Apart from getting through my work takes for the day, I've been tinkering with a service called Airtable to create a database for our board game collection. I already tag all our games on BoardGameGeek including all of our plays, but extracting all that data has been a pain, at least for all the scripts I've tried running. This is some of the most technical work I've done in a while, and it's all for a personal project!
But after all that effort, I've managed to assemble a pretty decent starting point that covers all of our tagged games, my BGG scores for them, our total plays, among other things. Apart from the user-inputed data, I've also managed to scrape a lot of the basic details of these games like player counts and official game descriptions. All that's left is adding the personal element in terms my actual reviews. For that I've worked on a AI prompt that keeps me on track in terms of what 4 main points I want to highlight in each snippet review, then another prompt that expands that into additional review text for the latter part of the individual page.
It's a lot of preparation work, and it's going to take a me a while to write even limited content that I need to write for the site. With a game collection of over 1600 games, that's still a LOT of games to write about. And I'm eventually going to apply the same approach to writing content for all the books and comics I read for even more pages at scale.
It's intimidating and makes me feel a little dirty, but it's also a fascinating exercise on this sort of content generation at scale. I still have to put in a lot of work to tag all the content and add unique information about the entries, like how difficult it is to teach or set up each game. So there's still a lot of work involved. But if you asked me if I ever planned to write reviews for all of the games in our collection or all the books I read in a year for a content-driven ad play, I would have said l way. And yet here I am getting started on a programmatic SEO journey.
I'm focusing on getting the initial board game stuff setup. Once that content starts churning out, the goal is to get more traffic search queries I now qualify for, and then I can take more time writing meatier articles that aren't so generated. And apparently, Google AdSense is just the tip of the iceberg. If I can get enough page traffic I move to other ad platforms that work better with niche content like board game or book content.
I'll let you know how all this goes. There's a lot more technical madness ahead as I get this content engine of the ground.
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