The state of the blog and upcoming changes.

I'm by no means a good writer.

English grammar and punctuation are as elusive to me as Portuguese. But my goal was to turn my passion for Nintendo into something I can share with the world. Not to impress people with my verbal prowess. That being said, blogging is hard. Writing a cohesive piece takes time, passion, and an understanding of the culture. Of those three criteria, time is the most difficult for me to harness.



You see, I do this for the love of it. I don't get paid, I don't have ads on my site, and right now I'm small potatoes in the grand scheme of the internet. But I do have dreams. I'd love for this thing to grow into a bustling community of Nintendo fans. I'd love to have a platform to express interesting ideas about Nintendo and gaming in general.

I suppose the aim for any blogger is to grow their following. I'm not unique in that. The "how to" is what I'm working right now. And I've learned a lot in the short 4 months this site has been active. There's some really great resources out there to help budding bloggers, and I've talked to quite a few people who are doing this successfully. Here's what I've learned so far.

Center it.

"If you try to hit everybody, you'll hit nobody." I have no idea who coined this phrase, but this is the single best marketing advice I think I've ever come across. Basically you have to find your audience, and cater to them. The more specific you are, the easier it will be for people to find you.

Harness your enthusiasm.

People know when you're writing something quickly or without much thought. There's tons of content out there these days, and if you don't throw yourself completely into your post, it's going to get lost in the sea of mediocre content. So make meaningful, quality blog posts, and slowly, people will take notice. And don't worry about frequency at the beginning. Quality over quantity is key when you're starting out.

Learn learn learn.

Know this. You're going to get trolled, hurt, berated, kicked around, and stepped on. It's the internet, and she doesn't care who you are. But that doesn't mean you won't come across perfectly nice and helpful people. So keep up a good attitude, even if know ones gives it back.

I had an experience with this on Reddit. I posted my recent blog about Nintendo's relevancy in this generation on r/Nintendo. What I didn't anticipate was how my article came across to the die hard fans. They were insulted that I would "drag Nintendo through the mud." When really the point of the blog was that Nintendo doesn't need to be relevant because they create their own culture. It was a severe misunderstanding. And I realized that it was all my fault when through the barrage of negativity, I received the most honest feedback yet. "I don't understand your article." I messaged this individual and thanked them for helping me realize my error. It turns out, they we're a blogger! They gave me a few pointers, and all in all it was a great learning experience. So, thanks blarg357.

To me, this blog is an experiment. this perspective helps me deal with the many failures I'll come across. After all, you can't fail an experiment, I'm just learning what works.

So, What can you expect from me going forward?

I'm going to focus on families. People who grew up with Nintendo who are married or have kids. I'm going to continue to keep my content kid-appropriate, but not necessarily make content for kids. This is a place for married couples and parents to talk about video games in the context of their marriages and families.

I'm going to be posting less often. I've been trying to push out a blog post once a week. And although that seems pretty infrequent, I have a full-time job, a part-time job, and a wife, a new baby, and I actually play video games occasionally too. So My focus will be on making quality content, not frequent content. At least for now.

I'm going to be experimenting. As I mentioned before, This blog is an experiment. So there will be all sorts of different content popping up. Just go with it. Some of my ideas are blog posts about the best games for the family, games to play with your non-gamer spouse, how to balance work/life/gaming, as well as different editorials about games I find interesting.

I'm also super open to feedback. If you have an idea, or you thought I did something stupid, please email me! dancaporello@gmail.com.

Live Streaming! and Let's Plays! This is the part I think I'm the most excited about, I'm a videographer and editor by trade so video content was always on the horizon, but I'm ready to roll it out! As of right now, I'm streaming most Sundays and/or Thursdays from 5pm-6pm (UTC).
Here's the link for the Let's Play Page: http://www.theblockfort.com/p/videos.html
And the YouTube Channel where I'll be streaming: https://gaming.youtube.com/channel/UCnC2mYG4GMOmXq9CstGGpxQ#tab=1

So, Thanks for reading! I hope this community continues to grow as I learn how to actually do this thing called blogging. Who knows where it'll lead!?