No, that’s not a typo in the title. You can very easily get targeted traffic for your entertainment site at a maximum rate of 3 clicks per penny! The reason I say “targeted for your entertainment site” is because you can send the traffic anywhere, but the audience is mainly interested in having fun.

This method is unbelievably simple, just “sponsor” an online flash game. What this means is that you will pay an independent game developer a fixed price and, in return, they will place your logo and links within their flash game. I have used this promotional technique six times in the past (three games I created myself and three games I sponsored) but have recently gotten lazy with my flash games website, UsuallyGames.

The games that I created myself are older than the sponsored games, and one of them received much more circulation, but I never installed any click tracking on them . I would estimate that the best performing of those three is currently at an effective cost of less than $0.001 per click.

Luckily though, the sponsored games are the topic of this post and I do have tracking data from them to share with you:

Note 1: You will notice that “Osiris II: Curse of Osiris” has an eCPC of over 1 cent… I can explain! That game was commissioned when my motivation for UsuallyGames was at an all-time high, but was finished when that motivation was destroyed. I was making an insane ROI by displaying Yahoo Publisher Network ads, then my account was shut down for low quality traffic. Because of this, I never submitted the game to other websites, all of the promotion was done by the developer.

Note 2: Plays refers to the number of times the particular game was played on UsuallyGames, not the number of times it was played in total. Clicks refers to the number of times a unique visitor was sent to UsuallyGames through a link in the flash game.

Anyways, back to how you can implement this strategy. You first need to decide what website you want to send traffic to. It doesn’t need to be an arcade website, but should definitely fit with that same target demographic. Prepare a nice logo, preferably a Flash animation, that you can have the developer place in their game. Also prepare some type of tracking system so that you can evaluate your investment.

Once you have all of that sorted out, it’s time to find a game to sponsor. This really isn’t that hard, there are tons of people who make these games for fun and have no idea that someone is willing to give them money for a sponsorship. The trick is to develop relationships with these game developers so that you can make a sponsorship offer before their game is released (the last thing you want is an “unsponsored” version of the game floating around).

The best way to contact game developers is to participate in development communities such as FlashKit and NewGrounds. A lot of the members at FlashKit are very skeptical of sponsorships, especially if you are not an active participant in their community. The NewGrounds community, on the other hand, is generally very receptive to sponsorship offers. What I used to do (and will probably continue to do in the near future) is browse the NG Flash Portal on a daily basis. When I noticed a game developer that obviously had talent, I would send them an email with a sincere complement and offer to sponsor their future games (upon review).

That’s really all there is to it. The rest is up to your relationship, negotiation, and cooperation skills. Once your sponsorship offer has been met with an interested response, it is up to you to make the developer want to be sponsored by you. If you do a good job at this, giving them a very pleasant experience, they will most likely contact you about all of their future games.

Also, to protect yourself and your investment, always make sure you write up some kind of contract that the two of you can sign before completing the transaction.

This post is already quite long, so I am going to break it up into two parts. The second part will deal with promoting the game you have sponsored and getting the most clicks for your dollars, driving the eCPC down to unheard of levels.

Update: Continue reading this series at How To Get Targeted Entertainment Site Traffic for $0.003/Click (Or Less) – Part 2