That's it! Our first Trailer is online
Introducing... The Switzerland Trailer
Making trailers for our maps was something that was planned from the beginning of the project.
Let's sit down and talk a bit about the reason why we haven't done it before.
Context
I think I need to give you some context. You may or may not remember the PlanetMinecraft incident.
Being on PlanetMinecraft has a huge advantage. It's a community-trusted website that's been around for a long time. And with half a million of maps (578,460 and counting as of today), it is easy to find the map you want. And because this website has here for a long time, it has a really good SEO score, which means that people who post their projects here have a good chance of being found by Google or any other search engine.
In fact, it's because we were using PlanetMinecraft that we had new members joining on a regular basis (sometimes we had 3-4 people join on the same day).
And as expected, since we removed all of our maps from the website, fewer and fewer people joined the server.
As a reminder, do NOT harrass the PlanetMinecraft staff. Their rules made sense, and the problem was on our side all along.
Back to the sketching board
Creating a website to showcase our map was just the first phase of getting out of PlanetMinecraft. The issue is that our SEO score is low. One way to improve it is to have backlinks from a website with high SEO score. Most social media sites don't make it easy for search engines to discover and index the content. But YouTube does.
That's where the trailers come in. YouTube has a good SEO score, and we might be able to eventually link back to our website in the video description. At the very least, we would be able to redirect people to our website if the Google crawler won't take in account the backlink.
Another thing to do would be to make a Shorts version of the trailer. Lots of people are watching YouTube Shorts, so that's another way to get more attention.
Making trailer
Now that we know what to do, it's time to pick a map. I choose the Switzerland map because it was the first map we ever released.
To record, all I used was the good old Replay Mod, with the PureBDCraft 256x resource pack and the Sildur's Vibrant Extreme Shaders. As simple as that.
The result
That's it, after 3-4 hours of work, the trailer is ready! And the Shorts version too! Here is the result: