by MiTT3NZ » Thu Aug 09, 2012 1:57 pm
You need to get on Facebook and Twitter. Personally, I don't care for them, and I used to only use Facebook to post random shit. But yeah, it helps a lot. I've already lined up 5 clients (3 of which are for next month), and that was within a couple of days.
Obviously, you'll have to wait a little longer to build up your friends list, but the bottom line is that social networking does work, and if you want your site to be a success, you'll have to bite the bullet and just do it.
What you can also do is participate in online gaming, focussing on the type of games that you review, or are relevant to the site, build up some rapport amongst your team and/or opponents, and then tell them about your website.
At the end of the day, it's a lot of work, and it isn't a simple case of "here's a link, go to my website". You need to let the people know what the website's about, speak with passion and charisma, make them feel that goin onto your website will be worthwhile.
One thing that will definitely keep people there after they've been on are sprites. I dunno what it is about them, but sprites have an allure that gamers just can't resist. If you find a website that is decorated with these, you almost feel compelled to want to stick around even if it's shit, just because of those pretty-looking 2D characters.
When I get my site up and running, we can run some cross-site ads (when it comes to it, I'll show you how to make ads not actually look like ads) Eventually, when mine is a success (which it will be), the increase in traffic will mean that you can charge for advertising, so you can actually make some money too.
That's getting ahead though, promotion is all about networking if you can't afford advertising, so take a break from single player gaming for a while, get out there (well... internet 'out there') and start building up some rapport!