Entering The Closed Anime Community Starting Out – The Immortal Anime Journey

Introduction

This has been HANDS DOWN the hardest project I have ever done! And the MAIN difficulty has been trying to get into the anime community.

This article works through everything I have done at the beginning of my journey since last year when starting out Immortal Anime trying to promote this website. This is my honest opinion with LOTS of useful information and data on my competitors/ fellow peers.

Anime Community Discussion

When first starting out, I spent a few weeks gathering data. Lots and lots of data in excel format. The below table summarises the top 20 anime blog websites online ordered by view count.

Giving a quick overview of this table you can see the following:

• Notes: This is where I determined if it was possible to write guest posts on their website.
• Domain Authority, Linked Root Domain, and Views per Month all show the size of the website.
• Ranking Keywords: How many posts they have approximately on their website relative to the total keywords they have ranked for.

Knowing all of this information led me to a few conclusions about the anime blogging industry as a whole:

1. Reddit is the BIGGEST place for anime blogs.
2. If 1k views equal ~$1.83 in revenue from ads then ONLY 10 websites in the whole anime blogging game have a STEADY income from ads alone. When compared with the size of the industry itself that is very competitive and ultimately gives a very low chance of success/ ability to become solely reliant for income and therefore fully focused on the website.
3. The full list collated had 59 websites on it but MOST only reached around 1k views a month. This shows that there are eager creators within the community with lots of potential but SEVERLY hampered by the competition and their respected google keyword rankings.

SO if you are new to creating an anime website and want to steamroll ahead and start receiving 100k views in a VERY short time, how do you do this?

The honest answer is you can’t!

But why is that?

1. It seems that no matter how quickly you rake up the blog listings, GOOGLE wants to feel that you are real and genuine which seems to mean a waiting period of around 3 months. When you start going through the endless YouTube videos and blogs about SEOs at the beginning, MOST say that it takes 1 year to get up and running.
2. It’s a MASSIVE grind. On average I am able to get ONE good post out a day when I have time away from my social life. This consists of 2-3 hours of data gathering and prep and 1-2 hours writing. However, trying to maintain 1 post a day is HARD, especially when you don’t see any people even viewing your website for the first few months.
3. There have only been a COUPLE of independent English language anime blogs that have done well over the past few years in the whole world, Anime Motivation and RecommendMeAnime.
4. The anime community doesn’t want you to post articles about your website or anything to do with your website on their forums. They only want your INSIGHT and therefore NUMBER COUNT and nothing more!

So it all depends on what your goals are?

For Immortal Anime, this is a place to VENT my thoughts into the BIG world of anime and hopefully meet and discuss anime with similar-minded folk as a bonus. But to make this passion my main source of income is not going to be likely.

Anime Forum Discussion

I have discussed how it’s HARD to make it as an anime blogger, so let’s move on to the reasons why trying to engage with the anime community is next to IMPOSSIBLE.

I’ve known of the main areas to post content about anime for many years, so my first point was Reddit! 🙂 This was a TOTAL waste of time. This was because Reddit won’t allow you to advertise yourself. If you prompt a discussion about a certain anime and tie this back to your website it is perceived as SPAM.

My second try was Discord connected to Anime-Planet. The moderators were friendly but on numerous occasions pointed out the line warning me to not advertise my website while discussing anime. It is stated within their discord rules:

6. Do not spam others in the channels or in private messages with advertisements, such as: invites to other Discord servers, advertising your personal projects, or sending unsolicited friend requests, unless given permission by the moderators. Unsolicited Discord invitations and other spam will result in an immediate ban.

I DID contact a moderator who said that I could display a post within the chat as long as I was active in Discord and not just using them, which is manageable!

Where to next?…

I then posted on to Amino (@immortalanime919) which had a POSITIVE impact. I wasn’t restricted in any way and was able to reach HUNDREDS of anime enthusiasts.

Thereafter, Ruqqus (immortalanime) allowed me to post whatever I wanted and I was able to engage with the anime community and listen to lots of feedback which was very insightful.

Posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Minds hasn’t helped at all yet. 🙂 But maybe you will have better luck.

Recommended:

Anime Age Rating System and Why Certain Anime is for Adults

Summary

I have written this article to display my TREACHEROUS journey for anyone reading this to EASILY jump straight into action knowing the risks.

I have made 17 views this month and counting 🙂 however, all have been through direct links to my site which I have posted on Ruqqus and Amino. This means that even with the 54 keywords that I rank for in google I am not close enough to attracting viewers from google itself. On the PLUS side, Immortal Anime is now No.1 on google for the keyword, ‘Immortal Anime’ and ‘Anime Age Rating System’ which shows STEADY progress!

So what do I do next?

According to the evidence I have read, I SHOULD post several times a day to get the quantity of the keywords on the site. But I am HESITANT to focus solely on quantity as this for sure would reduce the quality aspect of my articles. I will keep working on delivering content but with high quality.

Looking at what Anime Motivation has done, I could look at a podcast, posting on Quora, YouTube, and Pinterest. But further to this, I will start posting on TikTok (@Immortal Anime) as well. 🙂

Let me know your thoughts in the comment below and hopefully, this guides you in achieving more views faster!

• Have you thought about creating your own anime blog, but thought otherwise?
• Have you had the same situation with blogging altogether?

Recommended:

Sony Acquires Crunchyroll From AT&T