8 Ways to promote your RPG product and Not Spending Any $
These are in
the order of what generates the most number of sales beyond people just stumbling across
your product.
Direct Mailing
Generate a
free preview of your Product and upload it to DriveThruRPG/RpgNow (I do this
every month with Pathways) before you release your Product. Then when you
release your product, use DriveThruRpg/RpgNow’s email a customer feature. You
will generate an email to almost every customer who has ever downloaded a copy
of one of your products including that free preview. (Don’t send an email like
this more than once a week).
Social Media
Facebook,
Google+, Twitter, (in that order of importance). You need to be active on it
every weekday. You need to be talking about your products and not just posting links to your products on sales, you
need to engage your fans. If all you do is post releases people will stop
watching your feed even though they may “like it”
Your Website
Focus on one
thing. You can have links to your sales sites and other product lines but your
front page should be the product you want out the most, and it should be your
most recent release. A website that is not
updated with some regularity is useless.
Message Boards/Rpg related sites
You should
be active on the message board that is the most popular for your product! Do
not just post press releases, engage your fans. But you do need to post press
releases to every message boards and sites that allow announcements and news.
Blogs
You should
be blogging about your product, before it comes out, design notes, art previews, anything that
relates to its behind the scenes productions, and even snippets of stuff, You
can link to this from your social media. I prefer blogger, but wordpress is
also good. Visits to your blog can drive
your sales as people become interested in what you write about and want more. This
needs to be updated every weekday.
Podcast/video cast
You should
be doing a podcast or a video cast, audacity is free so you can edit your
podcast and blogger has a very simple way to get your stuff set up for Itunes. Heck,
we do a live streaming videocast with the Demiplane of Gaming via google hangout;
this takes no real tech skill. Also ask other podcasters and videocasters if
you can be on their show! They need guests and you need promotion, so don’t be
afraid to ask for things.
Advanced Review Copies
This one is
harder to gauge with level of importance because one cannot do it with PDF only
releases because no one can preorder a PDF, but having a review available the
day it goes live is extremely helpful to sales. Anytime after that the review
is not nearly as useful. An advanced review can also point out problems and
give you time to fix them don’t be trigger happy to activate your product as
soon as you upload it (I am bad about this.) Good consistent reviewers generally
need two weeks advance to review a book (some are much cooler than this but it’s
a good rule of thumb).
Now you do
have to spend your time doing all these.
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