Saturday, February 8, 2025

Colorado Plays

Playing in Colorado in all forms.

Journal

Goals for Colorado Plays in 2025 – Let’s Rebuild a Brand

Needless to say, 2024 was a bit underwhelming for Colorado Plays. This was mostly because I was exceptionally busy trying to build up my writing website and YouTube channel. Now that things are stable over there, I figured it was a good time to dump some effort into the gaming platform.

I mean, I’m paying for the hosting every year. I might as well get some use out of the blog and start funneling money into the various causes I support.

The fun part is the sheer amount of fixing I have to do to the majority of the content (sarcasm detected). That’s perhaps one of the greatest drawbacks to having a technology or gaming blog – the number of updates when things change.

Why Care About Rebuilding Colorado Plays?

Colorado Plays has a special place in my heart, mostly because of why it was created in the first place. I use it to generate income to help support a variety of charities such as Extra Life. Well, the income has been lacking for the last couple of years thanks to a lack of content and effort.

As my goals for 2025 have changed massively due to my writing career, I should have adequate time to dump into the blog as well as the YouTube channel.

I know I have attempted this more than once. But this time, I actually have a decent time management strategy to get more done throughout the week. And since my other channel is bringing in a few bucks every month, I should be able to hire writing help this time.

Not to mention we have a few creators here who are eager to do more on YouTube and help us out there.

What’s the Plan for 2025?

Ultimately, I would love to get the blog back to the traffic numbers it was seeing back in 2021. On average, this site was seeing about 219 visitors per day. Currently, I’m lucky to see 14 per day. Yeah, that’s a massive decline.

That’s what happens when you only publish three articles throughout the entire span of 2024. Not to mention having a lot of outdated tutorials, many of them missing the images they once had.

So, let’s make the goals for 2025 realistic. For the blog, we’re looking for 100 visits per day. For the YouTube channel, we’re looking for 100 hours of watch time in a 28-day period.

How am I going to go about hitting those goals?

Routine Publishing Schedule

The first step is to get the blog on a routine publishing schedule again. To start, we’re aiming for at least two posts per week – one on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But there will undoubtedly be times when we publish one or two more.

That, alone, will put us at more content throughout the year than the blog has ever had.

Once Google “learns” that routine content comes out on those two days, indexing the posts should be much quicker and smoother. Plus, subscribers to the push notifications will know exactly when those two articles come out every week.

I would also like to get more reviews, lists, and tutorials published on both the blog and YouTube channel. Perhaps we can make a few extra bucks with affiliate content and sponsors. It worked for the writing blog.

Updates Galore

As I said, the site has a lot of older pieces of content that need a complete rewrite. Not only are some of the articles grossly outdated for information, but I’m still missing a lot of the older images from when I moved the site from Hostgator.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of time available throughout the week. That means I’m only going to be able to do maybe one or two updates…possibly on the weekends.

Updates are important as I’ve seen client articles grow by more than 8,000% in terms of traffic from a few simple changes. And I’m talking about thousands of visitors per month, mind you. It’s what I do for paying clients, and it’s high-time that I do it for myself on Colorado Plays.

Routine Video Schedule

Getting the YouTube channel on a regular schedule is probably going to be the most difficult part of rebuilding Colorado Plays. With any luck, I’ll be able to delegate editing. But at the moment, I’m the only one who knows how to do anything with a YouTube channel.

It’s not overly difficult. I just need to sit someone down and show them how to do it.

This is more of a long-term goal. We’ll spend 2025 figuring out the logistics of maintaining the channel. Hopefully, everything will be on a routine schedule before the summer.

Sunday Night Live Streams

I would like to get back to Sunday night live streams. It’s been a while since we did this consistently, but I think it would be fun to get back to YouTube and Twitch.

In reality, the live streams are what helped my writing channel get enough hours for monetization. The hope is that we can do something similar by providing a regular stream for anyone who wants to hang out with us for a couple of hours.

It’s kind of difficult to build up an audience if you’re never online.

Exploring More of Colorado

Lastly, I would like to stick with our brand – playing in Colorado. There are a lot of great locations here that I would love to share on both the blog and YouTube channel.

For example, I’d love to find some of the ghost towns we have here for a Halloween stream. Plus, there are a lot of beautiful mountain locations I wouldn’t mind visiting again while sharing the experience.

Not only will this help with content, but it’ll get me out of the house more often. And that, by itself, is reason enough to explore Colorado.

It’s Gonna Be a Fun Year!

We have our work cut out for us, that is for sure. The unfortunate part is that I do most of everything myself. As I said, though, I’m bringing in a little bit of extra money from the other channel to help fund some assistance.

But even if I have to do everything myself, I should have enough time in the week to get the blog on a routine schedule. While I would love to get the YouTube channel going strong, it all comes down to my lack of time.

After all, I am managing a lot of different websites and YouTube channels at the moment. It’s going to be a busy, yet fun, year.

Michael Brockbank
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Michael Brockbank

Michael developed ColoradoPlays to help various charities through his favorite pastime. Since then, the blog and Twitch channels have donated several hundred dollars to Extra Life, Geeks of Grandeur and Operation Supply Drop, to name a few.