I am currently in development of a game I plan on selling as shareware. Now, since I am getting close to completion, I must ask, how do I go about properly promoting it, and getting people to my site, to buy my game? I would like to put in as little money as possible for this (I do not have a lot of money to spend on this), however, I want to get a fair amount of people that will turn around and tell other people etc... I hear of download.com being a good temporary traffic booster, but, it doesn't last long, and, if I can find a one time investment gaining traffic for life sorta thing that would make me extremely happy.

There's no such thing as a free ride. The closest thing is my company, www.vgsmart.com, but for full marketing opportunities you have to prove your game is sellable (By having a good game).

Going back in time, what you should have done was create a game around a marketing strategy, rather than creating a game and then thinking about marketing just before you launch it.

Drop me an e-mail, if nothing else I can give you some tips.

Good luck!

-Joseph Lieberman
Owner, www.vgsmart.com
webmaster@vgsmart.com

I assume that you're looking at web-based advertising?

If so, I recommend you take a look at a few of the past articles in the UK's .net magazine. They have several online too, I think the section you'd be interested in is the web builder tutorials, which go into depth about how to attract people to your site and keep them coming back. You're basically trying to pull people to your site as hard as you can, perhaps using the features of search engines along the way. As it stands, you'll need a good website designing, so if you're not a web designer yourself, consider recruiting one for money or favours. It goes without saying that you'll need to ensure your product is worth selling too ;)

You'll also need a way for people to pay for your game online. You can obviously use things like PayPal, but you might want to look into companies offering shareware registration handling. They process the cards and do all that stuff, leaving you to send the software or unlock keys. A couple of companies that spring to mind are Set Systems and Share*it. Of course, these services aren't free so you'll have to pay a fee for processing, but it's worth looking into.

Support is an issue I see being as important. You'll need to be quick and helpful with any support requests that come in, lack of support can be the downfall of shareware as the community doesn't have any good will for your product or company. It might be worthwhile investing in something such as BetaShare to gain widespread and public testing of the software before launch, minimising the number of update patches you may have to issue. A good website support FAQ is a must in this department, allowing users to troubleshoot their own problems first.

You're after word of mouth advertising, treat your customers well and word will slowly spread. If you visit forums, use your URL on your signature, send your demo out to magazines for their cover CDs - I know a couple of UK magazines run Indie Games corners to review and play indie games.

I hope this was some help.

If you can get yourself to the top of the google results for a few keywords in your niche then you will get a steady stream of traffic from it. You can also use google adwords to get a steady stream, but that costs money.

Being an indie isn't as easy as it used to be. Getting traffic to your web site is a major undertaking these days and converting that traffic into sales is yet another big job.

You need a site (obviously),
You need it to be well designed so that it sells your software, rather than confusing visitors,
You need it to be search engine friendly,
You need a variety of payment processing options in place,
Then you need to start submitting to the numberous download sites,
Then promote your product by sending out press releases (need to be well written in order to be taken seriously),
Send out review copies,
Test out Google adwords and other similar schemes you can find,
Bore your friends by mentioning your great game at every opportunity.

Good luck.

Paypal offers the best way to pay using a credit card. Customers don't even need to be paypal users. Sure paypal might take a bit of the money but its really nothing compared to what you'll be getting and what it would cost you to have your own merchant service.

Paypal is just one option (and not necessarily the best). Most shareware developers/publishers use more than one in case customers experience problems with a particular service.

one of the tricks we plan to do is operate fast game servers for similar games in the genre - this will hopefully generate traffic and awareness of our game.

Lots of great advice here. I would also recommend finding websites dedicated to indie games and/or community forums for indie gamers. Most news sites (especially if they specialise in your particular product) are usually willing to post news updates or Release/Patch news.

Is a great (and easy) way to get a bit of free promotion.

Micah Hymer
Reverie Entertainment, LLC
www.reverieentertainment.com