Hello! I've been writing games as a hobby for quite some time now, mostly cause it's awesome and fun. I would like to try, however, to make a bit of money off of my endeavors, and I was wondering if anyone had tips on marketing on the web, such as how to advertise and where, on a very tight budget.

Any and all help would be appreciated, as I'm not experienced at selling things! As I said, I mainly write code for the love of writing code, but it would be nice to have enough money to replace my computer

thanks!

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I code theirfor I am.
And more importently, theirfor my program am.
wait is that right... theirfor my code ams? no...theirfor i is... no... oh idk

Usually putting money into advertisements will leave you with less money than you had before. It's barely paying off for indies. What you rather might try is 'infiltrate' networks such as tigsource, gamedev, and ask indie game magazines (the indie game mag or rockpapershotgun for instance) to play and review your game. Written (positive) articles usually provide more exposure to the kinds of people you want to appeal to.
Also you can create project pages on indiedb or similar networks to provide news and updates to your game. There's really a whole lot you can do. in fact so much that you can be stuck for days writing articles and posts for the different portals and forums

Good luck

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Thanks! I'll certainly try this! I've heard good things about writing in portals and forums, although many have a no advertising policy, but I had never thought of submitting my game to a magazine or a game reviewer. My game is very arcade style however, many of the best games in the world are very simple, but I'm not sure it would look like very much next to the much larger scale games like octodad (perhaps i'm impatient, but I like games that at least start very simple, and I never figured out octodad xD)

Even so, that's a few things I can try, and it gives me a good place to start experimenting thank you very much!

_________________
I code theirfor I am.
And more importently, theirfor my program am.
wait is that right... theirfor my code ams? no...theirfor i is... no... oh idk

Depends on the forum i guess.
Tigsource for example expects a bit of forum activity before you actually go and present your project, which is actually a fair deal. not sure how strictly they control this though, if at all.

_________________
Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

It will be worth adding Analytic's to your website too.

I don't know what Analytic's are... xD

Lol, and I try to follow the rules of forums I visit I figure it's the least I can do to be respectful.

_________________
I code theirfor I am.
And more importently, theirfor my program am.
wait is that right... theirfor my code ams? no...theirfor i is... no... oh idk

www.google.com/analytics/

it enables you to gather information about the traffic on your website. when marketing, its useful to measure the results of the things you try.

cxzuk