24/10/2017 10 Ways to Promote Your Indie Game – EMJ Advertising

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10 Ways to Promote Your Indie Game

by Elliott Marc Jones February 18, 2017

Promotion is the most important thing for a game dev, so here are ten ways
to promote your game from a guy who's been there and done that: Elliott
Marc Jones, the creator of IGS' number one rated game, Redactem.

Hold an IndieDB Giveaway

IndieDB allows one developer each day to hold a small giveaway on their
site. Even if you don't give away many copies of your game, IndieDB will still
feature your game on their homepage for a day and email it to their
members resulting in thousands of people reading about your new indie
game, and quite a few new sales!

Tell Your Story, Not Your Game's

A great way to promote your game is with your local newspaper or tv

station. Local news groups are always looking for success stories about local
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people. Tell them your story, how you struggled, how this game is going to
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  change your life. Make it interesting and inspirational, they'll eat it up like
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cake and then boom, free advertising.

Even Bad Press is Good Press

Gaming websites love a good scandal, and once a big site like Polygon has
covered your "PR crisis" all the YouTubers will jump on the same bandwagon,
The Know, ReviewTechUSA, TGN, etc. Usually these websites would never
have even touched your game, but now because you red your main
programmer, or made some questionable comments on Twitter, thousands
of people are reading about your game. As long as the scandal isn't about
your game being bad or full of bugs, you'll come out on the other side with
thousands of new sales.

Use Keymailer to Instantly Send Keys to YouTubers

Keymailer is a site for sending game keys to YouTubers and Twitch streamers
instantly. The site has thousands of in uential members and you are able to
send a game key to each and every one. They won't all play your game, but
you should be able to get at least ten or so smaller creators to talk about
your game which is important for when potential customers search for your
game on YouTube. YouTube videos are more powerful thank you think.

Secret Cheat Codes

Community engagement is everything. You should be doing everything you

can to get your players talking to each other. One effective way of doing this
is by adding secret cheat codes, or cheat codes that are very hard to nd.
When your game rst releases, before the cheat codes hit the internet, your
users will discuss things like cheat codes on forums, and on social media
pages, which will keep your players interested and give you more exposure.

DLC

Downloadable content and add-ons get a lot of hate, but they're great for
boosting the visibility of your core game. Every time you release a DLC for
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24/10/2017 10 Ways to Promote Your Indie Game – EMJ Advertising

your game, no matter how small, or big, it will for a short time be on the
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  homepage of Steam, which will in turn lead users to your main page. Keep
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your players happy by making it free.

Improve Your Game's SEO

Search engine optimization is important for every product, but many

developers forget that boosting their SEO and making sure their game is is
the number one result when potential customers search for it is one of the
most important things to do. If your game has a common name, or there are
other things with the same name, SEO should be one of your major
concerns. Click here to learn how to boost your SEO from a search engine
pro.

Blog Posts on Your Store's Page

If you are selling your game on Steam, you are lucky as you are able to post
blog updates which your users can share, or new users can stumble upon
online. Traditionally these posts are used for update notices, but you can
also use them to promote your game in other ways. Consider talking about
upcoming discounts, bundles or stories from the game's development, make
it juicy and you'll get hundreds of shares on Facebook and Twitter.

Free Weekends

Steam has a great functionality for developers called free weekends, and it
allows you to temporarily make your game free, and it is added to every
player's library. Don't worry though, after the free weekend, it is removed
from their library and they have to buy it if they want to play again. It
doesn't work for all games, but for games that take a long time to complete
or multiplayer games it works well and can potentially drive thousands of
sales.

Purchase Posts on In uential Social Media Pages

Social media is the best way to promote your game, but growing your own
pages is not only hard but sometimes impossible without a big budget.
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24/10/2017 10 Ways to Promote Your Indie Game – EMJ Advertising

Because of this, many developers instead pay for posts on social media
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  pages with a big audience. Usually it costs quite a lot, up to $100 per post,
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but there are a few websites that offer promotional packages so you can get
your game on to multiple in uential gaming blogs and social media pages for
a very low cost. We offer one ourselves, click here to post your game to a
40,000+ member Steam group.

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