Play2Earn PR represents a confluence between two of the world’s most successful and innovative industries – combining aspects of public relations for gaming and blockchain. The blockchain industry has been on a global upwards trend, with a predicted valuation of $227.99bn by 2028. Alongside this, the gaming industry has also seen spectacular growth in recent years, now being predicted to reach $314 billion by 2026.

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When publicizing your own Play2Earn game, many questions will come to mind – which channels to use, which avenues to pursue, and which strategies to employ. To create a lasting and impressive Play2Earn PR campaign, there are many moving elements that differ from traditional gaming and blockchain public relations.

What is Play2Earn

When it comes to gaming, it was traditionally thought that there are two major play formats:

• Play to play – Where a user will buy the game up front and then gain access to all of its features.
• Free to play – A game that absolutely anyone can download and begin to play, ensuring that anyone can play at any time without investing money.

Many games offer free-to-play features with additional benefits for those that pay a monthly fee, with online RPG like World of Warcraft and Runescape following this format.

Yet, in recent years, in line with the evolution that blockchain has brought to the gaming industry, a new format of gaming has emerged – Play2earn. This is an expansion of Free To Play, where users are able to generate income for themselves while playing these games.

This works primarily through the distribution of NFTs and a native token, which we’ll be discussing further later. Simply by playing the game, a user will be able to earn cryptocurrency, providing them a method of making money while doing well within their favorite games.

This next step in gaming has created a revolution in the gaming industry, will millions of players flocking to this new format, boosting user bases and driving the price of cryptocurrency upwards onto new highs. 

What is P2E PR?

P2E PR, or “Play-to-Earn Public Relations,” primarily focuses on non-traditional PR methods to engage and capture the attention of the target audience in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. This audience is often tech-savvy, likely to use ad blockers, and overwhelmed by ads, making it more challenging to reach them through traditional PR channels.

Instead, P2E PR professionals leverage alternative strategies such as social media, influencer marketing, content creation, community building, and digital events to effectively communicate with gamers and the crypto community.

They may also utilize native advertising, sponsorships, and collaborations to create authentic connections with the target audience while circumventing ad blockers. By focusing on building authority and trust through these non-traditional methods, P2E PR can successfully attract gamers and investors to play-to-earn projects, ultimately contributing to their growth and success.

How Do Play2earn Games Generate value?

Initially, it may seem strange that a free-to-play game can generate value, not only for the business itself but also for the players. While paying for a game in order to gain access to it has a business model that instantly has a visible profit, free-to-play games don’t have the same cost barrier to entry.

Yet, one of the most popular free-to-play games in the world generated $1.8 billion dollars in profit last year, despite costing absolutely nothing to play. While this generates value for the company, with players buying in-game assets, watching advertisements, or donating money to the project, it does very little for the players themselves.

That’s where play-to-earn games come in, with players having the opportunity to generate value for themselves through their gameplay. Typically, this is done through acquiring in-game assets in the format of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which players can then sell on the global marketplace.

Additionally, many P2E games will give players some native token cryptocurrency alongside experience as they progress through the games. With this, two unique ways of generating income for players is achieved:

• NFTs – Players will either find, win, or earn NFTs that can they can then buy, exchange, or sell to other players for native token coins.

• Native Crypto – Developers will award the native token of the game project throughout the playing experience. Players are then able to exchange the tokens on major decentralized exchanges for USD or another fiat currency. 

Yet, while these represent a method of a user generating income, they do little to explain how developers can profit. Typically, there are two methods that developers will integrate into their games to profit from them.

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Method One – Native Token

The first method that P2E games generate value is through the increase of their native token’s price. By creating a cryptocurrency and then attaching it to their project, its inherent value will increase as the project becomes more successful.

As this token is a reward for playing, it is distributed to players, while the developers retain a high percentage for themselves. As a game becomes more popular, the price of the token increases and therefore increases the asset’s value for the developers, generating profit. 

Method Two – Assets

At any time, a developer can mint a set of NFTs and incorporate them into the game, selling each one for a fixed value. As users buy these potentially game-improving NFT characters, weapons, of skills, the developers will generate a profit.

In some NFT games, there are also card-pack sales, where the developers will sell random packs of cards with a small chance of unlocking a powerful unit. These will also generate profit for the developers. The NFT market has skyrocketed over the past 18 months, with total sales reaching $2.5 billion in only the first half of 2021.

Within the P2E system, both developers and players simultaneously benefit, which is one of the main appeals of this new gaming platform and potentially why it’s currently seeing so much success. 

What avenues are used for Play2Earn PR?

Diverging from traditional marketing and public relations streams, Play2earn PR makes use of distinct avenues. When attempting to gain publicity around your play-2-earn game, instead of seeking traditional advice, we often find that the following platforms are most successful.

Typically, play-2-earn PR campaigns will turn to:

• Guest Posting
• Social Media
• Alternative Communications Platforms
• Alternative Social Media Platforms

Let’s break these down further.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of the most important activities that you can do when attempting to run a successful P2E PR campaign. This is the act of posting an informational article on another website in return for links back to your site. 

Typically, a campaign manager will contract a range of guest posting opportunities, finding out about their required styles and structures before submitting some short articles which cover a topic on their niche.

Within the play-2-earn gaming niche, typical articles that could be submitted are:

• Listicles – 10 Things You Didn’t Know About P2E Gaming
• How-Tos – How to Make Money By Playing P2E Games
• Reviews – Everything You Need To Know About {P2E Project)
• News – {2E Project} Receives X Amount In Investor Funding

While these are the most common forms of posts when writing and sending out guest posts, any style will suffice depending on the publication you’re aiming to be published in.

General Rules For Effective Guest Posting

There are three general rules that you should follow to create effective guest posts.

• Find Opportunities That Advertise Before Cold Pitching
• Include A Link To Your Site
• Explain, Don’t Advertise

Opportunities In Play2Earn PR Campaigns come from many sources

There are many guest posting opportunities on different websites that will actively accept posts submitted by guest authors. You can find these by searching for them directly. Use the Google Quotations Feature to get a range of results that are directly related to what you want to find.

From there, you can make a list of different sites and then submit your posts directly to them. Alternatively, once you’ve exhausted the first option, you can cold pitch your article ideas to different websites. When doing this, you need to outline why it would be a good fit for the site, often using interesting facts or figures to get their attention.

Link To Your Site

The main purpose of guest posting is to secure backlinks for your site. When writing an article, be sure to actually include a backlink to your site; otherwise, the guest post would have been for nothing.

You should attempt to naturally imbed these quotes naturally into your text or ensure you have a link back to your site within the author bio.

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Explain, Don’t Advertise

No one wants to read a guest post article that is clearly just an advertisement for a certain Play2earn product. When writing your guest posts, try to always keep the central goal of delivering useful information to the audience. While your product might be related to what you’re saying, you should only ever briefly mention it.

Remember, content is key – your product isn’t! These are guest posts; your writing should accommodate their style and aim to help their readers.

Social Media

Sites like Facebook clock in with around 2.7 billion active accounts every single month, demonstrating the global power some of these tech corporations hold. 

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No matter your personal opinions on social media, a huge part of your Play2Earn public relations campaign will be engaging with uses on these various mediums.

When starting your PR campaign, be sure that you have accounts on a range of different social media. Ensure that your branding is strong across all of them, making absolutely sure that your logo, style of writing, and design for profile photos and cover photos are the same on each one of these platforms.

By doing this, you’ll be able to make sure that when someone comes across one of your pages within a certain social media page, they’ll know exactly who they’re dealing with, helping you to build up a level of brand familiarity.

Take a look at some of the most common social media platforms that markets are regularly using.

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Alternative Communications Platforms

One of the central tips that we can give is that you need to remember that Play2Earn is, at its core, a blockchain marketing, and PR campaign. Due to this, avenues that are popular within blockchain are also useful for building up a community.

You’ll be able to use platforms like Discord and Telegram to build up communities that are following your progress. Those that join your communication channels will be able to get updates on how your Play2Earn game is going, having the opportunity to connect with the developers and learn more.

This social form of advertising has been steadily gaining popularity, especially within the gaming space. By May of 2019, Discord recorded over 250 million users. 

It has also steadily been a growing online marketplace for games, with the gaming population making use of these social communication streams. 

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Due to this, with P2E’s background in gaming, you should endeavor to make the most of these communication platforms, combining core elements of both gaming PR and blockchain PR.

Alternative Social Media Platforms for Play2Earn PR Campaigns

Back in 2018, Facebook banned any advertisements that had anything to do with cryptocurrency. This came after the rising rate of IDO scams led to millions of people around the globe losing money on their investments that turned out to be rug pulls or honeypot scams. While this ban was later repealed, this has still had a major impact on mediums that blockchain uses.

As a result of these bans, the cryptocurrency community turned to other, non-traditional forms of advertising. Two of these sites, Reddit and Steemit, became some of the most important tools within the social media marketing space for blockchain.

As Play2Earn is a blockchain concept, these platforms still remain particularly valuable for these markets. If you’re wanting to launch a Play2Earn PR campaign, we implore you to make the most of these communities.

Looking at one of these, Steemit, you can clearly see an upwards trend in the number of active users directly in line with the period of time when these cryptocurrency bans were impacting larger social media. In May-June of 2018, Steemit crossed over 1,000,000 registered users, displaying the shift towards this crypto-friendly platform.

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From there, these communities have only continued to grow, with Steemit and Reddit now both being an incredible resource to turn towards if you’re looking to create a successful P2E PR campaign.

Additionally, by utilizing Reddit threads and Steemit posts, you’ll be able to further the reach that your posted articles gain. You can repost links or summaries of your posts, then link to them on these Free-To-Post sites to amplify your campaign completely for free.

Best Practises for A Successful Play2Earn PR campaign

When running a successful P2E PR campaign, one of the central aspects that you need to focus on is ensuring that players understand why your project is impactful, innovative, and, most of all, entertaining.

While there are many P2E games out there, not all of them are actually particularly interesting to play, nor do they demonstrate monetary benefits. To avoid common errors that developers and publicists are met with when launching this type of campaign, we recommend that you follow the following strategies:

• Demonstrate Monetary Value
• Vary Your Target Tiers
• Home Website SEO
• Blog
• Site Use-Functionality

Let’s break these down further.

Demonstrate Monetary Value

One of the central reasons that players will gain an interest in a campaign, even more than the gameplay itself, is the fact that they can earn by playing. This is still a relatively new concept for the majority of users, meaning that the idea of earning money for playing a video game will excite them.

Within your open advertisements, be sure to play the ability to earn while playing as a central characteristic of your ads. Doing this will further increase your click-through rate, inciting more people to play. If this is at the heart of your campaign, it will do considerably better.

Vary Your Website Tiers

A website tier is an arbitrary ranking of that site, either by visibility in your niche or overall readership. Tier one websites would be any site that is fairly general, easily accessible for guest posts, and doesn’t cost much to post on if you’re buying your way in.

A tier three website is one of the most exclusive websites, with very high readerships and an even higher barrier to entry. While these are seen by the most, meaning you’ll get a strong boost in exposure if you end up on these sites, they are not necessarily the best option when creating a Play2Earn campaign.

One of the central tactics you should employ within your campaign is varying the tier of website that you are focusing on. Instead of pouring your whole PR budget into securing a link to a tier three-site, you should instead focus on getting an equal spread across the three tiers.

While lower-tier websites will get fewer views on their articles that mention you, they still secure a backlink. Additionally, articles can go viral at the drop of a hat, making quantity a vital part of a successful Play2Earn PR campaign.

SEO is Central in a Play2Earn PR Campaign

Creating a strong SEO presence on your own website is one of the central aspects that you have to ensure is complete before you really get into the nitty-gritty of your PR campaigns. Without great content, strong fundamentals, and SEO which pushes you above your competitors on the SERP rankings, your campaign won’t be as effective as it could be.

While gathering backlinks and ensuring you have a high domain rating is important, it pails in comparison to making sure your own site is fully optimized. By ensuring a strong on-page SEO for each of the pages on your site, you’ll begin to gain natural traffic from people coming across your game on different search pages.

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While SEO is a vital part of any PR campaign, inwards curation and ensuring that your site is already in the best condition possible should be one of your first priorities before launching your link-building segment. 

Blog

Extending from the SEO tip, one of the central focuses that you should have when creating a strong website is cultivating an active blog section. This is where you can write information about your game, launch playthroughs or walkthroughs, even give information about how certain game features work.

Within this blog section, you can use SEO keyword planning in order to find out what keywords you should be creating content around. From there, it’ll be significantly clearer which articles you should be working on. 

Cultivating an active blog will help with your on-site optimization while also ensuring that your players have a wealth of resources to turn to when they are seeking more information. Additionally, ensuring that your website is up-to-date with information about your project will put investors at ease when they see your page. They’ll be able to access any information they need when deciding if they want to invest in a project or not.

Fast Fire P2E PR Tips

In order to summarize all of the various different strategies, tips, and integrations that we’ve suggested within this guide, let’s do some fast fire reminders:

• SEO is King – A strong SEO campaign is the heart of PR, P2E or traditional. By ensuring your site is optimized and that your link-building campaign is strong, you’ll be well on your way to a successful campaign.
• Never Buy Following – Nothing is more of a red flag to investors than a project that buys its own followers or engagements. Natural campaigns are always the way to go.
• Take Media Seriously – Social media can make or break a P2E campaign. With a strong presence across many channels, you’ll be able to drive natural traffic and get the world talking about your game.
• How Can You Serve – Remember, users will flock to programs with strong incentives. Make sure the reasons that people should use your platform to earn are made clear across all of your channels.

With these tips, strategies, and ideas, you’ll be well on your way to launching a successful P2E PR campaign. 

Final Thoughts on Play2Earn PR

Play2earn is a unique phenomenon in the gaming space, combining the best of cryptocurrency with this already thriving field. The intersection of these two pursuits – gaming and cryptocurrency – is a valuable medium through which developers and players alike are finding potential.

If you’re looking to launch a successful play-2-earn campaign, we recommend that you make use of the avenues we’ve outlined, draw upon our strategies, and put the tips to work. That said, GuerillaBuzz is always just a message away if you’re looking for expert advice on your upcoming Play-2-earn campaign.