My first pieces of publicity

After releasing Path of a Hero almost a week ago, my efforts have of course been turned towards getting the word out there.

First thing I did was post on Hacker News. This provided some good initial feedback as well as around 300 hits :)
This was good for general web site feedback however the site does not really appeal to the majority of Hacker News readers. I moved on to my target market... WoW players.

I started to find some smaller forums and post an explanation of what Path of a Hero does. I am generally finding it difficult to convince people to check it out. That said, as soon as they actually check out the site, I get a lot of 'oh wow' and 'cool's. All of the feedback I have received has been positive or at least constructive.

I have avoided posting on the major forums because I want to try to get the site running with a reasonable amount of people before I open myself up to any sort of possible bombardment.

The conversion rate (amount of people who actually start using Path of a Hero vs how many are exposed to a link to it) seems to be quite low from forum posts and I am assuming this is because of a number of reasons:

1. People are scared of visiting a site that they don't know much about (will my password be stolen? for example).
2. People are too busy with all of the interesting things happening in WoW (Hallow's End and Lich King world event) at the moment to have time to check out new sites.
3. Until all their friends are using Path of a Hero, they see no need to sign up.
4. They are at the forum to read forum posts, not to visit external sites.

Anyway I have come to the conclusion that I should focus my efforts on getting world of warcraft bloggers excited about my product and use them to spread the word. I feel that there is a market for Path of a Hero and it is just a matter of getting the adoption to snowball.

At this point in time, I am proud to announce that Path of a Hero has been blogged about for the first time. WoW Blogger (a blog that I frequently read) liked the site and was kind enough to mention it in his most recent blog post. So it has begun....

Don't forget that if you like Path of a Hero, tell your friends about, because the site gets more interesting when your rivals use it as well :)