Does anyone else has problems getting taken seriously when trying to advertise?
Ive done advertising quite happily on gamextazy.com and diygames.com, but everywhere else seems to ignore me.
take pvponline.com, great site, i got their rate card, emailed them asking to run a promotion for a fee over their minimum budget, but got zilch response.
I've had this a few times. its as if my money isn't good enough!

Does anyone have any recommendations for sites to buy advertising space on? sites with good, targeted traffic, a minium spend under a thousand dollars (im not uber-rich), and an advertising manager than answers emails?
Thanks. :D

I've had these sorts of problems before with various sites and it really seems to come down to incompetance in sales rather than lack of interest. It's like jumping through hoops to give them your money. Other "big" sites have taken ads from me without any problems at all and had great tracking systems and quick professional response. Unfortunately I don't really have any great sites to recommend to you. If you have trouble working with one site, I'd recommend just looking elsewhere.

Is GameXtazy worth advertising in it? I had the impression that it's a showcase for Alawar's games and little else...

Honestly i don't think advertising works. ( i've tried several, they all had ridiculous impact )

Take the top indies and try to find ads...
Have you ever seen a Dextery ad, retro64 ad , goodsol ad , mking ad ?

Better to invest your money or time in something else imho...

pat.

well dexterity do puzzle games, a game like starship tycoon isnt the same deal.
I know that some advertising i have done has paid off. and i can be 100% sure that i get downloads through google adwords, which eventually translate to sales.
I think advertising can work very well, if its targeted and good. My games wont be on the front page of PC Gamer any time soon, so I see this as one guaranteed way of getting the word out.

I agree with Cliffski.

Sure, an individual Ad Campaign might not turn a profit, but it can generate exposure, downloads, and hopefully customers. And once you have those customers, you wont' have to pay nearly as much to get them to check out your subsequent games. Advertising should be looked at as mid to long term profits, not necessarily short-term.

Dexterity, Retro64, and etc may not advertise actively because their sites already bring in a steady stream of traffic. They have a solid Internet presence (Steve mentioned the Dexterity domain has been up for over 8-9 years) and they have a strong pre-existing customer base. But for those of us who are just starting out, we don't have those advantages. We have to figure out ways to bring in traffic and generate downloads.

- Download sites obviously don't bring in enough traffic on their own. Download.com is not what it used to be and the vast majority of other download sites only provide a trickle of downloads.

- Search engine optimization. This is important, but even if you do everything right it still takes awhile to get indexed and listed by all the search engines. Also, with all the search engines getting more commercialized, it's harder to get listed in a timely fashion. Before all you had to do was find the "Add Your Site" link at the bottom of the main page. Now most major search engines won't list you right away unless you pay several hundred dollars. Otherwise, you won't get listed till up to 6-12 months.

- Link exchanges. This helps for search engines in the long-run, but they don't necessarily bring a lot of traffic on their own. If you partner with a site, you might get more traffic, but usually sites only want to partner with you if you have comparable traffic. Kind of a catch 22.

- Press releases, game reviews. This obviously works very well. But usually these forms of marketing give you spikes in sales. You usually get the best out of these when you have a major announcement or product release.

That leaves...
- Keyword / Banner Advertising. It's true, it's hard to find an Ad campaign that directly turns a profit. But for us new guys, it's one of the few sure ways to get quite a bit of targeted traffic flowing through the website. You obviously have to watch your spending and advertise at the appropriate places, but advertising can be a good way to build long-term customers. Then once you get big enough like Dex and Retro64, you may not have to spend as much on advertising.


Using a combination of all the above methods is obviously the best way to go. I just don't think advertising should be discounted. You should just have the proper goals for it.

Now most major search engines won't list you right away unless you pay several hundred dollars. Otherwise, you won't get listed till up to 6-12 months.



You've got to be kidding :eek: Does it really take that long to get a new site listed? I knew there was some lag, but is it really that much? Geez, some of us can create a brand new game in less time then that.

Didn't take very long to get listed for me. Usually it's just a matter of getting someone else to link to you and the spiders will eventually pick you up when they crawl, which is usually within a month or so.

It depends...Google is pretty fast. As soon as you have a few sites linking to you, you'll get listed in a month or so. Google makes most of their many from Adwords and such. You can't pay to be listed in their regular index.

However, other sites such as Excite and Alta Vista have "paid" inclusions. You pay them a couple hundred dollars and they'll add your site to their listing the next day. Otherwise, it can be a VERY long time...Also, you have to pay Yahoo $300 JUST to be considered! It doesn't guarantee anything. Several years ago all you had to do was fill out an online form and you'd be placed in a Yahoo directory within a month or so...

I've never paid a single cent to any search engine and I seem to be listed in Yahoo and the other ones I know. In fact, I've never even heard of paying to get into search engines. I'm out of the loop or something. Heh.

https://secure.ah-ha.com/guaranteed_inclusion/teaser.aspx - Excite's program
http://www.infospider.com/ - Alta Vista's program

Anyway, I'm not saying you can't get listed without paying. I'm saying it's much harder than it used to be. If you got listed by all the major search engines in a timely fashion without paying a cent, congrats! :)

My site opened 5-6 weeks ago and it's listed in yahoo search results (even though for some reason nothing shows up for "rototo smart lines", but only for "rototo smartlines"). I hadn't checked yahoo before so I can't tell how much time it took.

For Google, IIRC it took about one week (I used their submit form, and also put a link on my personal home page).

I announced my site about one month ago, and in two weeks or so I was on most of the search engines, I never paid anything.

Fèlix Casablancas
Nurium Games
www.nurium.com

Hey guys:

Advertising is a weird game. It's true, sometimes the ad people wont even get back to you when you wave money in their face.

I've been, lately, polling some download sites (so far, for the record, I agree 99% of them are total crap when it comes to paid advertising. There may be a few nuggets of goodness in them though). I sent out about 25 e-mails offering money to do ads and got 1 reply. That is low even for internet standards.

Now Cliff, for the record VGsmart offers advertising management. Not only can I get you an ad on PVP but I can do it with discounts that would amount to as much, if not more, than what I charge. Why? I already have connections with PVP and have negotiated rates with them.

On the otherhand Cliff (and everyone else), I may know some sites that would do even better ;-).

Anyway, drop me an e-mail at sales@vgsmart.com

My opinion is, advertising works, it works very well, but it's not always about turning an immediate profit.

Lets give some examples about ways advertising makes you money:

A) Links to your site increase your site popularity on search engines
B) Any visitor visiting your site has a chance of signing up for your newsletter, if you have one.
C) Brand recognition, any visitor visiting your site may remember your company. This could make future advertising easier or increase your downloads for future products.
D) Anyone who purchases your game may, through word of mouth, cause additional purchases.
E) Anyone who purchases your game may make additional purchases of other products in the future.

Now, some of those you say to yourself "what good does $1000 in advertising do to increase my brand name"... and the answer to that is pretty silly. Lets say you get 10,000 visitors for your 1000 dollars. We'll say for the sake of this example that means 10,000 people know your brand name. 1% of them frequent the next site you advertise on, meaning 100 of them will recognise your brand name. How is that different from a company who spends 1 million dollars and reaches 10 million people, 1% of whom frequent the next site they put that ad on. It's the same thing, but its a smaller scale... so yeah, maybe your first ad makes you 10 dollars or even -10 dollars... but if you are doing it right it should BUILD and profits will increase over time. From your perspective it may look like the advertising is having no impact, yet profits will eventually rise.

And hence why advertising personell have a miserable job of convincing their bosses they are not dead weight.

-Joseph Lieberman

I think advertising can work very well, if its targeted and good. My games wont be on the front page of PC Gamer any time soon, so I see this as one guaranteed way of getting the word out.

i have seen a printed add for x-plane recently. i think it was in some sort of catalogue where software-dealers can get the boxes for theire stores. maybe you just ask the authors of x-plane about that...

a few years back i have seen another printed add for a shooter which was sold by mail order.

i have no experience as a shareware games publisher but i know from my past as a web designer that getting your url on printed material generally works pretty well.