Advertising these days?

[realmoflegends]

Now my game is actually open - at corrupted-streets.com by the way. :)

What do you guys do these days to get new members and advertise? I have the game submitted and listed at about 9 different browser game toplist things. What else works these days? It seems the older posts about how to get new members may be outdated. If YOU were starting a game nowadays, how would you advertise?

Thanks!

[LeeMason]

First of all I'd fix your registration form - I've created 2 accounts but cannot login to either!

If you look at your website as a *potential* user then there isn't really anything enticing the user to sign up. I'd re-arrange your landing page, put the registration form there, screenshots, user feedback. Entice the user with an 'offer' - Sign up today and get xxx.

Considering that a lot of your traffic will be coming from mobile devices it would be a good idea to make the experience as good as possible. Look into making your existing design more responsive.

Once you start getting new members use them to your advantage with a decent referral scheme. Could make it more interesting with rewards with game value such as if your referral buys premium features that they get x% added as credit to there account.

Anyway, think I'm blabbering on a bit now but overall advice would be to sure that your site is as accessible to new sign-ups as possible. If someone looks at your site and thinks it looks cool, they will sign up.

[realmoflegends]

Signup form is fixed, site is mobile friendly in terms of it running on mobile devices (ipad, phone, etc) and front page will be getting a little more attention soon. My question was directed at: how do I actually get more eyes onto the site? As in advertising, etc? You can have the coolest site on planet earth, if no one knows about it, it doesn't matter. :)

[SRB]

Signup form is fixed, site is mobile friendly in terms of it running on mobile devices (ipad, phone, etc) and front page will be getting a little more attention soon. My question was directed at: how do I actually get more eyes onto the site? As in advertising, etc? You can have the coolest site on planet earth, if no one knows about it, it doesn't matter. :)

Word of mouth will always be your best advertising.

You were given some solid points, but chose to just want a higher number.

High numbers are only good if you have a decent retention rate.

[Guest]

Your site is not mobile friendly at all.

Google is penalizing sites now too if they are not friendly.

Maybe this can help a little.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcorrupted-streets.com%2F

[SRB]

Your site is not mobile friendly at all.

Google is penalizing sites now too if they are not friendly.

Maybe this can help a little.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcorrupted-streets.com%2F

Might at well consider insights page speed too;

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcorrupted-streets.com%2F&tab=mobile

[Aventro]

For starters you should make sure your site/game works before advertising. I am getting a white blank screen.

[realmoflegends]

I've stopped considering any ads while I refurbish the site's front page a bit for increased speed, better layout and cleaner internals (small pics, less Javascript, etc).

[KyleMassacre]

You could look into caching your site, use minified, etc to give a bit of a boost.

[realmoflegends]

I'm working on making it fairly lightweight, so it can be zippier than the old front page/login, without any 'tricks'. From my early testing, its about 30% faster than the old page. Then again, the old page was from 2010, an old Clantemplates layout with lots of extra CSS that I wasn't using.

[KyleMassacre]

I don't know what you mean by "tricks" when the methods I stated were made exactly for this purpose. If you don't plan on changing your images around all the time then caching them for a few days may be a good idea for you. Also minifying your files is a good idea and you can check out some ways to do that like using something like this for an idea:

http://www.phpclasses.org/package/4881-PHP-Compress-CSS-files-by-removing-unneeded-characters.html#information. There are also packages for CSS and JS

[Sim]

The worst bunch of replies ever. All but 1 reply was off topic.

The best place for FREE advertisement at the momment would be FaceBook.

Create a fan page. A few posts a week.

Find pages in your niche(web games, mafia games, pirate games, or we). Contact Admin of the fan page in hopes a free post.

I even created a seperated FaceBook account and been slowly building friends everyday that are gamers. Involves a lil more work then just friending anyone. Post random fake **** about my life. About once a week, ill post a link to one of my sites saying i found a cool site. :)

I also use twitter, i get traffic and retweets, no noticable conversions.

For paid, I would seek owners of similiar unrelated sites. for ex: if your game is about pirates, seek pirate fan sites and blogs, forums. Also find related pirate cartoon and anime fan sites, blogs and forums. Contact owner about paying him/her for a banner ad in header for a flat fee per week or month.

Also find similiar facebook fanpages and if Admin will not do it for free, offer to pay. :)

[realmoflegends]

The worst bunch of replies ever. All but 1 reply was off topic.

The best place for FREE advertisement at the momment would be FaceBook.

Create a fan page. A few posts a week.

Find pages in your niche(web games, mafia games, pirate games, or we). Contact Admin of the fan page in hopes a free post.

I even created a seperated FaceBook account and been slowly building friends everyday that are gamers. Involves a lil more work then just friending anyone. Post random fake **** about my life. About once a week, ill post a link to one of my sites saying i found a cool site. :)

I also use twitter, i get traffic and retweets, no noticable conversions.

For paid, I would seek owners of similiar unrelated sites. for ex: if your game is about pirates, seek pirate fan sites and blogs, forums. Also find related pirate cartoon and anime fan sites, blogs and forums. Contact owner about paying him/her for a banner ad in header for a flat fee per week or month.

Also find similiar facebook fanpages and if Admin will not do it for free, offer to pay. :)

Good suggestions...this is what I meant, folks. Let's assume I have a beautiful, fast front page (which I will have soon). My in-game has been considered good by players so far, based on player comments, and 8 of the 12 people who first signed up are playing regularly for 1-2 hours per day, so I don't think retention will be an issue, at least so far. Word of mouth is good too, but not if 12 people in the world know about the site.

My issue is that getting people onto and signing up for the site is harder without paying anything. Game Site Ads and Ad4Game are two i'll be trying, and contacting other site owners perhaps for paid ads or banners, game mentions in chat, etc is a good idea. Someone here said they got 800 people to sign up in 2 months, that's pretty good, and if I recall, that front page didn't blow my socks off really. Quality of the site AND quantity are both important, I think, when building a site's player base.

[KyleMassacre]

Sites that do the pay per click thing I try to stay away from because I don't trust their services and plus I don't understand how they really work. I have always been afraid of dropping like $20 down on one of those and just seeing my funds diminish because of bots. Plus signups are only worth it if they stay otherwise you are paying for people to look at your site. I agree with some of what [MENTION=64603]Sim[/MENTION] wrote. In a way all the posts were relevant. I would safely assume that most people don't want to see a site any longer if it takes them a while for the page to load especially on a mobile device where they have a limited amount of bandwidth and battery power, and they just see the wheel spinning. What's the point of paying for someone to click a link just to get frustrated and navigate away? Firsts things first young padawan. If a site is loading up 56k speeds your about 15-20 years behind in tech and a landing page most likely has the least amount of resources being used so imagine the in game content.

But yes, Facebook and Twitter are probably some of the best since you get the cheapest amount of advertising possible and its word of mouth. People can post/tweet away about your game driving their friends to your site. And I bet with some tweaking of their APIs you could even reward players for posting about your game by searching their tweets or posts for some content

[Sim]

Good one Kyle, I forgot about incentive sharing. I got it written down in a notebook for an idea od mine,

Reward players for sharing/tweeting once a day with referral link. (2 incentives for user if someome regs)

Share/Tweet during im game milestones. Level ups and achievememts are always a good way for players to brag. Bragging results in more people wanting to share.