Jamie Posted January 18, 2015 Share Posted January 18, 2015 I'm soon bringing a game out and was thinking of advertising on top100arena Would this be a good source of advertising or should i go down some other route? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hnc Posted February 8, 2015 Share Posted February 8, 2015 I would gather some of the top 100 sites and add them to your game so when you get players they can vote for your game for a small reward. Also social media is a great place to gather players from also. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mint Berry Crunch Posted February 8, 2015 Share Posted February 8, 2015 In case you are unaware, there is some feedback here from certain advertising experiences: http://makewebgames.io/showthread.php/36153-Advert-experiences-and-feeback Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tk-hassan Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 I would gather some of the top 100 sites and add them to your game so when you get players they can vote for your game for a small reward. Also social media is a great place to gather players from also. I totally agree with your point about social media. Social sites are one of the best platforms to promote anything on the internet especially when you need quick response. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sim Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 I'm soon bringing a game out and was thinking of advertising on top100arena Would this be a good source of advertising or should i go down some other route? No FREE Advertising is bad advertising! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Truefalse Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 No FREE Advertising is bad advertising! Would you say word of mouth is free advertising? I'd say it is. And of course, I wouldn't say something like that without a few resources to back me up :cool: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/ http://wordofmouthbook.com http://hireinfluence.com/all/elements-successful-word-mouth-marketing-campaign/ http://blog.peerindex.com/word-of-mouth-success-stories-by-industry/ rekt. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sim Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 Would you say word of mouth is free advertising? I'd say it is. And of course, I wouldn't say something like that without a few resources to back me up :cool: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/ http://wordofmouthbook.com http://hireinfluence.com/all/elements-successful-word-mouth-marketing-campaign/ http://blog.peerindex.com/word-of-mouth-success-stories-by-industry/ rekt. I completely agree. A lot of people say Word of the Mouth is the best Free advertising. Regarding topsites though, no harm in submitting to everyone known to mankind. Even if you get 1-10 visitors a month (could be way more) per topsite, well worth it. In the long run. One top site send you 5, and 9 more send you 5 more. We'll that's potentially 50 extra members for free every month for 1-2 hrs worth of work. I would't stick every vote button on every page. Maybe not even the best ones. But just stick them all on homepage at bottom or something would do. You really don't even need anyone to vote on them either. Just yourself once a day/week whatever there limit is. Most require at least 1 vote to stay listed. I get around 100+ visitors/month from the 5 topsites I am apart of. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miks Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 There's hundreds of free ways to promote a website/game, top sites is just one, you should use every method available to you as the more traffic streams the better! I'll write a post on the basics of promoting a game. Website promotion is an ongoing process and time consuming but it has ti be done, whilst you go about promoting your website you should also consider reading up on Search Engine Optimisation, as front page positions for multiple terms can send you thousands of visitors a day, they dont even have to be short search terms either. I'll write a post tomorrow as I'm off to bed now, 4:30am start tomorrow :( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sim Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 Agreed [MENTION=69473]Miks[/MENTION] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miks Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 (edited) I’m going to keep this brief as there a lot to write about, so lets jump straight in. Also please ignore the spelling/grammar mistakes as I am writing this around doing work. Lets assume your game website is finished and ready to be promoted to the world. 1. One of the first things you want to do which was suggested is to sign up to as many top sites as possible. Read Sim’s post above for more detail. 2. Then you want to create your social profiles, I know both points so far are obvious but its best to start at the beginning and cover the basics. Incase some of you aren’t aware you can now include hashtags in your status updates, marketers are seeing a 60% increase in reach/traffic since using hashtags. Also when you create your Facebook page make sure you pick the most specific category as it’ll make it that bit easier for people to stumble across your page amongst the billions of pages already created. 3. You also want to use the social bookmarking sites like stumble, reditt, delicious, dig etc you want to submit each page individually to each site. You can only submit each page once so make sure your website is actually ready for release. For example, even though your posting your gym page for example the user will still be directed to the homepage and then meta details also get picked up from the homepage and not the gym page. A lot of old school gamers use social bookmarking sites etc so a good place to be seen. Also social bookmarking sites like dig.com claim to have several million visitors a day. Two things to take in to account from here to help get the most out of your promotion is, what genre game do you have? Is it medieval, mafia, general rpg etc Also another thing to keep in mind at this point is “fish where fish swim”, theres no point promoting a game website on a dog training website. You want to promote your website on game related websites. 4. Google DID have a blog category which they have removed now but people like Bing and Yahoo still use it. What you want to do is search in the blog section for “Mafia Games” and then work your way through the blogs leaving “useful” comment with a link back to your website. Most blog comments allow you to turn your name into a link or embed a html link within your post. There are down sides to this, for example, comments may have to be manually approved by an admin but due to the amount of comments they get they don’t review them anymore. 5. There are millions of different types of forums, post your website on developer forums, game related forums, anything that you feel is relevant in some way. When you sign up to a forum, comply with the forum rules that way your link wont be deleted. 6. Web 2.0 sites – Use web 2.0 sites to release promotional content which you then publish on social bookmarking sites, twitter, facebook etc Content on web 2.0 sites is not just for promotional purposes it is also used for your websites reputation. If someone googles your game they will see multiple results talking about it which implies its good 7. Do not do this to game owners from this forum! Fish where fish swim! If you want members to sign up and play your game why not visit other games and post your link around. This isn’t morally correct but in business you have to down size your morals if you want to succeed. 8. I have spotted a lot of expired domain names on game forums, if you come across an expired domain name then buy it. Expired domains can send you hundreds of visitors especially if there are tons of links pointing to them. You have to do your research first and some old/expired domains are banned from google so redirecting them to yours will only get yours banned 9. Some of you may have heard of the Facebook snowball effect. This is where one user likes or shares something, it appears on then friends list, there friends like or share it and it gets posted to there friends and so on. Easier said than done. I found that on one of my websites by adding a homepage popup which lasted for 15 seconds and never appared again if they clicked a twitter or facebook share button etc increased my traffic by atleast 200 visitors a day and increased my Facebook page likes by a steady 100 a week. 10. Create other free high traffic sites/resources and market your game at your own level of subtlety. I for example have a free social network which recives 2-4k visitors a day, 100-200+ signups a day and is a very powerful tool. I also create other free sites like covers4timelines.com - statuses4updates.com and will eventually put banner adverts on there etc 11. Email marketing is ok but if you want to choose the ethical route then it will be time consuming getting users to sign up and opt-in to receive emails from you. There are free unethical ways of obtaining emails addresses, and for the sake of reference I will post it. You can use software known to me as email grabbers, you type in a few website links and it follows internal links as well as external links and brings back as many email addresses as it can find or until you hit stop. The downside is unsolicitated emails will most likely get marked as spam and eventually your server IP will end up on some blacklist somewhere. I’ll leave it here for now but I’ll happily add more to it if people wish - - - Updated - - - I also suggest reading up about "on-site seo" The mccodes and Raven Mafia Game script havent been created with SEO in mind so I will write a post on how to make it more search engine friendly next If you visit my site and head to the blog section I explain in detail about SEO MiksMedia.co.uk Edited April 9, 2015 by Miks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
microsocket Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 7. Do not do this to game owners from this forum! Fish where fish swim! If you want members to sign up and play your game why not visit other games and post your link around. This isn’t morally correct but in business you have to down size your morals if you want to succeed. Great post until point 7. This comment alone destroys all credibility in you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miks Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 You can think what you like of me, I'm speaking from my own online experiences based over 9+ years and have over 100+ websites. Point 7 whether you agree with it or not achieves the end result and isnt that the purpose? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G7470 Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 7. Do not do this to game owners from this forum! Fish where fish swim! If you want members to sign up and play your game why not visit other games and post your link around. This isn’t morally correct but in business you have to down size your morals if you want to succeed. Agreed with [MENTION=69032]microsocket[/MENTION] to a degree. The concept of "Fish where fish swim" is true; however, lowering your moral standards to do so is NOT the way to do it regardless of the scenario. I have seen people do this and have it backfire SO many times, from DDoS attacks and XSS vulnerability attacks to even legal action. If you want to gather more users, always take the conversation out of a game before this form of advertising, whether that is through email or another method of contact. If you would want to promote your game through another game, always ensure that what you are doing is legal on that particular site and not violating a TOS agreement. Remember, if you go and spam your link on another game, violating their TOS doing so (which you agreed to before registering), why should they follow yours? It's the "do onto others as you would want done onto you" philosophy in play here. You would be quite surprised to note that a community like this is a great place to talk with other game owners, boost your reputation as an owner, and they might even recommend their own users to try your game. If you do not believe this, well believe it because I have personally seen this happen before. This is a rather strong community whether you believe it or not, so make yourself known and help others out! Not only could that potentially benefit your own game, but it will also create friendships that could last a lifetime. :) ~G7470 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miks Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 I would also like to point out its not a method I would use as theres more ethical ways of attracting traffic, I was posting it more as a reference as I plan to add many more points to the list. I dont promote unethical/unmoral content on my blog but thought I would share with you ALL the methods available, if you want I can hold back on the "dark side" of online promotion/marketing if you like. This happens every single day across millions if not billions of websites, its fine if you dont want to follow a point as thats your personal choice but the cold honest truth is if you're not doing it someone else is, and gaining from it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KyleMassacre Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 I will completely disagree with point 7. If I had a game and someone posted 1 link to their game or another game then I will come back 10 fold. As [MENTION=70485]G7470[/MENTION] stated, chances are that will happen. I think every game owner should have something like that plastered into their TOS since to me it would be considered as spam. I have yet to see something good come out of posting a link on another game and game owners should also enforce their players not to do it. Doing something like that does show true character in a game owner and shows you do not care. I understand it's dog eat dog world out there in the game industry which is why I do not have one but there are other, better routes that you can take. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sim Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 I wouldn't consider #7 bad/black depending on the approach. Messaging every user in 1 min via bot, a little messed up, but if i got an interested PM, i am more likely to click and check it out. its more personal. Players are ALWAYS seeking new/better games. Regardless, #7 is the most.effective approach getting your game out there when starting out. One should not care what the owners of another game. they are your competitons. Chances are if they post in a few forums, ect about your tactics, it will do damage your rep. Once your gamegets more known, those didiscussions on the net will get burried far in the SE results. Not just games, but tons of niches do it. This dude on Twitter tagged me in a tweet about something. I seen it, checked his page, he tagged thousands of people one by one, with link, short desc, and image. Hell yeah, i checked it out. Imsged him, told him great tactic then shared his tweet. lol :) whatever works, if i spammed the hell out of games and owners msged me, well I paid someone for referrals, will apologize and tell the owner I'll deactivate his account for referral account for spamming - - - Updated - - - Maybe ill consult @Mik for advice regarding advertising of another project of mine of mine. lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miks Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 (edited) I have added 3 more points to my original post and have added them here for quick reading 9. Some of you may have heard of the Facebook snowball effect. This is where one user likes or shares something, it appears on there friends list, there friends like or share it and it gets posted to there friends and so on. Easier said than done. I found that on one of my websites by adding a homepage popup which lasted for 15 seconds and never appeared again if they clicked a twitter or facebook share button etc increased my traffic by atleast 200 visitors a day and increased my Facebook page likes by a steady 100 a week. 10. Create other free high traffic sites/resources and market your game at your own level of subtlety. I for example have a free social network which receives 2-4k visitors a day, 100-200+ signups a day and is a very powerful tool. I also create other free sites like covers4timelines.com - statuses4updates.com and will eventually put banner adverts on there etc 11. Email marketing is ok but if you want to choose the ethical route then it will be time consuming getting users to sign up and opt-in to receive emails from you. There are free unethical ways of obtaining email addresses, and for the sake of reference I will post it. You can use software known to me as email grabbers, you type in a few website links and it follows internal links as well as external links and brings back as many email addresses as it can find or until you hit stop. The downside is unsolicited emails will most likely get marked as spam and eventually your server IP will end up on some blacklist somewhere. Edited April 9, 2015 by Miks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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