Since my game is in a pretty advanced stage, i decided
to start working on a site to do some pre promoting and
awake some interest in the gaming community.

it's not up yet, since i'm still thinking about the design and
promotion process. I thought about releasing a new "feature"
to the site about each character, game zones and techniques
each will include in-game screenshots, technique/char/zone info,
behind the scences view ect. hoping that this steady buzz will
attract and create anticipation for the game.

does anybody have any experience or suggestions for
this kind of pre-promotion?

Before we shipped MicroMan (just released it today) we ran this teaser GBN ad:

http://www.hipsoft.com/ads/mmcc_ad1.gif

It received double the click through rate of our other ads and helped us get some volunteers for our external beta test (in addition to generally driving traffic to our site). We also updated the screenshots a few times and also kept people updated through our newsletter.

If you don't already have a newsletter, I would highly recommend it so that people that respond to your pre-promotion ads can sign-up and you can notify them when there's new news and/or the game is released.

Good luck!
-Scorpio

newsletter...

how didnt i thought of that?

Originally posted by Scorpio
Before we shipped MicroMan (just released it today) we ran this teaser GBN ad:

http://www.hipsoft.com/ads/mmcc_ad1.gif

It received double the click through rate of our other ads and helped us get some volunteers for our external beta test (in addition to generally driving traffic to our site). We also updated the screenshots a few times and also kept people updated through our newsletter.

If you don't already have a newsletter, I would highly recommend it so that people that respond to your pre-promotion ads can sign-up and you can notify them when there's new news and/or the game is released.

Good luck!
-Scorpio

a bit off topic but, what was the click through rate for that ad? I'm considering doing a little banner advertising myself =)

I always tried to keep prepromotional materials fairly vague, but then again the projects I typically got signed up with tended not to turn out. I'm not sure if it was a self-defense mechanism against humiliation or merely prophetic laziness :P

But anyway, we always liked a degree of mystery and tried to just show off enough to get people interested. If you show too much you might sort of weather away any mystique you might have. That's one of the reason movie trailers tend to just hurl themselves at you with shots so fast you can barely distinguish what's happening.

It's also probably a good idea not to promise too much if the possibility exists that you may remove certain characters, levels, features, etc. later for whatever reason.

Originally posted by gilzu
does anybody have any experience or suggestions for
this kind of pre-promotion?

I wish I had some pre-release experience too. I'm hoping to squeeze in a book or two specific to that subject before my game is done, but not until I've read more about marketing and advertising. It's a good subject to post about because I think way too many developers overexpose a lot of nothing. It would be interesting to her some more on this.

I usually put up preview pages of projects in progress. I don't know if it serves to detract from the games I'm selling much, but it certainly leads to many mailing list subscribers.

Originally posted by Balron
a bit off topic but, what was the click through rate for that ad? I'm considering doing a little banner advertising myself =)

In it's initial run, it averaged a little over 4% with a peak of just over 5%. GBN total CTR average is usually a little over 2% (which is what we normally see as well).
-Scorpio

I was thinking about starting a thread like this one. I wanted to hit the ground running, so my pre-release marketing plan had three prongs: 1) Collect newsletter signups as others here have mentioned. This is so I have an immediate list of targeted leads when my game is released. I wrote my own newsletter system for this -- not hard at all, but then again I enjoy working with PHP and MySQL. 2) Prepare my website for search engines. I went through a round of paid and unpaid submissions to a number of search engines, spent some time over at Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com), and started some minor search engine optimization. Shari Thurow's Search Engine Visibility and the free articles over at Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com) were very useful. 3) Start up a link swap program and take up others on their swap offers as well. This is partially to increase pagerank, but it also just feels good to be connected to the community.

You can go to my web site (http://www.gearhand.com) to see how it's going so far. From early analysis, some observations are: 1) Everyone here who said people are hesitant to confirm their subscription to a double opt-in newsletter was right. 2) People go right for the big button that says "games" at the top of the screen. I might change that to go straight to my main game page for the time being (until I get a second game). 3) Some people actually type "games" into my internal search engine. Hurm.

In addition to 'Word Tracker' mentioned above, try out this link Search Term Suggestion Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

Its quick a easy, plus its free! ;)