Marketing Your Game

Yup. I also got the same result when I searched Hosted Games LLC.

Would be interesting to see if the algorithm is at fault, or if the other games have added “hosted games” metadata to grab a high place in that search.

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@Malebranche I don’t understand your question.

@jasonstevanhill I’m asking if the coverage of previous years (i.e. when you had more sites/articles covering COG and COG games) helped to drive more awareness and customers to COG and its games than it has been doing in more recent times. From your first reply to me it seemed like A. That COG has been tracking the results of its latest COG Press Release campaigns and that B. COGs current efforts to create results from “Press Release” campaigns has presented less than stunning results.

@Malebranche I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “tracking results.”

All of our press hits go here: http://www.choiceofgames.com/press/ (if you ever notice that I’m missing one, feel free to send me a link, so I can put it up).

You’ll note that our older games received more press hits than our newer ones.

I don’t know if this is because a) we’re releasing games much more frequently or b) that our games aren’t for free anymore, but whatever the case, we get noticeably fewer press hits on releases these days.

I can’t speak to how many new customers we receive from the press hits. All I am “tracking” is the press hits themselves.

@jasonstevanhill Allow me to elaborate. Firstly, I am going to assume that by “press hits” you mean “articles published” (please do correct me if I am wrong). By “tracking results” I mean specifically tracking how many clicks to a link came from that article (this is assuming you have a click tracking service at your disposal and that you can ask the publishers to use links created by aforementioned click tracking service (Like http://clickmeter.com which is my personal favorite, 1. because it’s free and 2. because it’s very user friendly) and then how many of those clicked the buy button (which you could track by connecting a tracking link (which redirects to the game in the app market) to the corresponding button).

It sounded like you knew that the “press hits” were not bringing fresh customers from your first reply to me when you said: [quote]this is, in fact, the case. For all the good it does. :/[/quote] So I presumed that COG was tracking the results (i.e. how many clicks you got) from the “press hits”. On an optimistic note, if COG indeed was not tracking clicks then there really isn’t any way to say that the buyers on a recent COG game could not have come from whatever few “press hits” were published :smiley:.

On an entirely different note, COG might want to start “Syndication” of the press hits its games receive (especially from well known press publishers such as PC Gamer or Touch Arcade) by doing this it will 1. Create more buzz around COG and its games and 2. Create what’s called “Social Proof” which will encourage more people to buy and/or become subscribers to your list. This could be done most effectively by employing 1. COG’s Social Media outlets and 2. http://Empireavenue.com and it’s “Missions” feature, where you can get people to “Like” “Share” or “Comment” or “Re-tweet” or whatever the Social Media platform you use calls it, in exchange for points that will allow them in turn to create “Missions” and syndicate their content, and chances are that some of them will get interested in what they see on your social media outlets or what they read in the content you want them to syndicate and buy and/or sign up to COG’s email list.

I was going to start a web site question thread but this old thread is relevant enough.

I’ve been looking at wix, godaddy, etc for simple drop down web page creation and included hosting.

Does anyone have any experience (good or bad) with these types of providers? I really want to focus on SEO terms like college and hero and have a place to post art (fan and official) and sell or link to other products I want to sell/create like a “conventional” CCH novel. I think all the busines sites on wix and godaddy allow for PayPal transactions.

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Personally, I recommend Wordpress 4.1. If you want to concentrate on SEO and SERP’s, Wordpress and ONLY Wordpress Based Platforms will give you an SEO edge. In addition to the vast amounts of SEO helping plugins and SEO knowledgable community Wordpress has. If I were you I’d only use GoDaddy for the domain name, get a $10/mo hosting plan, and install wordpress on it. Besides, a paypal button is only simple embedable html code that you can put on any site that allows you (and some site builders don’t).

I neglected to mention that I am a moron with things like this!

I need the solution to be so easy that my mother could do it.

Oh, don’t sell yourself short, you’ve got a nearly completed WiP with a good amount of complexity to it, so you probably would make short work of simple HTML code :smile: (made easier with WP’s WYISWYG view), managing a WordPress site would probably be alot easier for you than making a game in CS.

Now regarding solutions…

See, I could tell you that you would have a decent chance at ranking in the SERP’s for keywords like “college” and “hero” easily with a platform like Wix or GoDaddy Sitebuilder and not have to be an Expert SEOptimizer… But then I’d be lying through my teeth. It’s one thing to rank for a newly created keyword (with very little search traffic) like “Community College Hero” and Dominate the SERP’s, you’d just have to get an “Exact Match” domain name from GoDaddy.com (i.e. Communitycollegehero.com) put in some content on the site with your keyword listed about 4ish times throughout the page and spaced between about 180-280 words apart. It’s a COMPLETELY different realm when we’re talking about ranking for COMPETITIVE keywords where there are domains with more authority, keyword density, content, backlinks, social backlinks, and (most of all) AGE. Now think about choiceofgames.com, alright? It’s a domain about at least 5 years old, has MANY pages and (here’s the hint) blog posts, now they didn’t do nearly anything (at least to the lengths that I would have done (Choice Of Games guys, if you’re reading this, GET GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP PLEASE, it would bump up search traffic for you by at LEAST 15%) for it and THEY ARE RANKING around 7th - 5th (just above-below the fold of the page) for such valuable keywords as “adsense for games” and “zombie apocalypse game”, thats the kind of power an aged and many paged (i.e. authority domain) has. No matter who you ask, even the worlds BEST white hat SEOptimizers (I don’t recommend going to black hat Optimizers, pretty good chance that what they do will get you “Google Slapped”) if you want to rank for keywords with any kind of decent traffic, you HAVE to know what you’re doing.

Hey I wanted to toss out more marketing questions/ideas, so I figured I’d bump this one as opposed to starting a new thread.

I’m hitting Wizard World in November (merely as a humble visitor, not an exhibitor), but honestly I’m already thinking about whether it would make sense next year to rent a booth (costs $) or perhaps do a presentation (free) about interactive fiction in general and CCH in particular.

Has anyone presented his/her CoG or HG to an audience before? I know from a purely mathematical outlook, you’d need thousands of purchases to directly make it worth your while, considering your opportunity costs, etc., but still the idea intrigues me because all sorts of folks with industry contacts attend these conventions and isn’t it everyone’s dream to “hit it big” with their intellectual property? My current pipe dream is to send a proposal to Image Comics after the CCH trilogy is completed (they actually take submissions and serve as a brand for hundreds of different independent comic book “teams”).

Is anyone doing things like this? Getting your product directly in front of potential customers, or perhaps more importantly, industry contacts?

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We recommend against spending money marketing your game. Like, renting a booth at a convention or whatever.

Of course, if you can get on a panel, that’s a different story. But don’t spend money on a booth/table.

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The panel would probably attract more interest anyway. Wizard World is pretty big - we had over 25K folks attend in Louisville last year. They have tons of slots to fill with programming and I thought it’d be worth it to take a swing next year. I would definitely be more interesting than the woman who presented a talk on anthropology in Star Trek.

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(Appreciate this thread is old, but it appears a relevant place to ask a follow up question)

@jasonstevanhill, if you don’t mind my asking. Is it that you recommend not spending money on marketing at conventions, or generally?

I appreciate that COG and HG push their publications to reviewers, etc. I also appreciate that the lower revenues on IF publications can make a marketing campaign spend a disproportionate cost.

But there are examples of marketing campaigns for small/indie games being successful. I just wanted to ask if you’re willing to write a word or two about the reasoning behind this (if it is a statement about marketing spends generally). Thank you!

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I’m obviously not Jason, but I think he might be on vacation with his new bride. I’m not 100% sure about that.

I’ll just toss in my two cents since I’ve been exploring marketing as much as anyone else here.

It will be hard, especially to start, and the $.52 per game profit for an author on a $2.99 game obviously means you’d have to sell (and I mean on-the-spot downloads) 200 copies just to make $100, which is the bare minimum for most table spaces at smallish conventions. Many are much more expensive.

So will you make your money back immediately? No way. But does that mean you shouldn’t try? I’m not sure about my answer yet.

I’ve had three “for sure” reviews and/or emails because of my June convention so far. From a pure numbers standpoint, that’s pretty bad. But, it’s interesting who they are. One is a reporter for a local TV station. It doesn’t hurt meet new folks like that, especially in your hometown. Another apparently has website experience and has offered to help improve my website (for free) because he loves CCH and wants to “contribute” in direct way.

And two folks at the convention had already read CCH and that was pretty awesome meeting them.

So I think you have to think long-term. What are you writing goals for the next five years? Are you marketing your game, a series of games, or yourself? Would you be okay with losing money on exposure now if it lead to a few readers becoming dedicated readers; folks who buy your next book no matter what? And if you gain local readers, might those people help in other ways, buy merchandise in the future (where you have a higher profit margin), contribute to crowdfunding campaigns, etc?

But from a math perspective, with our low profits on these games, it will hardly ever make sense to push the games in a physical setting. Selling HGs and CoGs is a “numbers game” and the platforms do a great job with that.

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What a lovely considered reply (especially interesting given your previous contributions to this thread). Thank you @Eric_Moser .

I guess I’m in the process of weighing the different ways effort and resources could be spent doing this. Our company markets very successfully on google for example - so I’m aware (in very different contexts) how marketing can have a significant impact relative to resources put into it.

But theoretically IF is both niche, yet has the potential to access the wider market of e-readers. I’m not suggesting that paying for a marketing campaign would make that happen, just that, given a good quality product it would be interesting to see how far a marketing professional could push a choicescript game.

At the very least I’m definitely going to have to drop a line to a couple of local newspapers. Thanks for the inspiration : )

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Thanks for the like @Harian It’s neat to get a like to an old message. :slight_smile:

I see that I didn’t think my Facebook page would have a lot of effect back then. Things have changed. :slight_smile:

I started that page by calling it Life of a Wizard. It was my only game and I had no idea that it would be so accepted. It spurred me into make many others and changing the page name to Lucid’s Games. It’s now up to 1328 likes and reaches 1500.

It’s a small percentage of my total readers, but it’s also a great way to get that “first time bump” when a new game releases. This helps my games reach higher on the lists, which draws in new fans and sends it higher yet. :slight_smile: The CoG mailer is by far my largest form of marketing. In addition to this forum, having that large pre-existing fan base is enormous.

@JimD has 2678 likes at this time, but he started before me, so I’ll catch up with him eventually. :wink:

I don’t post a lot, which has a mixed effect. It means that I’m not filling up people’s newsfeeds, so they don’t mind keeping me liked and don’t unlike me due to spam. But, it also means that I don’t have a large online presence. I suspect that the reason I have a large number (and @JimD too), is by writing a sequel. People want to know when the next one is coming out. The downside is that you are committed to finishing it. Luckily for me, the Lost Heir is well-liked, so I have the proper motivation to keep going on it. :slight_smile:

I’m not on Twitter and I don’t do any other type of marketing, just this: Lucid's Games


I read and follow all of @Eric_Moser’s convention threads. He may not get big bumps of sales from his efforts, but I think it’s super cool. Those hard core fans will spread the word faster than the lukewarm fans. Is it financially effective with regards to the time and money he puts into it? Likely not. But it looks like a lot of fun and he can tell people that he’s been to conventions to share his work. :slight_smile:

All in all, I’m not a good marketer. I’d rather be writing stories than finding new fans.

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@Lucid, if you’re going to eventually catch @JimD, does that imply that I’ll eventually catch you? :smirk:

I stupidly didn’t include my social media stuff in the app itself and I probably blew the chance for more likes/follows. I’ll likely include that in a Part 1 update when Part 2 is ready to roll.

Also, to @Charles_Parkes, and anyone else, if your writing plans include writing “conventional” novels (which may have a slightly higher per-unit royalty, but only if they are traditionally published), I think it’s a good idea to “get yourself out there” and start networking and meeting people.

I am hoping to keep CCH going in some way, shape, or form for a long time, even after the three HGs are done. If I had enough support, a ongoing comic or a graphic novel would be a dream, but that would likely require crowdfunding, which again, is a reason to develop and cultivate a reader base.

Two of the other vendors I met at the convention shared specific Kickstarter project info (“ran the numbers”). One guy failed the first time, kept reaching out to old fans and converting new ones, and was successful the second time. It allowed him to pay his artist and create a (in my opinion) professional-quality comic.

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One biggie for me is, do the authors get access to free promo codes to do their own marketing?

Once I release my game, I’ll probably be posting about it on every semi-related forum I can find, and any relevant subreddits on Reddit. Afraid of looking like a spammer with that approach though.

Edit: Didn’t realise this thread was 2 years old.

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