Rekindling consistency

From unknown to expert in 2014

In 2012 I put an end to my career in the corporate sector where I went from change management consulting with one of the big 6 firms in the 90's to external trainer and instructional designer, to internal lead trainer for leadership and sales to head of learning and development for EMEA. I decided once again to fuel to entrepreneurial itch and pursue a knowledge and tech based venture in the gamification space. Purely by sharing interesting articles, consuming tons of courses on the topic and qualifying in game design and then tentatively writing my own blogs, i started to list in the top 100 influencers of this very narrow field. By 2014 I was in and out of the top 10 and that really started my speaking and evangelising on the topic.



A strategic choice made a difference


In 2015, I decided to up the ante and aim to publish a blog post at least 3 times per week. The strategy was to publish on 3 themes, monday was reserved for Game mechanics, Wednesday for a 'things, case studies, examples we love post' and Fridays for a Feminine gamification viewpoint. My whole premise of wanting to make a mark in the industry was that it was fully dominated by young white boys and a token Asian, whilst their work was trying to engage people like me: female and in their 30-40's. So I wanted to brig the feminine voice and ruffled a few feathers in this regard by coming up with studies, research as well as opinions that certain forms of gamification simply don't appeal to women. I still stand by that today and would now have an even broader inclusion view incorporating age, culture and ability.

I kept this up until the end of 2019, at which point my business was thriving and we ranked really high on Google for any search to do with gamification. We were being sought out by top names and I spoke at pretty much every note-worthy event in the industry and beyond. We won awards etc.



Burning out and other epidemics

By 2020, it felt like I had lost all inspiration, motivation and writing ability plus I didn't have the time to spend on writing stuff. I also felt that some of the high volume pushing out of materials was also conducive to producing a bunch of mediocre and often outright badly written material. I tried my hand at podcasting, which I aimed to publish once a month with questions, but I felt it wasn't really my medium. I always loved writing first.


Ironically podcast listeners were more likely to get in touch and speak about stuff they learned, whereas engagement levels on my blog posts were non-existent and often toxic or outright spammy. Posts were being ripped off and my ebooks even completely copied (including the biography ;-). I guess a lot of information you can probably get on gamification through AI is probably sourced from my blogs.

The pandemic came along in March 2020 and our outlook of a £600K year in the space of 2 weeks evaporated to barely scraping by and having to lay-off a kick-ass team. By the summer I had had Covid, thanks to my partner's work in television which never stopped and us living in a small apartment. I was contemplating packing it all in but feeling mightily unfulfilled in my goal to make a difference to my field and in my business goals of million plus turnover figures etc.

Then a search engine came along and wanted a female business owner to work on their gamification of a training program for agencies. It restarted the passion and although it was a massive challenge to deliver this on budget and time as a one man show with a few freelancers, wordpress (yes, wordpress) and a direct line to the creators of a gamification plugin as well as some help from my partner (a developer) to automate reports. I have bumbled along since then, never truly picking up the pace on marketing like I had before the heydays in 2018 and 19.



Changing the game plan

Having probably suffered burnout and several stints of covid, I decided to change my business model away from relying on custom game design and gamification to adding multiple streams of income. I took advantage of a bounce back scheme in the UK to fund the development of a mobile app and accompanying management portal for smart cities and put together a small team of developers and designers.

At hindsight the choice of app was probably wrong timing and hence we are now selling it off. I did also build out a few other applications which are now ready to hit the market and I also looked at buying other businesses that were aligned with what we did, so I added 2 saas web app to the mix as well.

My mojo for blogging or other social facing endeavours shifted completely from believing I wrote things that mattered and spoke about important stuff to feeling like an imposter and a self-critic on just about anything I dreamed of doing. Mad!
Talk about taking self-sabotage to a whole new level...

That lovely behaviour basically leads me to this year where we are lucky to be still standing but very financially unstable and in need of growth big time.

New commitment

Roll forward to this month, I have finally come full circle to pick up the writing pen again but this time smarter, more targeted and with the help of a chat GPT friend. And i have a back catalogue of content of over 800+ pieces to generate new items with.

I have a target of 3 blogs a week again, one for each website so slightly different in focus. For our main gamification business, it will still be more thought leader focused but also speaking to our target audience in the corporate sector more so than the enthusiast that all wanted to do what I was doing. For the 2 softwares they each have a distinct target group, one in marketing and one with remote teams, so the variety is a good place to start.

I have learned a bit more about SEO and researching topics audiences actually show for, although I am not all that sure I master any of those well. It will be a bit of a learning experiment to implement new tactics and leverage new technology.

Seen that this is week 1 of the new plan, I wanted to publish it somewhere where I would get some encouragement and support. And hopefully inspire some others to leap back into action again or simply take action for the first time.

By being based in Sweden now, we have the added bonus that authorities here are fining companies for the use of Google Analytics, so we are looking for creative ways to rank without actually going with the obvious routes.

As I try to figure this out and learn more tactics from the community here, I will promise to add an update on progress to this post. All feedback and suggestions are totally welcome, all we can do is learn and improve.