10 Quick-and-Dirty Indie Game Marketing Tips, Part 2
Here is the rest of my presentation on quick and dirty indie game marketing tips to help you sell your game. If you use these and are incredibly successful, it is still all your fault. Again, I'm not trying to be comprehensive here - just a quick brain-dump of ideas and reasons.

Tip #5: Be a part of the community
All things being equal, would you be more inclined to do business with a friend, or a stranger? Who are you more inclined to listen to? Who is more likely to get banned in a community if they ask community members to take a look at a game they just wrote?

Business is about relationships.

The point is that you should be active in whatever communities your audience might be before you start pushing your game. You need to provide real value and service - not just lip-service and demos. It's not just about getting people to buy your game. It's about becoming a part of the group that you intend to serve, finding out their wants and needs, and being able to serve them better.

Tip #6: Do SEO - Search Engine Optimization
There can be (and have been) books written on this subject. You want to be #1 on Google and other search engines for your chosen keywords. You want to be the first site on the list. Barring that, you want to be in the top three. Barring that, you want to be on first page at the very least.

How do you get there? Strategies and "tricks" change constantly - every time Google or the other Search Engine companies change their rules. But there are a few things that should get you consistently ranked more highly.

First of all, you want high-quality content, and lots of it. Someone with five hundred pages of unique, user-focused information about the subject at hand is going to get weighted more heavily than a site with only five pages on the subject, and three of those pages are copies of each other. You also want good keyword placement. Keywords at the start of the page get ranked more highly than keywords occuring later in the page.

High-quality, incoming links also rank pretty highly. The best links are from high-traffic sites with similar subject matter to your own, particularly with your keywords as part of the text of the link. The best way to get those links? There are all kinds of things you can do, but once again, having lots of high-quality content on your site that people will refer their readers to organically is a great bet.

Also, websites that have been around longer generally get a positive bias. Also, pages that are updated regularly tend to be weighted more than one that has been unchanged since 1998.

Tip #7: Have a Killer Demo
The Demo is your sales team. It should be a showcase for your game, not just the first five levels. Your goal is to get the player hooked and ready to whip out their credit card in the first five minutes of play. That's a tall order, but your demo is your point of contact with the customer. Make it rock, give them a great time, and promise much more with the full version.

Even if you are using a non-traditional way of getting revenue from your game, it needs to be set up to encourage purchases, donations, additional replays, or whatever it is that pays your computer's electric bill. This is not something you can save for an afterthought!

One last tip: Focus on the benefits of the premium version OVER the demo version. You may think you are selling the full version of your game, but what your customers are buying, in their minds, is the difference between the demo version and the full version. For example, if your demo only offers sixty minutes of gameplay, then your customer is buying the ability to play the game for more than sixty minutes. If they have had their fill after sixty minutes, then there's nothing more they want to buy.

Tip #8: Get Good Media Coverage
Getting coverage by online and other media can be pretty tricky. You will want to cultivate a contact list of everyone in the media that you make contact with. After a couple of years, people may move around. Someone at Joe's Blog today could be regular contributor to Kotaku or 1Up tomorrow.

Submit your news everywhere you can. News sites, magazines, and grandma. Even beyond your normal press releases. Here's a trick - journalists are a pretty overworked and underpaid lot. They don't have the time to hunt down well-hidden stories. If you can drop something interesting in their laps, something they can use that already does half their job for them, you may make their day and they'll be happy to post it. Also, remember that they are expecting you to be showing off. Don't be afraid to show off what's cool and toot your own horn a bit.

Also, let your personality show through when you get the chance to be interviewed or on a panel or something. Marketing drones are boring. People want to read (and interview) real, outspoken people with quirky personalities and sometimes controversial views.

Tip #9: Cooperate With Other Indies
What would you rather have, 50% of something, or 100% of nothing? The biggest problem indies have is exposure, not competition. So, as small indies, it's often more important to work together to grow the size of the pie than to squabble over the size of the pieces.

Talk with other indies. See what can be done to share resources. Work with affiliate programs, if they make sense. Exchange links. Comment on each other's blogs. Share info. Make allies.

Tip #10: Take Advantage of the Indie Game Lifecycle
You aren’t a big publisher. Don’t act like one. Take advantage of the fact that you are a tiny, nimble company. Don't try to sell your game like the big companies do. You don't HAVE to have your game sell out in the first 60 days or suffer returns from retailers. There are some indie games out there that have been selling consistently well for YEARS.

Updates and upgrades to your game are as much an opportunity as a duty to your customers. An upgrade gives you something newsworthy to send to the sites and remind people that your game exists. They build goodwill amongst existing customers. They let you repeat your message to potential buyers who, like me, usually need to hear about something three or four times before they consider it.


Plenty More Where That Came From
Well, there you go. Each of these tips could be further broken down into tons of detail and suggestions, and there are easily a hundred more tips that could work extremely well. Feel free to share, suggest, argue, contend, add, or expand upon anything I have here. A lot of these ideas were expanded on and discussed in slightly more detail at the Indie Dev Night,

In fact, here's a forum thread for just that:

Indie Game Marketing Forum Thread

Want to know more? I also recommend The Indie Developer's Guide to Selling Games, by Joseph Lieberman.

Labels: Biz, productivity

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:00 PM (Permalink)