Sell More Games

Today I’m in the mood to talk about advertising, so another great quote, this time from the latest Perry Marshall’s newsletter:

If your business is dependent on free customers, you do not have a business. You do not have any kind of “real” business until you have the ability to buy advertising from a variety of available sources and transform that traffic into sales and profits.

Perry specialises in Google Adwords and in this newsletter he talked about free traffic from Google… free thanks to SEO. He points out that if your business relies just on SEO traffic then after another Google Dance you may wake up on page 6 instead of page 1 in search results (or even page 60). And if you don’t know how to buy traffic that converts into sales then you’re running a risky business… in our case you just develop games. Sometimes it’s enough (portals help a lot if you have a great game), but very often is not.

Though even if your strategy relies on free traffic it doesn’t mean you are doomed. Just don’t forget to collect customers informations. When your source of free traffic dries up you can convert existing customers into buyers again (and again (and again))… and if you’re smart you don’t wait until it dries up, you send newsletters already.

Learn the conversion puzzles while you have some money to burn… the best time to do it is after you release your game and get sales peak… when it ends it’s usually too late.

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I do have a budget for ads. Very limited one! But should I have it? Here’s a great post from Seth Godin:

So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?

If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you running them?

If I just had the ad that works… I still couldn’t buy all I want - credit card limits :D

But I don’t have the ads that work and I still run them from time to time. Why? Because I hope that this time they will work. Because on different site they may work. Because I am not sure if they work or not. Maybe my tracking mechanism is inaccurate? Or maybe I just like wasting money (at least those are my own dollars).

But seriously, if you have the ad that works why not buy it until your credit card limit?

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My last post: “Save 90% on ANAWIKI GAMES” was an April Fools joke. I am sure that no one (that is not out of his mind), including me, is going to fight piracy by increasing prices. Though I thought it suits April Fools perfectly I decided to give it a shot. A lot of people seemed to like it.

It was  also an example of guerilla marketing. I doubt we sold a single game due to this trick, but I am sure it did bring some attention to ANAWIKI (still, we broke the record of sales in one day, but it was probably the effect of last week PR).

Did you make any April Fools jokes?

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Your game is your best marketing tool. If can, make one by one and you’ll be rich. The problem is, that most of us don’t have resources to do so.

One of the ways to obey this is to release a freeware game to promoto your site. Freeware game doesn’t require the same amount of polish and content as a commercial game. This means you can finish it faster. If you treat this little freeware game as an experiment to check if your game mechanics and ideas work, you may get great feedback and promote your site. Later, based on the feedback collected from your players you can build top-notch quality commercial game.

Amanda Fitch from Amaranth Games made her first game available for free. It was RPG game and was downloaded 1 millon times. She builded her site credibility and user base. And when she released Aveyond she had a lot of players waiting for game.

We, at ANAWIKI Games, try to do it a little different. We wanted to learn some new stuff and decided to create a little JigSaw game with artwork from our other games. The game is called ANAWIKI Puzzle Game and is available for PC and Mac Intel. The trick is that the name and game content promote ANAWIKI or our commercial games. The game was just released so I cannot say how popular it will be, but we’re planning to do commercial version of this game with a lot more artwork and game play modes. By the time we reach beta stage I hope to have enough feedback from our players and beta testers.

Take care and have a happy New Year 2008!

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