Starting to realize your Bot's true potential

As an avid reader of the MTGOLibrary blog, you are probably an active Bot owner and looking for ways to increase traffic to your Bot. Day to day you put in the time to research prices, modify the PersonalPrices.txt and PersonalPercentages.txt files and give your customers the best deals possible in the MTGO secondary market. These are great tools at your disposal, but they do not necessarily direct new traffic to your Bot. Over the next few weeks I will be exploring some ideas on what you can do to attract and retain new customers to increase your sales potential.

Your Bot is the simplest of e-commerce models. People visit your store, add cards to their shopping cart and trade for store credit or Tix. For good or for bad, Wizards has decided to unofficially support this model for the secondary market including allowing chat rooms for Trades and even an Auction room. It's actually a shame and a bit of a business failure on their part that they don't do more to support trading as their entire business relies on the trading and market valuing of their product. That said, they do provide one very undervalued service that you may not have looked into and that is their Community Blogs.

Wizards maintains one of these blogs for the MTGO community at http://community.wizards.com/magiconline.

Wizard's community blogs are a great place to start to connect with your customers and the best part is that it's free. You can surround a card name with the tag [Card][/Card] and it will automatically link your card to Wizards Gatherer like it does on the Wizards Daily MTG blog. You can also post your Decks from MTGO with their "Import Magic Deck" wizard (it's the in the editor). Unfortunately the site is very limited in terms of marketing abilities and so in my next article I will explore building a simple website for your Bot and some tried and true marketing strategies you can use to support it and ultimately reach your Bot's true potential.