Breaking out of the Echo Chamber

As well as concentrating on your advertising, you need to make sure that you can break out of the Echo Chamber, and find a wide enough audience to support you.

The Internet is a wonderful thing, and just being famous on the Internet can be enough to promote your game out to the wide world. That’s not always the case though, you might easily find yourself caught into the Echo Chamber of blogs and niche sites, not able to break into the big time.

You need to be aware of where your games are being discussed and played. Engage with this audience, but also look at ways to spread your ideas further.

Play your games out in the real world, consider donating copies to local schools or libraries that will take them, or to local gaming clubs. Make sure people can find you and your website when you do this.

Move in different Internet circles. Break out to some sites or forums you don’t usually spend time in, get used to their culture and foibles, and promote your games there.

Don’t just spam places or throw around advertising, as this will never build goodwill, but look for opportunities in related parts of the Web, and build on them when you find them.

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Advertising

No one will play your games if they don’t know about them.

You need to advertise them.

The quickest, easiest and cheapest way of doing this is via the web. You need a website, and it needs to link to things. Once you’ve got a website that tells people about your games, you need to help them find it.

Be search engine friendly, upload a site map to Google and make sure that you follow all of the rules. Most of all, make sure to have lots of good content, there’s nothing that gets more traffic than great content.

Consider the various text advertising services, especially adwords. It’s only worth doing this if you’ve got something on your site that can make you money, never spend money on advertising unless you plan to earn it back (and then some).

You’ll notice that Google features a lot, and that’s deliberate. If your website is in the top page for a Google search, you’ll get more traffic. Focus your efforts, pick a small area you can dominate, rather than trying to be strong in many. Seth Godin has more thoughts on this, and other ways to successfully market things.

Aim to show people how great you are, and do it in an honest and non-pushy way. Help them find you, but never trick them or mislead. This will help you build an audience and share you games, which should always be the final goal of any advertising you do.