Hey, Johnny ...
I want to give you a couple more things to consider.
The purpose of marketing is getting the right people (your target market) to know, like, and trust you enough that they will exchange something they value (money) for something they want more (your product ... and yes, services are a product).
I hope you can see every single thing you do (from posting on this forum to introducing yourself to a new person) is a marketing activity. You have to keep this in mind every time you interact with someone (and if you have a negative opinion about something or someone, keep it to yourself).
After playing around with the numbers a little, you have a much better chance of reaching your income goal by hosting Game Days and publishing adventures.
Let's take a look at the Game Days first.
You mention you'd like to make a minimum of $900 per month.
If you can run a Game Day each week and charge $10 per person to play in 2 games per Game Day, you would need 23 people at each Game Day to reach your goal. That would require 4 DMs each week if you run tables of 6 players, or 5 DMs each week if you run tables of 5 players.
I don't spend a lot on entertainment and I'm very frugal with my money, but if you were running a fun event like that in my area, I'd attend at least two and probably all four Game Days every month. It's a great opportunity to meet other people who play a game I really enjoy. It would also give me a chance to enjoy just playing (I DM most of the time).
A great thing is that you already know how to reach your target market through forums such as enWorld and RPG.Net. You could also network with bloggers in your area to get the word out.
Another great thing is that you'd have many repeat customers who would attend multiple Game Days every month. One of the costliest aspects of marketing is acquiring new customers, so selling your product to your existing customers is the real key to making a profit.
Once you've built a relationship with your customer and gained their trust, it's much easier to sell to them again.
Let's take a look at the lifetime value of a Game Day customer. There are most likely three different kinds of customers that you'll run into, so let's look at each of them.
Ideal Customer -- Your Ideal Customer is a player who enjoys playing
4e D&D enough that they'll play every single Game Day. Most likely, they'll have a regular home group and still want to play in another game each week.
Your Ideal Customer will spend $10 each week for 46 weeks a year (assuming a 90% attendance rate since no one is perfect and will miss a few times a year due to illness and other committments). They really enjoy the game and are unlikely to quit playing, so they'll probably stick with you for at least 3 years if you're still running Game Days. So that gives us a Lifetime Value of $1380 for your Ideal Customer ($10 per week X 46 weeks per year X 3 years).
You now know you could spend as much as $1000 to acquire this customer and still make a profit from them by the end of the third year. If you get creative, you won't have to spend very much to reach them with your marketing, which will put a lot of profit in your pocket.
These are the customers you need to learn the most about and focus all of your marketing on. This is the customer all of your marketing needs to speak direcly to. Get inside their head and learn everything you can about them. When you discover one of these guys, offer to take them out to lunch just to pick their brain.
Average Customer -- Your Average Customer is a player who enjoys playing
4e D&D, but they will only attend a couple of Game Days a month.
Your Average Customer will spend $10 each week for 24 weeks a year (assuming a 50% attendance rate). They enjoy the game enough to play on a regular basis, so they'll probably stick with you for at least 1 1/2 years if you're still running Game Days. So that gives us a Lifetime Value of $360 for your Average Customer ($10 per week X 24 weeks per year X 1.5 years).
Casual Customer -- Your Casual Customer will only attend a Game Day once a month. There could be a lot of reasons for this: they may be so busy they can't make it on a regular basis, they may only have a small amount of disposable income, they may only want to play
4e D&D every now and then, or they may only play to see what the larger
4e D&D community is like in the area.
Your Casual Customer will spend $10 each week for 12 weeks a year (assuming they attend one Game Day a month). They'll probably stay with you for a year, so that gives us a Lifetime Value of $120 for your Casual Customer ($10 per week X 12 weeks per year X 1 year).
Drifters -- Drifters are the people who will only attend one Game Day and never come back. No matter how good your product, you'll have your fair share of these. Just accept their money and let them go. These are not your target market, so you shouldn't even worry about them.
A Drifter will spend $10 once and never come back, so that gives us a Lifetime Value of $10 for each Drifter.
Now there is one warning about Drifters. You might have to do a little digging to figure out if a person is really a Drifter, or if they are part of your target market that's dissatisfied.
Take a hard look at the math, Johnny. Now can you see why it's so important to have a clearly defined target market that you can actually reach with your marketing message? An Ideal Customer has a much higher Lifetime Value than any of the other kinds of customers. The more Ideal Customers you can reach and build a relationship with, the more successful you'll be.
If I were running a Game Day like this, I would collect each person's email address when they paid (you have to pay them for this extremely valuable piece of information so offer them a free gift) and email each person after the Game Day for their feedback.
Ask them to rate their experience, to rate their enjoyment of the adventure, to tell you one thing they really enjoyed, to tell you one thing they disliked, and then ask them what they think you could do to make additional Game Days more enjoyable for them. Ask them how many times a week they play
4e D&D. Ask them if they play with a regular home group. Ask them how often they play in public events. Ask them if they buy their
4e D&D products online or at a local game shop (and which one). Ask them what
4e D&D websites they visit and how often.
But don't ask them for their name. You've already got that information from the Game Day event and it's tied to their email address in your database. And asking for someone's name can trigger a defensive response. (And yes, all of this info should be going into your database. You don't have to get fancy, but you've got to find some way to organize this info if you're going to use it. A freeware spreadsheet will work fine for small numbers of customers.)
Near the end of the survey, give them their gift ... a link to a coupon that can be used at any future Game Days they attend. The coupon gives them a +2 bonus to any one attack roll. After they use it, they hand the coupon to the DM.
This gives them a nice little boost once per adventure, but the real secret is that it encourages them to keep updating their info with you after every Game Day. You can even get fancy and code each coupon with a unique code that lets you know who used the coupon and which survey they used the coupon from (just use the link to send them to a webpage that asks for their email address and generate the coupon dynamically by having the digits before a hyphen indicate the customer and the digits after a hyphen indicate the Game Day that survey is for).
End the survey with a reminder of when the next Game Day is and ask them if they want to reserve a seat now since they're going to fill up quickly. You don't have to charge them anything, but people are more likely to attend if they reserve a seat. You'll have a few people who reserve a seat that won't show, but it will be a fairly small number (it's a psychological thing).
Reward the people who reserve a seat by letting them take the first available seats at the Game Day they reserved a seat for. Fill the rest of the seats on a first come, first served basis. If you have too many people and can't find them a seat, apologize and offer to reserve a seat for them at the Game Day next week.
If you really want to be successful, go above and beyond and really wow your customers. Work out deals with local game shops for a discount card for people who attend your Game Days. Or offer to hand out flyers for the game shop in exchange for a $10 off coupon that's randomly given out to one of the players at each table. That works out to roughly $1 per person to advertise to your players if you have a full Game Day. (Show them your info on how many people attend each Game Day then have them divide the wholesale cost of that store credit by the number of people who attend on average to show them the value of the advertising.)
Ok, so let's take a look at selling the adventures you create for your Game Days as PDFs.
Rather than creating artwork most people won't care about, spend your time creating attractive battle maps for your encounters. I use GIMP (a freeware image editing program) and free textures/objects to create really great looking battle maps for the adventures I run at a friend's game shop each week. If you go this route, check the licensing agreement for each texture or object to make sure you can use it in a commercial product without any problems.
I don't have any hard data on the sales of
4e D&D adventures in PDFs from unknown authors, so I'm going to be extremely conservative. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.
So let's assume you publish the same 2 adventures you run at the Game Day each week and you sell 1 copy a month of each adventure for the next year. The adventures from the previous month become part of your back catalog.
Our first years gross profits look like this:
Month 1 = $24
Month 2 = $48
Month 3 = $72
Month 4 = $96
Month 5 = $120
Month 6 = $144
Month 7 = $168
Month 8 = $192
Month 9 = $216
Month 10 = $240
Month 11 = $264
Month 12 = $288
Total Gross Profits for the first year = $1872
$1872 isn't bad for just a little more effort than you're already putting out designing the adventures. If you continue this process for several years, you'll start multiplying that income.
I seriously doubt you could publish that many adventures your first year, but just trying will be great practice for your writing career and you're very likely to sell more than 1 copy of each adventure a month. You can probably sell three or four times that just from mentioning the adventure during your weekly survey for the Game Days. And you can quickly multiply those sales through effective marketing.
The best part is that these products will continually produce income for you if they're good. If they're bad, they won't make you a penny. You'll be able to tell how good they are by the reviews you find on the web and the number of customers who demand refunds.
A great marketing tactic would be to provide a couple of adventures as free downloads so people could check out your work and see if they like it. If they like your style, they'll probably pick up a few more adventures from you.
You should also give out free review copies to encourage people to review your adventures on popular websites and blogs. Ask them to notify you when they publish a review and go check it out. Thank them for their review no matter how negative it may seem ... they're actually helping you by showing you what needs work. And if they write a good review, link to it from your sales page for that adventure.
If you really want to get creative, give a free copy away to popular blog authors and ask them to do a joint venture with you if they like your adventure enough to recommend it to their readers. Create a special sales page for this joint venture so you know exactly how much you made from it and split the profits 50/50 with the blog author. It's a good deal for you because you get access to customers you probably wouldn't have reached otherwise and you get to borrow the trust the blog author has built with his readership.
I buy most products based on reviews and personal recommendations from people I trust.
Can you see how you can reach your income goals by just pursuing these two focused activities (running Game Days and publishing the adventures from them)? Can you see the synergy between them and how you're getting paid for the same work more than once?
The great part is that these markets already exist and there are a lot of channels you can use to reach them with your marketing message. Why would you try to sell a roleplaying experience to small businesses and wealthy socialites when you can sell it so much easier to people who already want a roleplaying experience? You're using the same skill set, you're just packaging it as a different product.
The reality is people don't value someone else's time as much as they value a product. So sell them a product they already value (a Game Day, an adventure) and you'll get paid more than you would for your time. Even high dollar service providers use this tactic. It's a perception thing.
Johnny, stop running around like a chicken with his head cut off, wasting your limited resources (time, money, energy), trying to create demand for your services in markets that will very likely never develop and just go where the money and market already is. A small piece of a large pie is worth so much more than a whole pie that you don't even have the recipe for.
If you want to succeed (and I believe you do), then you need to put yourself in the best position for that to happen.
In the end, it comes down to this: Do you want to hold onto your "cool idea" or do you want to make money?
Really think this through, Johnny. Right now, you're just distracting yourself with a bunch of activity and ignoring the things many of us see very clearly. Good luck and let me know if there's anything you want to discuss.
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