Features

How you can help Pocket Gamer achieve galactic domination

Calling all regular readers!

How you can help Pocket Gamer achieve galactic domination
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Pocket Gamer has grown since 2006 from a small site catering to the tastes of a few mobile, DS and PSP fanatics to a big fish in the world of portable pleasure. We now serve hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. (Hurrah!)

Many of those visitors - maybe you? - first found us via a social bookmarking site like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious or N4G. These are sites where users submit interesting stories, and the community agrees or disagrees to produce a front page of the currently popular news.

If a story gets popular, it means a lot more readers get to see the article than if it was never promoted outside of the original site.

Small is beautiful, but it can be hard to spot

In the early days of social networking, it was easy for smaller sites like Pocket Gamer to get noticed with quirky stories on mobile and handheld games. Social networking was blind to the size of different sites.

Today, however, the big sites have completely caught up, and now dominate most of the channels through sheer weight of users. If you're a games juggernaut like GameSpot, you've literally millions of readers who can vote up your story. An independent site like ours (or any one of the other fine specialist games sites around) finds it very hard to match that.

We're realistic enough to know we'll not compete with scoops like the real-life Lara Croft modelling a new bra or leaks about Halo 4. But we would argue we've got some good, unique content that deserves to reach even more interested readers than it already does.

How you can help share the Pocket Gamer gospel

If you read a story on Pocket Gamer that you like and you think others would too, we're asking if you could consider sparing a minute pointing to it via one of the social bookmarking sites.

We've included buttons at the bottom of every story (click the bit that says 'Digg, bookmark') to make this as easy as possible. You will have to sign up for membership of the particular site before you can submit stories, but it's worth doing so anyway - you'll find stacks to read on there, as well as a place for Pocket Gamer's best stories.

Obviously we'd only ask you to link to articles you think are newsworthy or interesting. (The idea is to build a little more awareness of our best stuff, not spam the netwaves.) If you find someone else has already submitted a story you like, it'd be great if you could vote it up, too.

We know a few of you do this already, and we're very grateful. Smaller sites like Pocket Gamer provide a more intimate space for readers and writers, and that extends to social bookmarking, too. Perhaps your link or vote could be the one that brings a new long-term Pocket Gamer reader into the fold?

Do you use a social bookmarking site we should be more aware of? Please let us know in the comments below.