Best Advertising Campaign for a Very Small Business

I own a very very small business that me and a friend set up. Well, you could hardly call it a business. We are both in college and enjoyed playing MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), such as Runescape and NeoPets.

So we decided to set up our own little game, we acquired some free source code for it and we began. That was 7 months ago and we had minimal PHP/SQL knowledge, now we are competent coders.

Our site makes around 100-200 GBP a month, yeah not huge, but we enjoy it so keep it running, and it puts a bit of spare money in our pocket. The only 'advertising' as such we have ever done for it is spamming other games.

The problem with trying to run an RPG is that the market is very saturated and it is hard to wheel the players away from the big games to support new, up and coming Websites.

Now we have found that we would like more players to come to our site. We have about 200 regular members, and get about 2000 Unique hits a MONTH, i know, pitiful.

I would now like to go on an advertising campaign, but have no money to spare. I would be willing to put in all the revenue the game earns over the next 3-4 months if it means an increase in members.

Do you think i should take up advertising on AdWords? Is this a good alternative, or for a tiny business like my own are there better advertising sites. Also should i promote AdSense on my website, i did for about 3 months and only received $12 from it. Are there better sites for a tiny business like mine to have adverts from?

All help appreciated.

Any help appreciated ...

I'm an MMORPG play and here are many ways you can make much more money with adsense but you might not want to use that because it might show the players that the game isn't good enough to play. A good place to advertise is http://officersclubcg.com . It has links to many MMORPGs and there are a lot of hits there everyday.

Did you post news to online gaming magazines? Press release? I can suggest http://www.dpdirectory.com or http://www.mypressrelease.net

Focus your news and press release on unique features your game has. Ask your players why they like the game.

Regarding adwords and gaming. I was involved in PDA gaming development (http://www.intorine.com) and adwords gave no ROI, then we stopped online advertising. As I found later the most competitors on the market stopped too.

I recommend targeting specific sites to advertise on.... I have some information and ideas on this... just PM me.

I can give you 100 free visitors if you sign up for my site.

http://ads.ismywebsite.com/

Save your coin... you can market any site for free with article marketing. A study was done here http://www.thekaizenbusiness.com/?p=174 and although it's in a different market than yours the results can be replicated in any popular market including entertainment/games.

Install a blog on a subdomain and write about playing online games - anything you can think of. Just write about your experiences with gaming and have fun with it - put a link to your sign up at the beginning of every post. Submit every post to the top social bookmarking sites. Repeat. Works for my game site real well.

As you are not specifically making alot of money, i would probably spend more time than money on advertising your game site.

Try optimising and getting backward links from websites with good page ranks. As your site is only 6 months old i think you said, it probably won't be as established as other sites out there.

You could use Pay per clicks to help boost this, as it will drive more traffic to your website.

Claire
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Development: check out Project Wonderful (http://projectwonderful.com/).

They run on a rather interesting bidding-based system they call "infinite auction." In essence, ad spots are set up on sites by publishers, and then advertisers bid on them to display their ads. The bidding starts at nothing (free ads), and goes up as more advertisers bid on a spot, with the high bidder's ad being displayed. Bidders can set total spending limits, time limits, and maximum bids to prevent going to high, running too long, and spending too much.

Bids are placed not just on individual advertising spots, so it's pretty easy to target your ads to sites with the audience you're looking for.

A pretty good number of start-up sites and smaller sites have taken to them, and their bidding system gives you pretty good opportunities for getting inexpensive advertising on a lot of sites, with fairly good turn-around.

I've seen several MMORPGs advertise on them, (though, I should mention that the webcomics crowd seem to be the biggest users of Project Wonderful), so you wouldn't be alone in giving them a shot.

As for places ads on your site - you can use Project Wonderful's ads along with Google adsense - they play nice - so you may want to try them as a supplement. If adsense is working for you, though, then I wouldn't worry about it.

Anywho - they're worth at least a look. I like em'. *wink*

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