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Here’s my follow-up to “How to Get Targeted Entertainment Site Traffic for $0.003/Click (Or Less) - Part 1” where I discussed the practice of sponsoring Flash games as a method for generating traffic for your entertainment site. In this post I am going to talk about how you should go about promoting your new-found marketing material.

When you made your agreement to sponsor a game, you should have included two very important protective clauses:

  1. The game can be freely distributed (but not modified) by anyone, and you are not liable if any websites incorrectly list you as the author. The real author should make it prominent throughout the game that he/she is the author.
  2. The agreed upon version of the game, including all agreed upon sponsorship material, should be the only version ever released on the internet. If another version is spread, some form of compensation should be granted.

The reason for having these two clauses is so that you can make sure the game spreads virally without having to worry about technicalities and also so that you have protection against a “non-sponsored” game being released and diluting your investment.

OK, now that we got that out of the way, you are ready to start promoting it. This is very easy to do because there are thousands upon thousands of flash game/arcade websites on the internet. I would suggest submitting your game to the top websites and letting smaller websites grab it from there. Also, for maximum viral effect, make sure you include a link in the game to either instructions for putting the game on their website or to a “games for your website” page.

It’s sometimes difficult to get your game featured on the larger sites, especially AddictingGames.com, unless you have contacts/relationships with them. Try to email them and develop some kind of relationship, put links to their sites on yours (even if your site is small, they will still appreciate it), and then submit your game. Here are the websites that I submit new games to (links go directly to submission pages):

Those are the only sites that I manually submit to. They collectively get so much traffic that tons of other arcade site owners will use them as sources for new games. If you submit crap games, you probably won’t get featured on these sites, but as long as you games are of decent quality, they are usually happy to list them.

Keep in mind that these sites are very popular and so they will likely have a large waiting list ahead of you. Just be patient and your games will eventually make it to their front pages, send you a ton of traffic and getting your games picked up by many smaller sites.

Take a look at this traffic graph for the month of October 2006. I only released on game that month, Alien Carnage. You can see the traffic spikes as a game was featured on various websites:

usuallygames_spikes.gif

Also take note at the visual difference in page views and visits. The traffic I was receiving was quality traffic; the visitors were browsing multiple pages on the site.

Well that wraps up this [small] series on generating entertainment traffic through Flash game sponsorships. I hope you found it helpful and I urge you to try it out. It will only cost you between $300 and $800, but the amount of traffic you can claim for that price is tremendous. I don’t receive as much traffic as I did when I was actively releasing games, but I do still receive about 2,000 uniques per day, all as a result of sponsoring games.