Blogging: What's the Benefit?

Hey all,

All those marketing tips/guides I run across mention blogging, but I'm trying to figure out how to do it and do it well. It takes a lot more time to do then posting stuff on Facebook and Twitter, and I generally see between zero and something slightly greater than zero feedback. Because of this, I've been neglecting my poor blog, although something nagging in my mind says I should update it, but I'm not sure why, really...

So, some questions:

What do you post about? I've seen it done in a very PR-ish way, with just some basic blurbs like "Our game is released! Buy it today!" "Our game was reviewed! Buy it today!" "Our game was updated! Buy it today!" etc. I've also seen it done with some more in-depth behind-the-scenes content, showing little bits of concept art, talking about roadblocks, doing postmortems, etc, things that seem slightly more geared towards people interested in development. What kind of content do you put in your blog? Who is the intended audience?

How often do you / should you post something?

What makes it worthwhile? How do you know if it's helping?

Any other crazy-amazing tips to make your blog crazy-amazing?

Hi,

I stay in the same situation like you. I created my first game for iOS, but all thing I can do for PR/marketing totally base on Facebook, Twitter. I tried on Twitter one per day (Facebook is not good cause I can not spam friend request ). Find something interesting for posting about my game. It seem has a little bit effect (you need a team to do PR, in my case I can not make a marketing campaign cause I'm lone-wolf developer).

I also have a blog but no-one know this blog, it's not famous, and I think blog is just use for showing news about your app/game/future product. You can post useful info about features, or improvement stuff. And if you have budget for marketing, try to spend some coin for advertising services (Facebook ad, or some app review websites)

Hope this post is helpful for you.

PS: sorry for my bad English, I'm not native.

The only thing I've found useful for a blog is tips and tricks for our games (which get a little attention) and contest details and rules (which get a little more attention).

Other than that, my other experiments didn't seem worth it.

Blogs enable you to engage with your community in a different way, over more complex matters or those that take more explaining.
Avoid "buy it today" style calls to action.
Treat it like a chat to your brother in a pub. i.e. no bull.
They take a lot of time to write and to build traffic you need to post regularly.
But if you write something that gets noticed by the broader community (Twitter, Reddit etc) you can reach very large numbers of people indeed.

Personally I like them for explaining our view on a subject. Here is one I just wrote on Apple device form factors, for instance: http://www.kwalee.com/2012/10/24/bru...onomic-design/

This would never have worked on Facebook or Twitter.

@Blackharon && @Eclectic: Your suggestions give me some ideas to write on my blog. Thank you