Indiannoob has now been around for a while. 5 years to be accurate, and the seeds for the site were even older, in a blogspot in 2012. When IN started, people used to go to actual websites to get news. But since then, times have changed and with it video games journalism. People now get their news mainly through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They now learn about games through streams and videos on Twitch and YouTube. So while half a decade ago, it was enough for you to know your way around WordPress, it’s impossible to thrive today only by being a good writer.
This post is not about gaming, rather it’s about some of the tools that we use in our day to day work cycle at IndianNoob, which makes our work easier and lets us reach out to more people every day. With new people joining the video game journalism stream every day, we think these are some of the best tools they can make use of (and most of them come free). And most of these tools will also apply to people who don’t belong to the
Hootsuite
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin. It seems that there is a new social network to explore every year. And as a site/brand looking to expand you can’t just ignore these social sites even though you yourself don’t have any interest in the platform itself. Hootsuite bridges that gap. While there is no replacement for the manual organic and unique posting of your on social media, sometimes you just want your Feeds to be consistent without having to worry about a unique caption every time. Hootsuite, in its free version, let’s you create an account that allows you to cross-post your content onto at least 3 social media at any time (for us its facebook, Twitter and Linked In). It lets you schedule posts, and you can share that one Hootsuite account between team members instead of having to share all your social media passwords every time. There are other tools out there who try to do the same thing, but the first step is knowing about them, and how easy they can make your life.
DesignCap
So now you know you can get your content onto social media. But how do you attract attention? One of the best ways to do that, at least on Instagram (and facebook) is to have eye-catching graphics. Images that can capture the eye of a casual scroller, small close-captioned videos that can convey a message. With social medias treating external links like the plague, you need to make sure the reader knows what you are selling, and the easiest and the fastest way to do that is by creating such engaging graphics. In this regard, DesignCap is a great tool. It’s free to use (the premium version gives you access to premium templates), and allows you to create simple and reusable templates where you can swap the images and the text on the fly and produce custom featured images, Instagram posts, social media banners and much more, easily available in sizes of your choosing. Design Cap also provides local language support in 7 languages: English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, French, Chinese. Really worth checking out, if you don’t consider yourself an artist. The image above, the featured image for this post, and the graphics that will follow have all been created on DesignCap.
Grammarly
But not everything in games journalism is about social media and images. Most of it is about covering news, writing reviews and publishing editorials/opinions that need to reach your audience. And do you know what’s the worse thing about writing a 1000 word critique about RPGs in 2019, it’s the grammar mistakes. How can you take someone seriously when he doesn’t know the difference between there and their. That’s where Grammarly comes in, it’s a free online tool which integrates with Chrome, and works in almost all editors imaginable, including forms on the internet. For editorials, where you need to use those heavy words but don’t quite remember the spelling, Grammarly is incredible. It’s even better at suggesting commas, hyphens and other such punctuations which would make your sentence even better. I am pretty sure all of this information is getting captured to train an AI, but it helps with my writing, and it should help with yours too. Maybe if we help Skynet out, it will let us live.
Resolve/OBS
As has been the theme of this post, things they are a-changing. And it’s no longer feasible to attract readers to your brand by just writing great content. You should at least look into video creation. Resolve is an open-source video editing tool, which can provide you with everything that you need when it comes to video editing. Sure you can use iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, but there will come a time when you will have to step up your game, and put out top-notch close-captioned videos or funny well-edited monologues to put yourself out there. DaVinci Resolve 16 is the world’s only solution that combines professional 8K editing, color correction, visual effects, and audio post-production all in one software tool! Check out this amamzing video by Manas Joy who used Resolve to edit the entire video.
But let’s say you consider your more of a people’s person. You are more organic and are more fun in a casual but LIVE setting. Then you might want to try out streaming. While platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and FB are all popular, the problem with streaming doesn’t just end after you have selected a platform. You need to add overlays, pre-stream card, post-stream cards, inlays, make sure video and audio are in sync, make sure you can read the comments, and respond to them. OBS is a free solution to almost all of those problems. Everything that you might need to stream is available, and everything is free.
Anchor
Finally podcasting. A kind of a middle ground between writing and video creation. Where you record your thoughts and then post them online, in the hopes that someone would like to hear them. The advantage in Anchor is very similar to using Hootsuite. Once you have uploaded a podcast, it takes care of distributing that podcast to various sources including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and even Spotify. But Anchor also provides a suite of in house tools that you can use to refine your podcasts. It provides simple editing tools, options to add background music, options to add monetization features into your podcasts, and of course create Seasons and Episodes under a single distribution brand. If you are looking to get into the podcast game, there are not a lot of better options than Anchor. Check out our very own podcast called Press Start To Play made entirely on Anchor.
There you have it, folks. Some of the tools that IN have been using to diversify our offerings and to reach out to more people. I hope this article helps you in identifying and at least trying some of these tools, and maybe you can find that next leap which would take your brand to the next level. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions for the tools that we mentioned and any other tool that you would like to add to the list.