CodeCandyBlue

Virtual Mystery and Escape Adventures

[codecandyblue]

Black Friday Musings

I was intending my November blog post to be about all the different variations of virtual escape games, but having just gone through Black Friday, that, and other topics will just have to wait.  

CodeCandyBlue.com officially opened for business on Valentine’s Day, 2021, so this was my first Black Friday as both a consumer and seller, and I have thoughts.

First, why is it called Black Friday?  I thought this was common knowledge, but several Black Friday ads I received in my mailbox exclaimed “We don’t know why it’s called Black Friday; we just know we’ve got DEALS, DEALS, DEALS for you!” (or something along those lines).

I didn’t look it up to confirm, or anything responsible like that, but I always understood the term to come from the fact that retailers sell such a large percentage of their stock on the Friday after Thanksgiving, that that is the point in the year their books go from being in the red (more expenses than income) to being in the BLACK (more income than expenses).

A Contract With Customers

This Black Friday, CodeCandyBlue is offering all of its virtual escape adventures, the Mars Shuttle Mission, the Mayan Temple Mission, Amnesia!, and The Cryptographer, for 50%, which is the steepest discount offered since we officially opened for business back in February.  Why such a steep discount?  And why on Black Friday?  Well, as a consumer and a cheapskate, I am such a big fan of steep discounts, and the predictability of said discounts occurring after Thanksgiving, that I am actually personally offended if I see an ad for, say 35% off.  “35% off?!?  Do you hate your customers?  Why are you so greedy?”.  That’s right, my opinion of vendors who either don’t offer Black Friday sales, or don’t offer steep enough discounts,  plummets, and I am less likely to buy from those insensitive rule-breakers again.

Mind you, this attitude easily co-exists with my constant eye-rolling at all the hyperbole surrounding Black Friday sales, and the attempts of all business to capitalize on the day/season, whether it makes sense or not (“Triple bypass surgeries, HALF OFF - today only!  Use code BLACKFRIDAYHEART at checkout!”).  Sneering hypocrisy?  Check.

So, all my virtual escape adventures are 50% off purely to avoid offending my customers.  And if the discount spurs sales, that’s just icing on the cake.

Whither Cyber Monday?

I have a confession to make.  I have not walked into a store for anything other than groceries in almost 2 years.  Sorry, brick and mortar retailers!  Black Friday originated, of course, in the days when most shopping was done in person in physical stores.  And it was limited to a single day to create a sense of urgency that if consumers didn’t buy TODAY, they would lose out on tremendous savings.  

As online retailing grew, in an attempt to grab some of the Black Friday cash, they created their own 1-day event: Cyber Monday.  Since shoppers in malls weren’t able to simultaneously search the web for deals, the online retailers had to pick a different day.  But COVID-19 and general retailing trends changed all that.  With so much shopping being done online, and competing stores a mere mouse click away, rather than a drive across town, there was pressure to move their sales earlier and earlier.  Since people weren’t going to malls anymore on Black Friday, it was safe for the online world to abandon Cyber Monday for Black Friday.  BUT, without the physical constraints of travel, it’s actually easier to customers to overbuy online, so online sales started extending the timeframe for these deals, so that we now have Black Weekend, Black Week, Black November, and the one I saw most recently - Black Autumn!  My solution to inflation?  BLACK YEAR!  Everything 50% off all year long!

CodeCandyBlue Black Friday Shenanigans

I will let you in on a little secret about CodeCandyBlue sales - they always go at least 1 day longer than advertised.  The day after my first sale event, when my only offerings were the Mars Shuttle Mission and the Mayan Temple Mission, I got an email from a customer who had seen a facebook ad for the sale, but when she added the virtual escape adventure to her cart, it rang up at the list price, because the sale was over.  I explained that while the dates in the ad were accurate, the ad had run past the end date, so that’s why she saw the ad even after the sale had ended.  But of course, she was disappointed, and didn’t buy the game.  Afterwards, I realized how stupid I had been.  Here I had someone who wanted to buy one of my escape adventures, and I turned her away because “Them’s the rules!”

To make sure that never happened again, I’ve since tacked on another day or two to the sale prices, so those who didn’t see the ad in time can still get the discounted price.  The data support that decision.  About 20% of all my discounted sales have happened after the sale officially ended.  For my first Black Friday sale, I am offering all my virtual escape adventures for 50% off from roughly the day before Thanksgiving, to roughly December 1.  Yes, that stretches the definition of Black “FRIDAY” beyond all reason, but I still call the sale “Black Friday”, because “Black Week”, or “Black 10 Days Surrounding Thanksgiving” just don’t have the same ring to them.

Wishing everyone a Happy Black Season!

[codecandyblue]

My First Blog Post

I am Gregory Anderson, designer of virtual escape adventures for CodeCandyBlue.  All the marketing guys say that I need to have a blog to perform better on Google search results, get higher domain authority and bring visitors to my page.  

The problem is that people don’t come to my site to read a blog post.  They come to buy a virtual escape adventure that they can play online with their friends from the comfort of their home, anytime, day or night.  So what could I possibly write about that would provide value to my audience?

Suggestions from various SEO sites include: how to tie a tie, a fresh new recipe, something about your pets, etc.  Um, no.  So I have decided to write about whatever I damn well please, related to my business, codecandyblue.com, and my games, including The Mars Shuttle Mission, The Mayan Temple Mission, Amnesia!, The Cryptographer, and our free starter game: Cadets - Training Day.  

I promise this blog will be unfiltered, will include tidbits about the storylines for my virtual escape adventures, as well as airing of grievances about running an online business in the age of Google.  You may be entertained, and you may learn a few things about the SEO and online marketing biz - not because I am an expert, but because I am learning as a go and need to vent about the ridiculousness of algorithm-determined validity.

First up - blogging!  Apparently, you need to provide new, well-written content to your site on a monthly basis to move up the Google search rankings.  After I protested that a blog seemed incompatible with my business goals, it was suggested that my blog could even be hidden from my customers, but as long as the Google crawling bots found it and saw that it contained the right key words and was updated frequently, that my site would do better in Google search.  I have decided for now to blog on Tumblr, then import my Tumblr posts into a blog page on my site.  I won’t hide it, but am not promoting it either - I need the most highly-visible portions of my site to be the virtual escape games that I am selling.

I also found out that the ideal blog post size is around 1500 words!  I’m getting close to 400 so far in this post, so no, I will not be getting anywhere new 1500 words.

Given the recommended length and frequency of posts, I first looked into AI Copywriting to help generate some crap to post.  Unfortunately, crap is exactly what they delivered.  Apparently these online AI writing programs take your input, scour the web for related content, merge the two into grammatically-correct sentences, and voila! you have a blog post.  

First problem - the one I tried didn’t have any options for a 1500 word blog post.  The most it generated was 400 characters, and that was using the “Product Description” setting.  They had other settings for Blog Titles, Blog Outlines, etc., but nothing that would attempt to generate a complete blog post.

Second problem - when I entered in information about The Mars Shuttle Mission, they pulled really inappropriate stuff from their related-content web search, like the names of the designers of a game, or the description of a specific plot point, all of which had nothing to do with my game, and would probably get me sued if the parties this text was stolen from ever read my blog.

I do have to say that some of the options were well-written.  They give you like 10 different paragraphs from your single input, so you can use the ones you like and discard the rest.  I deleted all the crazy ones unfortunately, but did copy out some decent ones.  Here is an AI-generated product description for my games:

“Virtual Escape Adventures let you embark on an epic, highly-interactive adventure with your friends, solving puzzles and riddling your brain to escape each scene. Uncover hidden clues, solve mysteries, make it to the end of the mission alive - all from the comfort of your own home!”

So, AI writing can generate some decent stuff, but the short stuff they do well is also easy and quick for me to write myself.  Once they can generate 1500 words that make sense and are relevant, I may jump on the AI writing bandwagon, but for now no AI writing for my blog!  You can rest assured that nothing you have read so far was written by an algorithm (except for the above quote, which is explicitly AI generated.

Hey!  I just wrote a blog post, and boy are my arms tired!  Almost 800 words!  Until next time...

Gregory Anderson

CodeCandyBlue - Virtual Escape Adventures

https://codecandyblue.com