Developing games is an art, but marketing and selling them is more a pain in the a.... I'm struggling to create awareness for my first game, which I thought should not be that hard because it is a web based game with a small facebook integration. But I landed right on my nose and I am a bit lost now.


How do you market and advertise your indie games?
I often read that "building a community around the game" is some great advice, though I don't know how to do that, either. In the indie game area, you also can't throw money around for buying advertising on google and facebook, because there is no money
Anyway, I think this might be a nice discussion, don't you think?

I was faced with similar challenges earlier. There is actually some good advice in a thread of mine here: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/604831-has-anyone-here-ever-launched-their-own-product/

One good avenue for gaining traffic is blogs. Find a blog site with high traffic and ask the owner to advertise your product for free (or for a cost). Another good method for "building a community" would be to run a free beta test.

In the indie game area, you also can't throw money around for buying advertising on google and facebook, because there is no money

I think you might mean in the hobbyist game area -- it's quite common for indie developers to spend a reasonable amount of money on advertising, and if you're planning on trying to make a living selling your games you'll probably want to consider spending a bit of cash.

That being said, if you're not going down that road there are still things you can do. A few ideas:

1. As mentioned above, you can try to get your game advertised on popular blogs. This might cost you a small amount of money, or you might be able to arrange link exchanges, or give away free copies or a similar arrangement.
2. Related to #1, you could create a press release for submission to relevant sites who post news about game-releases.
3. You could submit your game to review sites -- positive reviews may generate additional interest in your game.
4. You could blog about the development of your game and/or write post-mortem articles. If there are interesting lessons to be found or interesting techniques went into making the game you might generate some interest from fellow developers -- this might be a result in-and-of itself, or if you're lucky enough to draw the attention of a developer who already has a larger following they may be able to help you generate wider interest.
5. You could offer a free piece of premium content or bonus levels or something similar to people for "liking" your game's Facebook page, hopefully then causing it to pop up amongst wider social circles -- Angry Birds did this!

Hope some of those ideas help, or give you some ideas of your own!

Don't forget exploiting other social networking sites as well - even for games designed for a particular social network!

One strategy is to build up a small fanbase for your game. Get people to follow your twitter feeds, subscribe to your youtube channel, facebook etc. So even if your first game is not very successful, you can still inform your followers about the next game. The idea is to engage with the public and build a relationship with them.