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| How to tell that you exist? |
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This is one of the fundamental questions for any kind of business, and yet even more so for web sites
where yours is just one in a huge galaxy of others that have been there much longer than you.
Before I even start to give away a bit of my knowledge, I must sadly admit that marketing is
certainly not my strongest skill. However, during the past years I have tried quite a few strategies
with varying degrees of success. More skilled people here comment after this article and suggest other,
or more successful, strategies. Your own web site: It is useless to drive traffic to your site, and then have people just leave as the site is badly designed (look & usability). Therefore, the first thing to do, even before asking people to test your game, is to prepare the home page. It should have some appeal and at least an "about" and a "feature" page, maybe with some screen shots as well. All that may take you a bit of time, but it will be more than re-paid. The fact is that a new visitor will spend not more than 30 seconds to decide if he/she will stay or leave, and that's even before trying the game itself! This situation is partially due to the huge number of games available, and also because of the "first impression" effect. Also think carefully about the registration process, as nobody wants to lose time when he/she decided to actually register. For example, email confirmations are, most of the time, lost to some "smart" spam filter. I, personally, decided not to check emails at all and thus avoid those standard registrations completely. Instead, my players start right away, and once inside, while talking to a NPC, the player will answer a few questions and setup his/her account. Forum posts: Let's start slowly with what is one of the most common, but at the same time, underestimated solutions. Choose your forum wisely, carefully read the rules to avoid being banned. Next, post a thread about your new game. Do not post a single sentence like "Visit my great game xyz". Instead, try to give some info about the game story, how things are set-up, how long it has been online. Talk about your team (or lack of), the technologies used and how long it took until you decided to open the doors to the players. The more interesting the information you give, the more chance you will have that somebody will visit your site. Also avoid any overly commercial talk like "the best game ever"; this kind of language will actually result in the opposite effect, where the people reading your post will go away. Also, be prepared to answer, in a kind way, any reply/feedback. So, don't join a forum for a single post, but instead try to promote a discussion. Other ways to use forums include; providing signature mini-banners to your players with a link back to your game; an effective and more hidden way, if more costly, is to start to be an active poster of a forum; provide information and/or tutorials when you link back, either in the post itself, or in your signature, to your site. With just this you should already get some visits, but let's see some other strategies. Banner exchanges: Old and somewhat ineffective the banner exchanges may work a little. They become a bit more effective as soon as you have enough "page views" yourself, as most of those exchange networks are based on a percent of your banner displayed based on how many you show on your site. Some works on a 1:1 which means 1 of yours for one other ad on your site. Some others have a ratio of 1:2 which mean one of yours for two ads displayed on your site. Any kind of ratio exists, and it is up to you to find a good network. Also, the kind of sites on which your banner is displayed is extremely important. You should carefully check the results you get from a banner exchange, and cancel those which don't give enough results. I personally used them at the beginning to drive traffic, but now I decided to avoid showing banners on my game and stopped using banner exchanges. Link exchange: Similar to banner exchanges, a link exchange shows only text more or less long depending on the network. The advantage is that the link could be "hidden" between game functions, and therefore has more clicks from your players. However, the level of results from those "mistaken" visits is unknown. I have personally never used them. Paid banners: One of the most well known advertisement solutions, but gives extremely mixed results. Much will depend on factors like the aesthetic appeal of your banner, and where the banner will appear (which site and where on the site). Paid campaigns are either paid per number of times your banner is displayed, or on a given period (like days, weeks), or per clicks. This last option is fair if there is some control on the clicks. Personally, I got the best results with this option but you should start with a small budget and check the ratio between the amount of money invested and the registrations. Count about 50 cents (US$) per registration, if you get a lot more expensive results then something is not right. It could be the wrong advert network for your game, or a bad homepage on your side. I have personally had the best results with the "Games Advertisement Online" network. However your budget will be burn really fast, and around 500$ can last about 3 days, unless you set a limit per day. Social networks: You can set-up some social page for your site, and if you are active enough there, and push your own players to use it, you may get some results. I personally integrated my own game with Facebook with poor results so far. I do also feed the game news to tweeter via tweeterfeed with really poor results, but this didn't cost me anything besides creating some accounts. Player referral: You may also implement a referral system, where your own players are asked (with the offer of some reward) to find new players. However, this may open the doors to all sorts of abuses, so be sure to offer the reward only for active referred players. I personally give 5$ of reward for each 10 players reaching level 10. This means, again, 50 cents a player. With this I do get some traffic, so it is not bad for the time I had to invest to implement it. Blog: A blog about the game, or the development process, may also be an effective and relatively cheap solution, as you will only need to write interesting information. What is important here is to offer relatively frequent updates. I would say a post per week should do the trick. Again, what is important is the content; if you manage to get good articles you may get more visits, which means more visits to your main site. RSS feed: This is something to implement as soon as possible. Feed all the changes/updates/new features that you can. This allows your users to see that the game is still actively maintained and what has changed lately. Updates (big or small) are appreciated by players, and will keep them around longer. Newsletter: A newsletter is a very good solution to drive old players back to your site. However, it runs the risk of putting your site in black lists if somebody reports it as a spam. You should certainly not send newsletters more than once a week. In actuality, if the delay between the mails is bigger you will get a greater effect. Game directories: Spend the time to submit your game to as many directories as possible, even on small ones, as this will increase the number of links to your site. In turn, this increases the possibility of being spotted by new players. It is a tedious task, but a very effective free solution. On most of those directories there are options for paid services, like appearing on the top positions, or of having banners on their site. I also used some of those, with relative results as the number of visits I got, for the price paid, wasn't really high. Voting sites: With all honesty, I do have a mixed feeling about these. Even though you may get some traffic (if you are in one of the top positions) those sites are normally completely overrun with fake (automated) votes. So, by all means, try but don't expect much from it. I do use a few to drive traffic with some modest results, but it is far from getting as great results as you may expect at first glance. You may improve your results by rewarding your voting players; however this is something I don't want to do myself. Cross promotion: If you have more than one game, or if you manage to do a deal with other game owners, you may decide to make the promotion of their game in exchange for the promotion of your game. If this is done via newsletter, or in game messages, it can be quite successful. If it is just for link exchanges, it will not drive much traffic. Up to you to find a valid partner for such activity. What is important in case you choose in or outside game newsletters is to write a good article about the game, and write such that it appears clearly as positively suggested rather than as a commercial advertisement. In conclusion, I want to say that a single method of advertising your game is not a smart idea. You should consider using as many ways as possible to inform people about your game. Remember that the success of a game is directly linked to the success of the marketing strategy. Remember also to setup all possible statistics about your web site BEFORE starting to advertise. This way you will then see the effects of the different strategies, and the impact on the number of players. However don't expect to reach high number of players in one day, so work continuously on the game as well as on the marketing. |
