Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

Firstly if you want web traffic you need the search engines to index your site. And the search engines look for keywords. So it is really useful to know the keywords that people are using in their search queries. Google release a lot of this information in Google Zeitgeist. Using this could make your website a lot more successful.

Secondly there is a lot of useful information you can find out about a website but it takes ages to do so. Firefox SEO does it automatically to every item on a Google search. This really is a very powerful tool indeed and will give you so much marketing information that you probably didn’t have before. Here is what it looks for: PR: ? | Google Cache Date: ? | Traffic Value: ? | Age: ? | del.icio.us: ? | del.icio.us Page Bookmarks: ? | Diggs: ? | Digg’s Popular Stories: ? | Stumbleupon: ? | Twitter: ? | Y! Links: ? | Y! .edu Links: ? | Y! .gov Links: ? | Y! Page Links: ? | Y! .edu Page Links: ? | Technorati: ? | Alexa: ? | Compete.com Rank: ? | Compete.com Uniques: ? | Trends | Cached: ? | dmoz: ? | Bloglines: ? | Page blog links: ? | dir.yahoo.com: ? | Botw: ? | Whois | Sktool | Yahoo position: ? | Majestic SEO linkdomain: ?

This article contains practical information based on marketing games. It also has input from experience in marketing forums and blogs (both of which are applicable to games). Everything here is free. All you need to do is the work. And the more work the better the results. Not all these methods are equally effective all the time, it is a matter of picking and mixing according to what you are trying to do.

We have become accustomed to an internet where a lot is free. Google, Wikipedia, the BBC and much of casual gaming for instance. Because this same ethos runs through the internet it is possible to do a lot of marketing without spending a single cent. Obviously using each one of these methods takes skill to get the optimum results, but that will come with practice.

1. Start a blog. Use Google Blogger or WordPress. Post your marketing content and links to it. It will show up on Google search within hours.
2. Use Google Blog Search or Technorati to find other people’s blog entries that relate to what you are doing. Add valid comments to these blog entries, with links where applicable.
3. Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin. Post links on it, form groups and put an RSS feed from your blog in.
4. Post videos to Youtube. Form groups. Put RSS feeds in to your social networking. One advantage of the internet over paper media is that you can use moving images, make the most of it.
5. Use social content websites such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and Stumbleupon. These can generate huge amounts of traffic if a story catches on.
6. Keep a track of the forums that are relevant to you. Create and post to threads where relevant. Put your url in your signature if it is permitted. Do not spam or abuse the forum, it is a community.
7. Seek out all relevant Wikipedia entries and ensure they present your perspective accurately. Add to the external links section at the bottom of the entry. Do not spam, only post what is valid. Also create Knols for everything relevant.
8. Make sure that you are getting onto news aggregators like Google News and NewsNow.
9. There are literally thousands of directories on the net that each need applying to by hand. Use Google to find the relevant ones for you and fill out the forms. Here is a game blog directory, for instance.
10. Many news sites allow you to add your comments to stories, Metro for instance. Do so when relevant. So if there is a major general news story that effects you it is an opportunity to whizz round a few big news sites and get your perspective over. Also many specialist news sites work the same way.
11. There are lots of free press release services, Free Press Release, ClickPress Fastpitch and Pressbox, for instance. Write a press release and stick it on a few of them. Choose services from different countries if applicable.
12. Website valuation tools. These are a bit of fun but they also often archive their results. So in a few minutes you can create a lot of good links into your website. Wesite analysis and statistics sites often work in the same way.
13. Join the reputation management sites. Like Naymz and Lookuppage. These create quality links and tell your side of the story. They help to balance out the anarchy of the net.
14. Free advertising on Craigslist, Vivastreet, Gumtree and all the other free classified services. These need refreshing regularly. They are nicely targeted and you can reach people in lots of countries.
15. Review your own products! On sites such as Amazon and Metacritic. In fact it is really good fun to go through and work out which comments are marketing plants. Your skill is in making yours impossible to distinguish.

By now it must be obvious that these methods are best used together, synergistically. Which is true of all good marketing. They also require creativity if what you do is going to stand out. And you will need a thick skin from time to time as the usual web idiots throw brickbats at you.

People look at the game publishing industry and see the giant global companies like Electronic Arts and think that it is impossible to compete. In fact it is very easy. There are three elements of the gaming industry that make it easy. The first is that you can distribute globally with no physical product, just look at Runescape, Maple Story and Habbo to see how big that can be. Secondly games can be all things to all people so you can develop for a niche in which there is little competition. Thirdly the industry is in constant flux and change which brings up endless new opportunities. Just look at how long we have had the Apple AppStore.

As proof of what can be done let’s look at three Seattle guys who started a game company with no money. So in 2000 they ran up $30, 000 of debt on their credit cards to finance the start up of their company. By 2006 they had a turnover of $80 million and in 2007 $110 million. PopCap have done what anyone could have done, the difference is that they did and we didn’t.

Their games are very simple and highly addictive. They beta tested using their mothers so as to get the games right for their intended demographic. They are played on online PCs, iPods, XBLA, mobile phones and all the other emerging casual gaming platforms. And they largely use the play for free business model with payment for advanced features or levels. So they are at the sharp end of where gaming is going.

And of course they are successful. They are the number one publisher on both iPod and XBLA. One of their games, Bejewelled, has sold 25 million units and Peggle is on the PC Gamer Magazine list of The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time.

Their marketing is clever in that they push the benefits of gaming and specifically their sort of gaming. So they say that if employees played games on their work breaks it would help British business to the tune of £4 billion a year. And they say how their games help older women relax, learn, bond with their kids and more. All stuff that makes good press and gives consumers features and benefits they can relate to.

So to anyone who wants to be in gaming I can ask these two questions. 1) Are you an XNA or XLA developer? and 2) Have you downloaded the iPod/iPhone SDK? Because these would be the actions of someone who wanted to get ahead in the industry. Whilst just talking about it will get you nowhere.

And if anyone in the British Midlands wants to set up a gaming company then drop me a line. Maybe we too can be a PopCap.

It seems that just about every young person in the world these days wants to work in video games when they get older. Mostly they want to be “games designers” when they have no idea what the job entails. Some know that they want to be programmers or artists and have a better idea of the skills that they need. To develop a game from scratch and get it to market takes a wide range of skills. And nothing is more important than marketing. You will not sell a single copy of a game without some sort of marketing. And the better the marketing, the better the sales.

So if you are very bright and hard working here are some tips for becoming a game marketeer.

The first thing is to read game industry websites instead of game consumer websites. Then you will see the industry from a different perspective. Look at Gamasutra, Gamesindustry.biz and MCV. I read these all the time. Next you need to get some real world hands on experience. This will give your CV a competitive advantage.
Try the following:
1) Write to the HR departments of game companies asking if you can work an internship (probably unpaid)during your summer vacation.
2) Find home coders working on XNA and iPhone games. There are many thousands of them. Classifieds and forums will help you find them. Ask if you can join the team as unpaid marketing person.
3) Get to trade exhibitions like GDC and E3. You need a trade pass but that shouldn’t be beyond your imagination!
4) As soon as you have the slightest credibility as being a game industry person join Linkedin, then Link in to all your contacts and join the game industry groups there.

Here is an example of someone who wants a career in game marketing proactively enhancing his CV with a game marketing blog:  http://thomcult.blogspot.com/

Obviously you need to go to a good marketing school to get the relevant degree. Be sure to build your management skills. Marketing contains a lot of management. Managing projects, managing money and managing people. Once qualified and working it is very well worth doing an MBA. Marketing people have the skillset to run the industry. And if you are going to run anything it helps to have the training.

Wikipedia is an amazing resource, however its fundamental basis and academic system of peer reviews and editors leads to several weaknesses. Google have tried to overcome these with their new knowledge project which is called Knol. It went to public beta on the 23rd of July so you are now able to contribute to it. Eventually, like Wikipedia it will contain millions of articles, but they started with just 400.

The system that Google are using to ensure quality of content is that every article must be posted under the author’s real name and Google go through procedures to ensure that this is so before you are allowed to post. Once you have made a post nobody will edit it, the onus is totally on you, the author. Other people can add comments and you can choose the level that others can add to your article. From no outside participation through to having the article open to all members.

Unlike Wikipedia, Knol content can be commercial and can be opinion. In fact having named authors rather predisposes them to giving their point of view. And Google encourage it: “Voice your opinion. Your name is behind your Knol, and it should reflect your unique point of view.”

Your benefit to making entries on Knol is that it will put your version of the facts up in front of people who search on the subject or for the keywords in your content. But, as with Wikpedia, any links that you put within Knol articles will not help the search engine rankings of the sites linked to. Also it is possible to allow Google Adwords on your Knol entries which will generate income.

So the company you work for really needs to sort out its Knol entry now. Also you need to make a Knol entry for every game, for every senior or well known person that you employ, for every brand, every proprietary technology and every blog or other website. This is a fantastic opportunity to get your information out to the world in exactly the way that you want.

Knol is here to stay and it is self evident that it will grow rapidly to become a significant part of the interweb. So it is obvious that if you have any knowledge or information that needs a public airing then you have no option but to put it into entries there.

Already I have made over 30 Knol entries. Here is the one for this forum, for the village I live in, for Artforums and about Sharks.

At last weeks E3 there were two massive announcements that Microsoft could have made but didn’t. The first was about their upcoming gesture interface, the second was an announcement about a new Halo game from Bungie, which was only pulled at the last minute. So why did Microsoft pull two massive stories that would have been worldwide headlines?

The answer is that, quite simply, they already had the world’s press in the palm of their hands. They had the maximum column inches and airtime that was possible. So to add extra content would only dilute the coverage that each story would get. They had reached the law of diminishing returns. Far better to save stories for another day when they will not be cluttered out and so will get far more coverage. Microsoft marketing want to get the maximum impact, the maximum number of times.

Which is exactly what I did when managing the news flow at Codemasters. Often I was sitting on a whole pile of “secrets” but was manipulating unveiling them so as to maximise the coverage that they received.

I started telling the world about a new game 12 months before street date. So that meant 12 monthly press releases plus the launch press release. This gave a nice pace that allowed me to gradually unveil the USPs and features of the game in a way that enabled the press, and therefore the public, to understand what it was that we were making.

I had a press release schedule for a release every Tuesday and every Thursday. Slots on this schedule were booked for months ahead. The schedule was shared with all our marketing people worldwide so we could maximise our management of the press. And with the development staff to maximise internal co-operation. Every release was translated into every language necessary well before release. And we also planned the assets such as screenshots, videos, renders and demos well in advance so they could be polished to the highest quality.

By having a well drilled global press mechanism and only ever releasing quality news content I was guaranteed to reach tens of millions of people with every word that I sent out of the door.

An example was IGI 2, a stealth FPS. The game contained infra red sights that could see through walls and the Barratt 0.5inch sniper rifle, these made a massive difference to the gameplay. I deliberately kept these features secret until fairly close to release date. By then the press thought that they knew the game pretty well, so when I announced these two features in a press release they went “wow” and we got loads of coverage. Far more that if I hadn’t sat on these features for so long.

So there we have it. Manage your flow of news to maximise the marketing impact that it gives you. Secrets are a precious asset so get the most out of revealing each and every one of them.

The interweb is an amazing thing, open to all it puts the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips. And with blogs, forums, social networking and content aggregators it has opened up it’s amazing power to everyone. The led to a few golden years when people were largely positive and the interweb grew exponentially in richness.

These days are now over as increasingly people abuse the interweb and everything that is in it for their own narrow agenda. Now a world expert university professor can and will be shouted down by an ignorant 14 year old. And there are lots of ignorant 14 year olds in the world and they have lots of spare time on their hands. This alone has led to many valuable contributors walking away from the interweb, they don’t need the abuse.

A good example in gaming is the story aggregation and social bookmarking site N4G which has been truly excellent. In one place you could get a feel for what was happening to gaming news over the whole interweb. This made N4G a very valuable resource for keen gamers, industry professionals and journalists. It was the pulse of the games industry.

Now N4G is broken, taken over by Sony fanboys with a narrow agenda. If an article is submitted that could be considered to be in any way critical of Sony (which is quite easy, the way they have screwed up this generation) they pounce on it en masse, marking it down so it never make acceptance. Obviously any pro Sony stories are massively marked up so they get instant acceptance and rise to the top of the points scoring system. So the whole output of N4G is now massively distorted and has lost it’s value.

Not only that, the Sony fanboys also boost each other’s reputation on the social scoring system and knock the reputation of anyone who does not follow their agenda. So the whole social side is abused, distorted and now pretty much useless. To be fair to N4G, they are aware of this and are fixing it. However the fix inevitably means that the site will be less open and more restricted. A prime example of the Balkanisation of the interweb.

Then there was Fatbabies, a forum for games industry professionals. Lots of non professionals joined and ran amok, shouting down those who knew better in typical fanboy style. The site imploded and the game professionals moved to The Chaos Engine and made the site closed to access by outsiders with membership only by invitation to known industry professionals. So all the immensely valuable content created by these industry professionals can only be seen by themselves. This is typical of interweb Balkanisation reducing the availability of the good stuff to everyday users.

Also look at VGChartz, a potentially useful site with guestimates of industry activity. However it is difficult for anyone to take it seriously because on their front page there is a forum dominated by rabid, ignorant fanboys. Which makes any serious discussion impossible. So they lose credibility and are Balkanised.

And then there is Bruceongames. This site started with an open comments policy but started receiving so much vitriolic abuse from ignorant fanboys that now every comment is held until it is approved, which can be for days when I am travelling. Not only that, I send the abusive comments to Akismet, something the fanboys probably don’t know about. And Akismet progressively closes down that person’s rights on the interweb. So they are less able to be a nusiance in future. But which also means further Balkanisation.

I also run a great forum for artists, it is a friendly and supportive community for practicing artists. Yet a full 50% of people who join do so with a narrow agenda of promoting their goods or services and are mostly not even artists. This, obviously, is very damaging to the community. So I have been forced to make the rules stricter and to implement them more thoroughly in order to protect this great community. And once again it Balkanises the interweb a little more.

So every time the interweb is abused it leads to a reaction to prevent future abuse. Which means putting limits and restrictions down. The fanboys damage themselves because what they can get out of the interweb is being continuously throttled as a reaction to their stupidity.

This makes life very difficult for the online marketeer. Blogs and forums will be attacked by idiots which means that they need stricter rules and policing which reduces their quality and usefulness. Community liaison continually come up against agressive fanboys with a narrow agenda shouting down anything they don’t agree with. It is a changing reality that makes things a lot less Web 2.0 and a lot more like the we talk you listen days of old.