Indie Game Dev Reality

By Christmas I aim to have doubled my traffic. Seems like a massive task, but in the past I have managed to double it within a few months, so it IS possible. Although last time I was aiming to go from about 300 daily visitors to 600. This time it's more like 1000 to 2000 =)

My 'Game for a link' promotion seems to be working fairly well and already got a lot of links back to my site, each of which are pulling a nice chunk of visitors. The next step is to send out a press release which will hopefully lead to even more linky goodness. Currently with just advetising this promotion on my site I reckon I'm getting about 1 link every 3 days or so. Each one of these links seems to be pulling an average of 20 users per day. This means that by christmas these links should be pulling an extra 600 visitors per day. Though the quality of this traffic may not be great, as not all of these sites will be games related. So although my traffic will have increased 60%, it doesn't mean my earnings will have. But possibly a press release will lead to more than an extra 600 per day.

It's important to note that links have two tasks: to get more traffic, and to improve search engine rankings. So the 'game for a link' promotion may end up improving my traffic by much more than the literal visitors I get sent.

Another way of getting links is through exchanges. I've already done a fair few of those and I think they do work, but each links value is likely to be minimal if you're just doing it through a small 'links' or 'partners' page. So instead I'm going to try some side wide link buttons. I put a link button on all my pages, and the partner links back to me on all their pages. This is great since it not only sends more visitors per exchange, but also gives a much higher search engine benefit. And setting one up takes the same amount of time as a normal exchange, so my ROI is much better for this kind of deal.

I've recently started hosting some flash games on my site which seems like a great way to get return visitors. Since people will have a reason to keep coming back to your site. Also there are a lot of sites that will link to your game page just to provide content to their users. For example I recently submitted Drakojan Skies to a certain site and the day they launched my game I got 4,500 extra visitors. Now I'm getting an extra 200 visitors per day just from that one submission. By adding more flash games and submitting them to sites like this I can quickly build up my traffic. Again these visitors will likely be of poor quality as they may not even find my shareware games or may only be interested in free stuff. But as this is such an easy way to get more traffic it seems worth it. If I try and add one game every week and submit to these sites I could have my daily traffic up by as much as 5,000.

Improving my search engine rankings is another sure fire way to get more traffic. I'm currently battling for 'shooting games' since this has quite a lot of people searching for it each day. Currently I'm 15th on google for this term. I estimate if I was #1 I'd get an extra 500 visitors per day. How to increase my rankings is a tough one, usually the process involves tweaking the wording on my site. If it results in a gain do more of the same, if it's a loss go back to how it was and try something else. Everytime I've worked on my rankings they have improved, so by doing every so often until christmas I'm confident I can nail an extra 500 visitors. These guys will probably be of good quality and well targetted to buy my games.