Phil Steinmeyer: Small Business Blog Interview

Phil Steinmeyer is a video game developer with such titles as Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 and Tropico under his belt. In 2005 he founded New Crayon Games. We highlighted his blog on August 22 and he kindly replied to some further questions:

"In fact, a fair number of useful business contacts have come about partly or wholly because of the blog."

Pajama Market: How has the blog impacted your company?

Phil Steinmeyer: I started the blog primarily for personal reasons (it's fun to have a mouthpiece to comment on my industry and the world in general), and I'd still say for me it's about 70/30 personal interest vs. real attempt to use the blog for business purposes. There simply isn't enough readership to justify the time I spend on the blog in terms of it's impact in reaching end-customers (the people who buy my games for $20 a pop).

However, I do think there's some positive, reasonably worthwhile effect in terms of establishing a presence (and contacts) with others in the industry. My games are distributed through a pipeline, via a publisher and then end-distributors, and it also helps to have others in the industry, such as reviewers, aware of what I'm doing. Even though these opinion leaders are few in number, they have a significant impact, and I at least humor myself that the blog is worthwhile because it reaches many of them. In fact, a fair number of useful business contacts have come about partly or wholly because of the blog.

PJ: What types of things about your work day inspire you to write a post on your blog?

PS: Boredom, I think :) I work alone out of a home office, so I miss the coffee pot culture of a typical office. Posting on my blog, engaging in dialog with other blogs and those who comment on my blog, and participating in various on-line forums helps to counteract the isolation of working alone.

PJ: What have been the biggest surprises with your blog so far?

PS: Well, I made some technical mistakes early on. I wasn't sure what form I wanted it to take early on - a straight blog or more of a blog/general content web site. So I chose a program called Xoops that was fairly flexible, but for which blogging was a bit more of an afterthought. It worked passibly well for a while, but then the comment spammers hit my blog, and I had to go through and manually delete about a hundred spam comments, because Xoops contained no advanced spam filtering or bulk e-mail moderation tools (that I could locate).

So I switched to Wordpress and have been happy since. I'm now getting 10-15 spam comments a day, but I use Akismet (a plug-in) for spam filtering and it catches about 98% of them painlessly. For the remainder, WordPress's own tools work well.

Later on, I did set up a separate web site for my company (www.newcrayon.com), using a conventional HTML editor (Dreamweaver).

PJ: What blogging program do you use for the blog? Did you create this blog yourself? How do you like the program?

PS: As mentioned above, I'm now using Wordpress and I really like it. I created a custom theme (based on the kubrick theme) and probably spent a bit more time tinkering with it that I should have, but I'm happy with the results. WordPress is very flexible, and just feels really easy to use.

Thanks Phil for the insight. For those who may be considering blogging, I'd like to explain comment spam.

Comment spam is when someone puts a comment on one of your posts in order to drive traffic to their porn/drug/scam website. The comments are left by automated programs, not by real people, and never say anything relevant to the actual post.

In my experience using the Typepad blogging platform, I have had almost no problems with spam comments. The few I have received have been easily removed and Typepad allows you to block any further comments from that person's computer in the future. Also, Typepad has recently switched to a verification process that makes it nearly impossible for a computer to leave comments without an actual person finishing the process.

As happy as Phil is with the Wordpress platform, I am equally happy with Typepad's.

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