Web Marketing Ideas

[lem45]

Hey,

What is everyone doing to get noticed in the web? I'm in Google's index, trying Adwords, registered at softscout.com (http://www.softscout.com), got in DMOZ.org (http://www.dmoz.org).

What other things should I try?

Lem

[ErikH2000]

You ought to get your game onto as many sites as you can manage. There are hundreds that accept game submissions. Get a program called "Shareware Tracker" and use it for that.

-Erik

[SunAndGames]

Hey, how long did it take you to get into DMOZ? I'm still waiting . . . less and less patiently every day :D

But, to answer your questions, here are a few tips:

1. Put a link to your web page in your signature, so we and others can see your web page ;) . Generally, if you have a chance to leave a signature anywhere (blogs, forums, emails, etc) . . . do it.

2. Swap links with other developers.

3. Write gaming articles and submit them to news syndicates with your web link on the bottom. You can try these ones:
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://www.certificate.net
http://www.marketing-seek.com
http://www.allarticlesweb.com/

4. Build quality content for your site. Then build more quality content for your site. Then build some more quality content for your site.

5. Do some market research to find out what people are searching for (http://www.wordtracker.com) and optimize your site pages for that.

6. Start a blog, and talk about your site there. Search engines love blogs. They're free and easy to. (http://www.blogger.com)

7. Visit sites like WebMasterWorld (http://www.webmasterworld.com) where they talk about all kinds of stuff realated to this. It's a huge discussion forum.

8. Read this thread about web traffic. (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=1564)

That should keep ya busy for a while. :p

[ErikH2000]

3. Write gaming articles and submit them to news syndicates with your web link on the bottom. You can try these ones:
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://www.certificate.net
http://www.marketing-seek.com
http://www.allarticlesweb.com/
This suggestion really perked my interest and I did a little research. I wanted to answer the question, "If I write an article and submit it here, where will it go?" The idea behind these sites is they will take just about anything you give them, publish it on their site, and other people can grab up the articles for free and use them. So in theory, everybody would distribute something you wrote all over the internet and that would increase traffic to your site and game sales.

I checked all of the above sites except yahoo.com and marketing-seek.com (my short attention span wouldn't put up with their member sign up rigamarole just to view available articles). I found articles in "games" categories, or failing that "computers" or "technology". In each category, I tried to find the best articles that had a chance of including useful information--not just promotional spam. Then I Googled for full phrases from these articles. For all the sites I checked results were the same. Articles would appear on the syndication site and "mirrored" on other similar sites that do the same thing. And sometimes articles would also appear on the site of the originating business (no surprise). But from the thirty or so articles I checked, maybe three would appear on sites other than the original contributors or a syndication site. There weren't any examples of articles that were picked up by several "independent" sites. Just onesies and twosies.

So my snap conclusion is that a person shouldn't spend a lot of time writing articles for the free article syndication (or at least the ones from above that I looked at). Better to concentrate on getting press releases and articles carried by other places, if you can manage it, and maybe come back to the free syndication sites with your leftovers to help give you a search engine results bump with the extra linkage.

This in no way is an argument against SunAndGames who brought something to my attention I hadn't thought about before. Thanks!

-Erik

[SunAndGames]

But from the thirty or so articles I checked, maybe three would appear on sites other than the original contributors or a syndication site. There weren't any examples of articles that were picked up by several "independent" sites. Just onesies and twosies.

So my snap conclusion is that a person shouldn't spend a lot of time writing articles for the free article syndication (or at least the ones from above that I looked at). Better to concentrate on getting press releases and articles carried by other places, if you can manage it, and maybe come back to the free syndication sites with your leftovers to help give you a search engine results bump with the extra linkage.

This in no way is an argument against SunAndGames who brought something to my attention I hadn't thought about before. Thanks!

-Erik

Nice testing Erik. I didn't think to try that. I'm not to suprised by your results, as there is definitely a lot of spam type articles, with very little good content. As well, there may be better places to submit your articles to, I just haven't found them yet. I've submitted one article so far, and have seen some traffic to my site from the article. Not a lot of traffic mind you, but a start. As far as I can tell, my article hasn't been distributed beyond the syndicated sites yet. Could have to do with the quality of the article. It's OK, but I'm sure I can do better. At the very least, you do get a link from another site. The link from the EzineArticles site (http://ezinearticles.com/?Great-Games-Youve-Never-Played&id=12488) is on a page with a PageRank of 6, and I know the article has been viewed 90 times so far. It's been out there since Feb 01.

I got the idea from the book Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764567586/sunandgames-20). It's got a number of good ideas in it, some I listed above. I enjoy writing the article, so I'll probably do a few more. I always thought about the developer articles Steve P. had on his site, and wondered how much traffic they probably brought him. How many of us were lured to Dexterity by those articles, and ended up in these forums? I bet that sold a few copies of Dweep.

The other thing I noticed about those syndicate sites, is that there is not a lot of games articles on them. So, either it's a complete dead end, or an untapped opportunity. :D Time will tell.

[ErikH2000]

As well, there may be better places to submit your articles to, I just haven't found them yet.
Right. We know there are a ton of gaming related sites that carry articles. There was one guy I did an interview with on diabloii.net and I got a nice bump in traffic and new players from that. I would not have even considered that site as a place to promote my much-different-than-Diablo game, but it worked. So that was something that fell in my lap, but it makes me think about getting aggressive about writing articles. I wish we had something that was the equivalent of the Writer's Market but for sites that game articles could be submitted to. There are even many sites that haven't even thought about accepting articles, but if you approached them with a free article relevant to their content, I bet there is a good chance they'd carry it. As usual, I offer up www.indiewiki.org as a place to store such a list if anyone feels enthusiastic.

I also like the basic idea of free article repositories, but it just seems they aren't working terribly well. Part of the problem might be that there are so many low-quality articles on those sites that nobody feels like looking through them to find a few gold nuggets. You see so much spam-and-scam on there that it is hard to find anything.
I've submitted one article so far, and have seen some traffic to my site from the article. Not a lot of traffic mind you, but a start. As far as I can tell, my article hasn't been distributed beyond the syndicated sites yet. Could have to do with the quality of the article. It's OK, but I'm sure I can do better. At the very least, you do get a link from another site. The link from the EzineArticles site (http://ezinearticles.com/?Great-Games-Youve-Never-Played&id=12488) is on a page with a PageRank of 6, and I know the article has been viewed 90 times so far. It's been out there since Feb 01.
Yeah, that was one of the "real" articles I googled on. It seemed pretty decent to me, though a little short. Perhaps giving some concrete examples of good indie games and what makes them favorable to mainstream titles would make the article feel more substantial. (You weren't soliciting opinions, but BAM! ...you get 'em anyhow. ;) )
I got the idea from the book Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764567586/sunandgames-20). It's got a number of good ideas in it, some I listed above. I enjoy writing the article, so I'll probably do a few more. I always thought about the developer articles Steve P. had on his site, and wondered how much traffic they probably brought him. How many of us were lured to Dexterity by those articles, and ended up in these forums? I bet that sold a few copies of Dweep.
Sure. I figure if you are already writing an article to go on your own website or for some other purpose, then it wouldn't hurt to post on the free article syndicators. That makes perfect sense to me. I'd be reluctant to write solely for those guys, though.

-Erik

[SunAndGames]

Yeah, that was one of the "real" articles I googled on. It seemed pretty decent to me, though a little short. Perhaps giving some concrete examples of good indie games and what makes them favorable to mainstream titles would make the article feel more substantial. (You weren't soliciting opinions, but BAM! ...you get 'em anyhow. ;) )


Thanks for the feedback Erik. I was trying to keep it short to appeal to those visitors who like to just scan web pages. Anything too long, and they just click on by. I also intentionally left out references to others games or sites for purely selfish reasons . . . mainly, the only link I wanted in the article was to my website. :o