So I have a
Twitteraccount ,
google code page,
blog blog ,
this forum as well as other forums.
Anyone have any suggestions on what to use to maintain them all?
Has anyone here successfully got the word out about there game with out working full time on publicity?
At GDC 07 Russel Carroll gave an interesting talk entitle āMarketing For Indiesā, you might find it a worth while watch. He doesnāt hold all the answers but will get you thinking about marketing.
oh and for maintaining them all, all your sites/accounts are for displaying different types of content so you should probably maintain individually, however, you could make your blog your primary point of contact, and use the others to drive traffic to your blog, so donāt have too much info on your code page and have a link to your blog.
You could probably use blog plugins to automatically push new post you make on your blog, to your twitter, and/or go the other way, and pull tweets onto your blog. Might be able to do the same for pulling Google Code activity onto your blog.
The ideas expressed above are mine and do not represent those of successful marketer / web master / publicist / game developer 
pretty basic common sense thoughts, but a good read :
Some quick thoughts. Some of these are on productivity, others presentation, others are ābang for your buckā in terms of time. If some of it seems obvious please donāt be offended
- Facebook Page Evil? Yes. The most popular destination on the internet? Yes.
- TweetDeck Keeping things updated doesn't need to be a full time job, especially with a tool that can update and track multiple services at the same time.
- Audience Who are you trying to target? What are they thinking? Shape your messages appropriately.
- Be Proactive Set up some searches in TweetDeck and peek in to find people interested in what you're pushing. At the very least, a quick push of the 'follow' button drops an email with your name on it in their inbox, if not a new follower for your account. (Make sure that your Twitter heading is the best one-line sales pitch)
- Consistency Using your logo as the quickest example, in same places the image uses a white background while it has a black background in others. Choose one and stick with it. If you decide to do a more intensive branding of the game/company down the line, keep some things consistent up and down the chain whether its a font, color, shape, etc
- Logo Everywhere Similar to the last point, your blog has no use of the logo! YouTube videos are great things to post on there, but you'll also find plenty of traffic on YouTube by people just showing up to view some video. 5 minutes in Photoshop or Gimp to come up with a stylized intro slide for videos goes a long way
I hope some of this helps!
1 Like
cool thanks @sbook great points!
Iām going to throw indiedb.com (or moddb.com = same thing) into the mix, I made a profile 2 days ago, as of this morning I got a mention at the top of the homepage and mTheoryGame is currently (somehow) ranked 49 of 4,131! Great way to get the your name out there, it also boosted my web traffic significantly.
Thanks guys for the good advice.
@thetoucher congrats on the ranking.
@sbook thanks for the good advice.
We are working on a consistent company logo. I will remember it for newer you tube videos.
Glad to help and good luck!!!
<
New company Logo. I will try and put it on all the promotion and games. Thanks for the advice.
http://twitpic.com/5sjbyl
1 Like
Looks greatā¦ though Iām just a bit biased because those happen to be my initials!
Sorry for taking so long to catch up on this topic. Busy times. Seems like a lot of great information has been shared already; Iām hard pressed to come up with something new to say! There is one last tip that I donāt see being mentioned a lot though: Use your inner circles. By that I mean, establish and maintain a strong relationship with the āfoundationsā that you chose to base your project on. In this case, Java, LWJGL, jMonkeyEngine and so forth.
I welcome both of you, @gbluntzer and @thetoucher to type up a guest post for the jMonkeyEngine.org blog. Itās not common for us to give this opportunity to pre-alpha projects, but maybe itās something we havenāt been doing enough. With that said, this is an opportune time to give this type of publishing a go, seeing as I am much too occupied these days to effectively update the blog with new content.
I suggest you type up a simple draft first; donāt spend too much time on it, just make the āskeletonā for the article. That way I can read through it real quick and tell you if itās going in the right direction, and the next revision could be made from within our siteās WordPress.
Another point to consider though, is that you need to be prepared to make the most of the publicity that you gain. If you stand to multiply your daily visitors count tenfold for a couple days, what do you want to direct these visitors to? The latest alpha? A trailer? Your forum? What do you hope to gain by directing them there?
1 Like
Thanks @erlend_sh, I would love to write an article for the blog. I will however give @gbluntzer the opportunity to respond first, for a few reasons, but mostly because he has made far more progress on his work than I (it also gives me more time to make my game and article better than him so I can score with more hotter chicks).
Sorry,
I havenāt forgotten. I just wanted to figure out what type of game play I wanted script blocks to have and create a alpha version of that before I unleashed the full power of the JmonkeyEngine WebSite/ Blog community.
If @thetoucher is ready please have him blog as well.
As soon as I get all my ducks in a row I will try to write up my skeleton article.
Thanks again,
Greg
Oh of course, thatās actually what I was going to recommend that you write about, so by all means take another couple of weeks to nail it down.
@thetoucher that means youāre up! That is, if you want to. Thereās no specific timeline for either of you, so just send the first draft my way (PM me a link) once itās ready.
well I know that this is @gbluntzerās topic, but I would like to thank for the links, they contained lots of info, and proved once again, that one cannot learn enoughā¦
let me add one link I just found: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/ the list looks promising, and I hope the contents will get uploaded this week as promisedā¦
EDIT: and another one: http://www.indiegamemag.com/indie-developers/ you can submit an easy interview by answering the most basic questions, or schedule a more in-depth one with themā¦