Marketing feedback wanted

Your just getting started you need to do much more than that . Here is more for you to do

I hope you come back to this thread and see this. I tell you what does really work though . Before you launch follow these directions and you will be way better off and have money in your pocket.
1) Hit all major forums that have heavy lurker traffic , before you launch your game
www.148apps.com
www.freshapps.com
www.iphone4forum.net
www.ipodtouchfans.com
www.nodpad.com
Also go to the social sites like www.Mocospace.com and facebook.
On mocospace go to the gamer and teen rooms 1st and promote then hit the other rooms.
2) Go on google type " list of 30 iphone bloggers"
a link should come up with list email addresses of 30 iphone bloggers. Pick maybe 20 of them and send them promo codes for them to review your game.
3) When your game is release go back to all those websites and open a new topic saying you game is released . Also go to PRmac.com and do a $20 press release.
Basically you just did $500 worth of marketing without spending $800 dollars they just charged you. Yes it takes about total of 8-10 hours to do the steps I showed you but its worth it and you only spent $20 bucks. How this helps you and everyone else.

 

Yemi has all good advice here. Though don't limit the forum posts to ones with heavy lurker traffic - I pick any and all forums I can get my hands on.

 

Thanks for the list here Yemi, didn't know about some of these forums ;-)

Another thing to try, if you're going to be throwing money at the situation anyways, is holding some sort of contest. There's a good promo code/contest area here in the TA forums. Look there for some good examples.

Besides, why give money to marketing professionals when you could just be giving money to your players/users as incentives to try it out

 

what exactly is "lurker traffic"???

 

"lurker traffic" lurkers are people who read the forums, but don't necessarily participate in the discussions. They may be registered users, but more than likely (?) they are unregistered and just come here to read up on what's going on.

non-registered users will never see what is in your sig (that stuff is only visible to other logged-in users,and even then they may have turned off sig visibility in their settings). sounds like I am getting nitpicky, but you will potentially get some hits from whatever's in your sig.

I say do some research and don't waste time on "dead forums." I suppose it's always worth it to poke around and maybe register/cut n paste a thread for your game, but in many of those secondary and tertiary sites they may just be ghosts towns. It's been awhile since I've poked and prodded on a few, but I remember some bigger sites (where you'd think they would have been more active) I'd put up a thread and it would sit on their front page for no joke, months. Sounds "good" but that means no one is seeing it, ever. Maybe 2 or 3 people, which is fairly irrelevant.

It's pretty easy to tell if a forum is active or not. I am going through this all over again right now as I prepare to release on Android.

FYI - here's a breakdown of where most of my hits came from (I suggest you use bit.ly or google links or something to track where your links are coming from, this will save you TONS of time and energy.

consider a link to my game's page on iTunes

1. neogaf.com (they have a very active iPhone thread), 530 clicks (in total, over the course of ~10 months)
2. TA (active thread and running promotions), 500 clicks
3. Facebook, 400 clicks
4. twitter, 350 clicks
5. my own (active) blog, 150 clicks

mind that I cultivated all of the above things in each case, never having just dropped something and left it there to "take care of itself." Also consider that these are clicks and not necessarily DLs

hope that helps!

 

Thanks for the list, haven't heard of a couple of those

 

Don't think it's anything to do with your game. People on forums and games press simply don't appear to be interested in anything that's not a) by a big publisher b) by people they know personally c) already successful.

My game got no attention from anyone at all before I released it despite me posting on many forums, and emailing all the review sites. The only response from any press I got was telling me in no uncertain terms that they weren't going to review my game and to stop wasting my time emailing them.

Fortunately for me Apple had to look at it and they decided to feature it in German and Austria. It's now sat at number 17 in the overall paid chart in Germany above Angry Birds Seasons.

Since, it's been reviewed several times, mainly in Germany but some English speaking sites as well. So I guess this falls under option C, already successful.

 

Interesting, did you translate the whole game to german?

 

No, the only translations that have been done are for the iTunes store text. Even that was done retrospectively after a kind offer from mr.Ugly.