Advertise your game
Let's start with the expensive solutions:
- News paper / TV / Radio advert
- Flyers
- And any other traditional advertisement solution.
You may wonder why you would spend money to advertise your online service
on traditional media, well actually believe it or not, that's still
where most of the public knowledge come from. Specially if you want
to offer a broad service. Don't tell me you never saw some "trivago"
or other travel / hotel website advertised on TV! Why do you
think they do it? Because it drives public interest. Of course,
traditional media are not cheap and may very well be out of reach
of any of us. Still it's something to consider on a side "attack".
If you can interest journalist enough that they would talk about
your tool in a radio program or a TV show, then it's free advert basically ;)
Banners and other Google like adverts:
Paying to have your service appearing on a banner or other payed online
advert system can and will drive some traffic to your site.
However most service are a "pay per click" system and while
you think it's pretty cheap you will see that you will need lot of
money to actually attract interested people, by that I mean those
which will want at least to try your service and not simply click
there and go away. Depending on the service you offer, you may very
well end up paying up to 5$ per real interested visitors. Not cheap
by any mean! So prepare some good amount and don't simply try 10$
advert as it will most likely 10$ lost.
Forums:
Yes forums are still widely used, but it also depends on the service
you want to offer and which forum you can post on. Many forums don't
accept advert post, and you may very well get kicked out after trying.
So either you don't care and try or you may consider either have your
service in a signature of your user and post useful info and therefore
indirectly advert. Anyhow forums can still drive traffic if well done.
Twitter / Facebook / Other social:
This is maybe the best free way to advert your service, however it is
by itself a science. You cannot simply put your link on some Facebook
page and expect it works. You must somehow have a community interested
in your service and be ready to try it. So you will need some smart
approach to do it or you may very well just upset people if you start
spamming with your service.
Online E-Zine:
Beside advert on those site, you may interest the people behind
it which needs to write article to post something about your service.
This would at the end be a win / win situation as both you and
the journal gain something out of it. However don't try this
road too quickly, be sure you have something of a good value before
approaching a big website as they will not talk twice about the
same service, and will most likely not look twice at you if the
first time you just had a barely running service.
IRC:
Yes it's an old media, but you may very well come in some chat
and ask for people to help you testing or talk about your
adventure. It may or may not drive some people to your site but
again it should not cost you much.
Referral campaigns:
Your users could actually help you in driving more traffic.
How? Well by inviting friends to do so. Beside that if your
service is good enough they should start to slowly doing it
alone, you could help this by offering goodies if they invite
some friends. Could be some online advantage or could be some
real one (money, goods or whatever). Beside jumping on this,
be careful that some will for sure try to get those advantages
without doing anything beside creating pseudo users.
Contests:
Creating a contest can drive people to your site. For example,
if your game has a monthly reset, you could offer some real win
once in a while and people will most likely want to play just
to win the real goods. Of course you should not scam them
otherwise you may very well end up loosing all your visitors.