How We Became the Top Blockchain Game (#50)

0:00this is either gonna make me come off as a huge scam artist or a brilliant marketer but probably both in January 2018 I tell the story all the time me and my friends we invented play to earn this part is true we made the first play to earn game we made the first the first game in crypto where people could play battle each other level up get monsters sell those monsters and make money from that we invented the genre did really well our first month I tell this story all the time here's a story that I don't that I don't tell at the end of the year it was crypto

0:40winter when we launched the price the price of ethereum was at one thousand four hundred dollars a token by Year's End or by early 2019 a year later a year after launching the price of ethereum was at 87 huge decrease and the market had really gone downhill and we the people were leaving the space and we wanted to get more people playing our game by the time that we launched there was competition when we launched the original version like hey this is how you can like start with it no competition and we made half a million dollars in our first 48 Hours of launch and a million dollars by the

1:26end of the month by the time we launched the full version of the game the game that we had spent 11 months building there was Heavy competition and people had left the space because we were in crypto winter at this point but I wanted to get users I'm very good at search engine optimization here is one of the things that I did so today's episode episode 50 of the Edward show is going to be what I did I'm gonna call it domain Authority hijacking that's what I'm gonna call it maybe I'll change the name I don't know but basically it is using a very popular website that

2:09has high domain Authority as in like Google really respects what is on this site and is more likely to rank it highly because that domain has high Authority and a lot of these a lot of these ones like Facebook they're closed off so what you write on Facebook quite often will not show on Google and that is intentional but there are some tools where that is not the case Twitter is one of them and another one of them is medium I wanted to get attention for our game I wanted us to have something to Leverage and so I wrote an article and the article was I think it was the 25 or the

2:5550 best blockchain games in 2018 and 2019. and I wrote this extensive list it was pretty fast to write and then I put us at number one I put our game at number one for that list and it ranked right away and when you would Google best blockchain games there we were Google would actually take us and make a snippet of us they would just show our game number one because I wrote this on medium and made it look like I didn't write it and here are some of the things that happened this was pretty cool this happened right away but a top company in the space

3:44called consensus and their CEO who was a founding member of ethereum tweeted out these games are the best blockchain games and we were number one and they used our image in the open graph image which displayed on Insta which displayed on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere because it was the open graph image that's the image that shows when you share something and that was cool because they literally just they did in doing their research for their for their article because they wrote an article about the best games the internet is so funny because it's a total game of telephone if you can if you can write something

4:26big people will just like people are lazy and they want to have their research is to be as easy as possible and so what whoever wrote that article did is they Googled like best blockchain games my list came up and they pretty much just copied my list and made us number one and it was so it's just so funny it's it's a big game of telephone and the more things are copied the more things get distorted because their list was a bit different I'm sure they got copied and that was a bit different I've seen this happen so many times so that was the number one thing and that was cool

5:03because because the person who tweeted it out was huge and everyone was reaching out oh I saw that you were tweeted they were shared by this guy a cool congratulations and so we were able to say we went around telling people yeah we made the best blockchain game in 2018 and 2019. because of this because of this little because I because of domain Authority hijacking and then the other thing that happened this was this was 10 months later and I was living in I was living in Belarus seriously I was living in Minsk in Belarus I was visiting a friend there I had spent the three months prior

5:47in key of Ukraine and then after that I had a friend who was in Belarus and I went to go visit him in Minsk which is a really cool City I was there in Minsk for a month that's a maximum amount of time that an American can stay consecutively like Americans can't stay there for over one consecutive month so I had to leave after 30 days so I was there for a month and while I was there I think this was halfway through our stay me and my co-founder and by this point all of our team because the market did not recover and we did something very

6:21dumb and we moved out of the space literally like several months before it started to Rebound with the nft Boom but during this time we were there and we get a call and it is from Sony and they are exploring the blockchain gaming and they want to talk to us and we have this call with Sony and we weren't in a position to capitalize off the call because we had left the space but I asked I said hey how did you find our game and and the executive that we were speaking to said well quite frankly I did a Google search and this is uh that was it that was it

7:01and I I think it's I think it's so cool right now we're getting customers to one of our companies reverb.chat and I now see these every day on Twitter I have an automation set up so whenever we get a new customer I have it limited to like two times a day that these announcements no one time a day that these announcements go out but I announce it on Twitter because my whole thing is build in public and so on Twitter I have an automation that goes out that that shows our monthly recurring Revenue the number of active customers we have and the total revenue that we've made

7:39and whenever we get a customer that goes out on on my Twitter show progress that's that's my Twitter at show progress I actually have two twitters but that's the Twitter that's doing very well at show progress and anyway so we get these customers we haven't we haven't done any marketing for the company in literally years it's literally in years and it's all from an SEO funnel that I set up in early 2000

8:13in in at the end of 2019 and early 2020. during lockdowns when I'm like what should I do I locked I was living I was back in Kiev at that time and I was locked down I was living in this crazy apartment it would have three balconies it was in the center like a huge kitchen huge dining room crazy big living room crazy big bedroom and three balconies I would grow peppers on those balconies and during lockdowns I was like what should I do with my time have all this time and I said oh I'm gonna make an SEO tunnel an SEO funnel for this tool and I I had started that

8:55that funnel when I was living in Krakow before and I just said I'm gonna go I'm gonna go really hard with this funnel now and I did that for a few months years later we're getting we're getting customers from it we didn't even have payment options in until February and we just put in payment options and now we we got we got customers we literally just were like actually Ah that's a crazy story maybe I'll okay I'll share the story I'll share it I'll share it the story is I was living in Rome I was living in Rome in October last year the site goes down we haven't thought

9:31about this company Reverb in years and our app goes down my co-founder forgot to pay hosting or something we literally like forgot about it and I get all these calls and messages from people hey are you done with Reverb is Reverb done is it coming back and then we put it back and we're like wow people really care about this let's put in payment and so we just it was free for that it was free before that and we we built a few extra features and now it's freemium so you can still use it for free and in order to use like more features like transcription

10:04or record I think it's or store more than 10 reverbs then you have to have like a paid account which is five dollars a month or sixty dollars a year and because Reverb it is you record your voice and it's stored in the cloud and you can share with the link very simple very simple concept and so we just built in a bunch of extra features we're actually one of the only companies that is doing speech to speech with AI with generative AI everybody else who's trying to do that they do speech to text to speech where the AI output reads the transcription but we don't do the transcription in the

10:43middle we have transcriptions but it's not used for speech to speech we go straight from speech to speech which maintains your tone and your emotion and and your pitch and everything is pretty special and pretty crazy that we've done that and uh yeah like we set up this SEO funnel for it years ago that still gets it gets us customers I I like these little things I love Evergreen marketing I honestly do I love Evergreen marketing I'm going to continue to talk about it on the Edwards show because you work on something and then it just gets you users and visitors or viewers or listeners whatever for years and years

11:26and that's why SEO is my favorite Channel because that's what it does you put it up you you get it to a point where the page has Authority itself and then it just brings you these things for years without you having to do anything and it's so cool that that exists it is what I am I am so passionate about I mean I'm passionate about all types of marketing I love viral marketing as well I'm still going viral from a bunch of videos that I made days ago that are still bringing people to my site and listeners to this podcast thank you everybody who's listening I really

12:04appreciate that I really do and I love that marketing as well but the just like it's there's something so cool about sitting quietly behind a computer from anywhere in the world and just setting up some funnel and then having that funnel work for you for years there's something to me that is so cool about that I think it it's it comes from like when I was 25 or 24 and I read the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss that's what it that's that's where it comes from that like oh wow this is really possible and because that's what Tim Ferriss evoked he evoked that sense

12:45you spend some time setting up this funnel and then it benefits you for years and to me like the fact that you can still do that I love that I think it's so ins I think it's it's inspiring and it's fun and that's why search engine optimization is my favorite Channel by the way that article about the best blockchain games doesn't rank anymore so if you're looking to find out I I don't even you probably could if you if you dug if you dug through Google you could probably find it but it's not on page one I don't even know if it's on page two because it's an old article

13:16but all right this episode 50 of the Edward show I hope you enjoyed today's episode this one was a bit more chilled out I'm definitely feeling a bit more chilled out I gotta stop recording these at at 9 00 PM because I'm still waking up at six and it's just I got to do it in the afternoon I went on a podcast today I use this tool it's called pod match es you with hosts so you can go on their shows and I've been using that I was that actually tool is why I started this podcast because I would go on a bunch of other people's shows and and this isn't

13:52like me being hubristic but like people would tell me very commonly you're the best guest I've ever had you should do your own podcast that's what caused me to start my tick tock and then I still kept hearing that and so I started this podcast and actually the and the other reason I started this podcast is because I figured that I could use Twitter ads to drive cheap Twitter ads to drive listeners thousands of listeners to Twitter spaces where I record them and that is still true you can still do that but I am recording this not on Twitter spaces maybe I might go back I'm

14:32recording this the way that I am right now because it's I like to do the post-production and it's easier to have to like not worry about the Twitter space but also actually ah when I switched to this method I didn't I hadn't discovered the Twitter ads hack that I've been sharing on the past few episodes where I'm getting millions of impressions for under a dollar I hadn't discovered that and I and what I had seen so far had actually gone downhill I thought Twitter ads was dead and I talked about that a few days ago I really thought Twitter ads was dead now with this it's come back so uh

15:10so you might see me recording on Twitter spaces again but I'll also record on the professional mic so it sounds nice and I'll still edit I'll still go and post using descript and edit the podcast so I have a cleaner version that goes out to all the streaming platforms because if I'm a listener and I had to choose between the cleaner version or the record or the or the raw version recorded in Twitter spaces I would totally choose a cleaner version but with that said that raw version recorded in Twitter spaces you can literally so this is another hack this is a crazy hack if you want to start a

15:45podcast do it in Twitter spaces and buy engagement ads to your Twitter space and it you will get so many listeners so fast I gotta do that again I'm gonna record maybe tomorrow or the day after I'm going to record a space I'm going to be really engaged I mean I'm pretty engaged now I'm pretty engaged now it's going to be a good show and I'm going to record it in Twitter spaces and drive thousands of listeners to it with Twitter ads it's really like that and it's such it's such a crazy hack I love that these hacks exist SEO funnels search engine optimization funnels that's another hack all right this is

16:24episode 50 of the Edward show I hope you enjoy this show if you didn't let me know this one was a little bit different so if you didn't please let me know my email is Edward edwardsterm.com you can let me know there or the contact form on my site or send me a message anywhere and if you did like it also let me know I love hearing from everybody who listens thank you so much episode 50 of the Edward show the big 50 the big 5-0 I will talk to you all again tomorrow bye now