QOTD : How to advertise online?

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Socoder -> Question of the Day -> QOTD : How to advertise online?
Tue, 30 Sep 2008, 05:25
JL235	Lets say you've made your small game, site or project and you want lots of people to take a look. You can't simply expect Google to redirect everyone to your site/download, so how would you go about getting it out there? and which of the things you suggest do you think has the biggest impact?
Tue, 30 Sep 2008, 05:56
Mog	Without spending money, Find specialty groups, forums and such for your intended target. There's tons of people cluttered together on boards or on social networks, even around your town, waiting for the next big thing. Be very proactive in whoring yourself out without being intrusive. It's all about finding your demographic and where they collect at. Network with like-minded people, and convince them why your project is worth looking at. I wouldn't spam either, that just angers everyone (which we should know already!), find every place you can that's relevant, and civilly lay your project out. Next is to optimize your projects website to reflect your idea to perfection. Write a short but descriptive summary of what you're doing, and everything involved, mining out every potential unique keyword that best describes your goals. Don't keyword stuff! that will murder your reputation on search engines and leave you dead in the water (see note below). You can't expect some people to happen across your project simply by long-tail searches, as you said. Write a lot of content, and make sure to be very clear about everything, Setting up a blog about your progress and cross-linking to other game developers blogs works wonders in online visibility. *Keyword stuffing is the act of using large quantities of high volume keywords in an attempt to grab traffic. For example, FREE. While as your project may be Free, imagine how many other things that are free in life that are listed on the web. Search engines work based on relativity, lifetime, and connections. If you, a small website, enters competition with other, much higher ranking websites, it's guaranteed that you have no chance in winning the weight wars. Google turns up over 4,160,000,000 results for FREE, so good luck with getting anything from that. As I said, Specifics! You can clump together terms to form a "Long Tail", say "Free Shoot 'Em Up Game" or "Free Open Source Forum" - but be careful, the more keywords you have, the more terms you have to compete on with others. -=-=- I am Busy Mongoose - My Website Dev PC: AMD 8150-FX, 16gb Ram, GeForce GTX 680 2gb Current Project: Pyroxene
Tue, 30 Sep 2008, 05:57
blanko1324	Forum profiles? Maybe post an ad on your school's bulletin board, or pass a few copies around work/campus. Submit it to respectable software reviewers, such as PC World, etc. -=-=- My Twitter
Tue, 30 Sep 2008, 09:17
Jayenkai	I like to come up with really odd words/phrases to suit my games. Seems to help me find them.. But other folk? I don't think it's working, to be honest!! As always, try freeware sites, things like that. shrugs -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Wed, 01 Oct 2008, 11:25
Stealth	I use Google AdWords and Facebook Social Ads.
Wed, 01 Oct 2008, 12:12
Phoenix	I imagine that if there was an easy way to get many people to visit your site then SoCoder would've used it ages ago. And Stealth, while minimalism is good your site could use some work
Wed, 01 Oct 2008, 13:30
Stealth	And Stealth, while minimalism is good your site could use some work Heh. It's more of a placeholder. The site has no purpose [yet]. It's just there to host my projects. -=-=- Quit posting and try Google.