Wednesday, March 25, 2009

101 guide to sell casual games

Most people will tell you simply to join a game selling program like Reflexive Amazon's GameCenter Solution and put up their affiliate links. Or maybe you'll be told to do the same with Plimus, BMTMicro or other payment providers. There's plenty with casual game affiliate programs.

They'll tell you to throw up some screenshots, a description, and two links - "download demo" and "buy game". Sure, that can work, but you'll usually need a lot of traffic to leverage or an audience who already wants to buy casual games.

This blog is about other methods. Sure, that will be covered too, but I'm writing for the newbie audience. The ones who'll need a 101 guide about how to sell casual games on the internet. Let's assume for today that you don't have a website of your own somewhere. You don't even need one.

Don't just try to copy a portal if you have no intention of being one yourself. There's free services like Squidoo who let you host single pages and you can even use them for shameless marketing. Some programs like Playfirst and Gamecentersolution might not let you join without a website but others allow those pages. Demo? Screenshots? You don't need to give players those either to sell casual games if you know what you're doing. It's the hardcore market that expects those. Some copywriting and marketing skills are a major plus.

That's a Squidoo referral link. Both of us will receive an extra $5 if you use their pages long enough. The Squidoo pages & forum are a great way to learn the affiliate marketing basics, but you'll want to advance out of them once you're ready for a 201 guide to sell casual games.

Find out the audience

Chances are people who like Diner Dash won't also like Master of Defense or Aveyond 3. Many marketers waste a lot of time trying to promote products to the wrong type of audience. Find out who enjoys what you want to affiliate and find a way to get them to your pages.

Search Engines

This blog doesn't exist to sell games - you won't find any on here to buy. However, it's easier to fill it with useful posts instead of garbage... the readers I get are a nice bonus. This blog post was because keyword research said people are looking for information about it, without much competition. Use the same thing to design sites and pages that are meant to try to sell casual games online.

Don't fall into the trap of just finding products and writing nonsense about them - the more specific you are the better. Skip the useless positive reviews with affiliate links, it's already overdone and not doing too well for the casual game reviewers. GameZebo will rank higher than yours anyways. Or if you do decide to review, use that to also recommend other products at the same time... people searching for the casual game usually already have it or know somewhere else to get it, like a discount club.

Social Marketing

This could be promoting them to your friends, or even a message board post like "Popcaps new Peggle game is fun. What do you think?" if you're well known there. Affiliate links work every where, not just on your own site. Be careful where and to who you promote casual games. You might get yourself banned or even lose friends sick of you marketing towards them. One popular method that works is a simple forum signature. Most forums allow you to advertise in them and that's a perfect place to draw in traffic to your affiliate links or landing pages.

Paid Advertising

You can use this to draw more traffic to your pages for selling casual games online but I don't recommend it to newbies at all. You might as well be throwing your money into the wind.

Walkthroughs

Here's a little secret I wrote about earlier with sell walkthroughs. If the people had to already buy the game to reach wherever they need help with... chances are they'll buy more games too. Why market to random people when you can sell casual games to folks who you already know buy (or pirate) them.

This should be enough to get you started. Good luck selling casual games, more posts will be here soon to help you along the way. Here's one last tip:

Avoid Banners

Most affiliates just throw up a bigfish gameclub affiliate banner, or even worse, a bunch of them onto their pages. Sometimes being subtle with your casual game links will have much better results.

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