
outside the box
Every chapter contains actionable activites to get you started on your path to becoming a Money Master.
Amazon * DriveThruRPG * Bookbub * Goodreads
Chapter 2 - Building a Community
In 2003 I downloaded a pirated version of a program called
“FRAPS” and started recording myself playing video games. I
really enjoyed doing that and was finding a way to put them
online on a website so that I could show people. This was before
YouTube was a thing and Flash Animation was the big thing.
My friends in my high school made fun of me for doing that
saying, “Pfft, who would want to watch someone else play video
games!” And taking that to heart I stopped doing something I
enjoyed. Fast forward to today and a few months ago someone
at Twitch.tv leaked a list of how much income streamers are
making and it’s actually in the millions for the top tier. Thousands of video gamer YouTube channels exist and are getting
paid sponsorships. And here is little old me, wishing I had
ignored the idiots I went to high school with.
I tell you that story because whatever cool thing you enjoy
doing, I guarantee you someone else enjoys the fact that you do
it. Time and time again we see that they are often willing to pay
money to help you keep doing it. The advantage we have today
is that there are a wide variety of ways to find those communities and get our voices heard. Between websites, forums,
social media, reddit, patreon, kickstarter, word press, and an
endless other set of distribution networks, it has never been
more abundantly clear that finding your tribe is just a matter
of consistency.
I want to start with a word of warning though. People can detect posers. If you are trying to infiltrate a group to cash in, you
will be outed by them. I am part of many social media groups
for creators and on a daily basis I will witness some “outsider”
join a group day one and post saying they are long time members, drop a product link and then never be heard from again.
This kind of post always ends up ridiculed and left unsolicited.
A lot of this chapter is going to be talking about social media
engagement, however all of the same rules apply to any form
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of communication. Whether it’s meeting your friendly local
gaming shop players, running events at conventions each year,
or communicating with your readers in your publications, the
principles are always the same.
What is far more effective in every circumstance is consistent,
authentic engagement. Let’s talk about what that is.
Consistent and Authentic Engagement
Engagement is a two way street. If you want more people to
interact with your stuff, then you have to authentically engage
with theirs. I often see artists and writers complaining that “the
algorithm” is preventing their stuff from getting out there. My
fellow admins at The Stash will tell you I am also known to do
this kind of whinging from time to time. The truth is that the
algorithm often does show your content, but no content is that
great that we go out of our way to react. What is true is that
community members support the others in the community that
they see supporting them. It is a give and take relationship. If
you only want to take you will get nothing back.
If you want success you need to help build your community.
Notice I am not saying “if you want to make money you need to
post everyday.” I am very deliberately phrasing this in a way that
removes the money from the equation. A lot of “how to make
money” guides talk about this idea that consistent community
engagement is what drives success, but I want to go a step further
and tell you that from experience I know you can post every day
and have no one give two shits about your work. The mentality
of exploiting your community to make money is inauthentic and
shallow. It’s also a bad approach that will only lead you to failure.
If you want to succeed you need to help build and grow the social
links you want to use to support yourself.
Looking at this aspect of the job from the perspective that we
are members of a digital village helping each other out will
change the way you approach marketing and even the services
you are providing your community. People work hard for their
Chapter 2 - Building a Community |
22 | Money Master’s Guide: Game Mastering for Fun and Profit
money. Most folks are living paycheck to paycheck. Few of us
could survive an emergency that made us lose our income for
three months or more. So if you want those people’s livelihood,
you better be providing a service to them that is valuable. Part
of that service is about lifting up their posts and their endeavours. Liking, commenting and sharing the things they enjoy
putting out into the community. Helping them get out of the
algorithm black hole. You will find the more generous you are
with your time towards them, the more relationships you will
build online, and the stronger your community is when you ask
for their support.
This is about building authentic relationships, real connections
and a sense of connectedness that is more than superficial.
Conveniently, doing such a thing on a consistent basis is also
rewarded by every algorithm social media has. All content
platforms reward consistent engagement. The more you engage
with someone the more you both see each other’s content.
Activity - Authentic Engagement
Okay, so at some future date you are going to have a product.
That’s great. Now how do people magically hear about it? Let
us say you want to post it to facebook groups, reddit, twitter etc. Guess what, if you just stroll in there and spruik your
wares, you are going to get next to zero response. So how do we
fix this? Right now, before you have any products, you need to
start engaging your community. Here’s our activity:
Pick a day and if you are going to do this weekly, fortnightly,
monthly, etc. That day is going to be your “engagement day.”
This is the day that you are going to just dedicate 30 minutes
to an hour and a half just going online and spreading the love.
Your first engagement day is likely to be just making a list of
places you are going to visit each engagement day. Save the
links in a document somewhere so you can go on every time
and get there straight away.
The goal of an engagement day is to earn a bit of street cred and
karma. By authentically going on reddit or facebook or what-
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ever and helping others find success you can really develop that
mutual community we have been talking about. Review other
people’s products. Comment on other peoples threads in a
positive way. You want to help others by supporting their work.
This will slowly make you a familiar face for others, so when
you finally post your own stuff you won’t look like a poser.
Guess what, you won’t look like a poser because you authentically will have built relationships and community. Surprise,
I tricked you into being a nice person, but in the long run I am
sure you will thank me.
Avoiding Toxicity
If you view your engagement as “building a community” rather
than “exploiting a market” you will by default avoid many of
the terrible things that happen online. This can be a lot harder
than it sounds. It is very easy and in vogue to be negative. Shitting on things makes us feel socially powerful in the short term
and those kinds of content headlines often get good interaction
and analytics as well. The problem is that in being negative like
that you will create a community that thrives on deconstruction and destruction. Is that who you want reviewing your
products, chatting in your discord or patreon feeds and commenting on your own hard work?
By role modelling positivity you will stand out from the crowd
and set the tone for how we communicate in our tribe. As a
content maker (of any kind) you are the leader of discourse. The
way you approach things will influence how people speak back
to you. The best way to avoid having a toxic fanbase is to not be
toxic yourself. Some good examples I have seen from my own
content engagement would be Goobertown Hobbies, Midwinter Minis, the folks over at Pulp Alley, and Bridgett Jeffries of
the Miskatonic University Podcast.
Loyalty Comes from Consistency
If you want loyal customers and fans then you unfortunately
have to be consistent in your product. Producing regular content on a consistent basis is one of the toughest things we have
Chapter 2 - Building a Community |
24 | Money Master’s Guide: Game Mastering for Fun and Profit
to do. Coming up with new ideas every week (or in some cases,
every day) can feel like a chore and is not for the faint hearted.
This is especially true if you want to see people actually engage
with your content.
This often leads to creators taking one of two paths. Either they
work hard to pump and dump content that is substandard or
they start varying the focus of their content until they lose their
identity. Both lead to losing that loyalty you have worked hard
to cultivate. It is important to keep focus on why you are making the things you are making. Ultimately you want to provide
a useful service to your community, so try not to stray from
that goal. The rewards of posting consistent content is that your
portfolio as a whole comes across as more cohesive and professional. This attracts new members to your tribe. This is especially important when starting out.
My best advice for this would be to actually take it into consideration when you are first planning how you want to be
building your community. In the beginning we start off eagerly
wanting to post things once every day and making every post a
lengthy piece of work. This will only lead to burn out. If you establish a cadence that is realistic early on then it becomes easier
to manage over time. There is nothing wrong with posting your
own content only once or twice a week so long as it happens
the same time each week. If people know “THAC0 Thursday” is
when you will post a video about a 2nd ed D&D resource, then
they will be there on Thursday waiting.
Also consider making easy-to-make content, regularly. You
can tell when I am busy in my real life because at The Stash my
posts will be shops, quests or other table like content that requires less brain power. Surprisingly these small useful resources generally do far better than the stuff I pour my heart and
soul into. I am thankful to have these easy resources and my top
tip to the other admins who are having a hard time posting regularly is to find something like this that they can knock out in
10 minutes on a bathroom break if they are creatively blocked
or busy. If you establish these kinds of “low effort - high output”
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content in your rotation then you can rely on them when you’re
having a bad time.
Gathering the Tribe
The time will come where you will realise that seemingly overnight you have gone from a few hundred followers to suddenly
having tens of thousands of people subscribed to your content.
It will reach a critical mass where it grows without you having
to do anything but maintain those bridges and create consistently. As an example, when I first started writing this book
The Stash had 14,000 followers and now we are up to 17,000.
In your mind you may feel the sudden creative surge and get a
product ready for release expecting them all to buy your work
and support you financially. In your mind you do the maths;
“if every one of them just gave me $1 that would be 3 months
pay.” This is quickly juxtaposed by the feeling after you release
your product and post where they can find it where your heart
breaks because you make only a few dozen sales.
Not everyone who follows you is going to support every product you release. Gathering the tribe is one of the hardest things
you can do, especially if your plan is to take rather than give.
Let’s talk about why that is.
For every post you make, it will likely only be seen by about
10% of the followers you have. And of that pool of people only
1% are going to interact with it. If the call to action is making a
financial purchase that then brings that number down depending on the product and its usefulness.
This is why building a marketing campaign is so important.
You want to use your consistent and authentic engagement
to drive interest in what you plan to release. Look at how big
studios do it. They release some cool artworks, and some teaser
posts, and for months beforehand they are talking with people
about what to expect, and they go on as guests on podcasts and
get reviewers to do some hype work and then ask you to sign
up for a pre-order and then launch their kickstarter or release
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26 | Money Master’s Guide: Game Mastering for Fun and Profit
their product or what have you. The amount of time invested
in building interest in the product is done long before its ready.
Building a buzz is a long and difficult process and not everyone
can master it.
This is where learning about copywriting is powerful. Copywriting is the art of writing product descriptions in a way that
excites and engages an audience. The principles of this can be
applied to all your marketing campaigns, not just the product’s
release itself. Gathering your tribe should be a joyous occasion.
And if you lay the groundwork with authentic engagement
along the way then the people who follow you will feel like they
have been on this product development journey with you and
therefore feel more invested in what you are making.
One final word about gathering your tribe. It is very reminiscent of “the boy who cried wolf.” If you act like everything you
do is a huge release, then people will stop listening when you
try to get them excited. If you only get excited when there is
actually something productive happening then people will likely
join you. Remember, it’s not about what your content does
for you, but what it does for your audience. If your release is a
self indulgent campaign guide that publishes your homebrew
content that no one is interested in, then expect no one to be
interested in it except you. If your release is a useful, generic
collection of content they can copy-pasta into their next session
then that is very useful and you will get more traction.
Only gather the tribe when what you have to share will actually
help them.
The Rest of the Book
From here on out the following chapters are about individual
approaches one can take to try and capitalise on the hobby we
all love. Feel free to skip over them as you need to, but I would
recommend skimming them at some point. You never know
when an idea or inspiration might strike for something that
even I haven’t tried. Also please read the final chapter of the
27
book where I will include some other helpful hints that relate to
many approaches
Raymond J. Hicks is a fresh author with a love of making characters who grow alongside their readers. Dad, high school teacher, gamer and at one time co-host of “The Game Masters Stash” facebook group with over 17,000 followers, Raymond is always looking to give back where he can. He has a great sense of humour and counts among his highest accomplishments having reached 30+ years of age without ever once reading an author bio and that one time he was dubbed the prettiest pretty princess in a board game. Raymond believes we are all pretty princesses deep down inside and tries to allow his characters a time to shine in their own unique way, whether it's in fantasy, sci fi or adventure. He hopes you enjoy his writing as the one thing he wants the most is to share his stories with like-minded readers.
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The excerpt sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing.
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