Wheres The Marketing

What sort of effort is Manifesto devoting to marketing itself, both in terms of aggregating gross site traffic and promoting individual games?

Patrick:

Since our financial resources are limited at present, our marketing efforts are mostly on the PR side. (Reuters picked up on The Shivah today, btw.) We are doing some limited advertising via Google and on sites like Fark.com... And we should have some interesting announcements in the next month or two.

CNN.com was running the Reuters story on the front page today. It was kind of exciting to see.

I hope I didn't sound like a heckler, lots of intension room for interpretation communicating online.

I think some title-specific OGMing might do a lot for you all, targeting forums and such. Technically all that requires is the time of someone who knows the tactics well.

Meanwhile, I'm going to shut up and get back to doing my part.

Speaking of doing my part, finally got some work done on the indie gamers page when I noticed the nice banner link I had for Manifesto was gone. When I traced the url I got nothing. If you've taken that image down, could you re-host it, so that I might leech to the effect of driving traffic your way? There are more generic images I could use, like the white background logo, but that banner, with the old lady and the persian guy and so on, was just gold.

Thanks.

http://www.manifestogames.com/image/tid/456

I think the marketing for this site is doing very well. It's already at an Alexa rank of 50,009 (as of right now). Not the greatest, but that's a better rank than igf.com, escapistmagazine.com, tigsource.com, even gametunnel.com -- pretty good for the site's first few months.

It'd be nice to hear general sales figures announcements, like "1000th game sold through Manifesto Games!" once in awhile, so we could know how the site was doing in that aspect.

Thanks Bill, got that banner fixed.

I'm only critical because I care so much.

Paul, (erm, sorry, Rinku) may be right; but my concern is that there's a feedback loop that Manifesto might be missing out on. If you can just get enough registered users buying from you, you start to clear overheads that allow you to reinvest in marketing, which increase your base, which increases your revenues, allowing to invest more in marketing and so on. Eventually VCs see you have a robust earnings profile and re-evaluate the "unworldly hippie" tag, and then you can fund games and do really ballsy marketing with some saturation appeal, print ads in hardcore mags, maybe invest in a distribution deal to get Manifesto gift cards out there (its the future of retail, IMO).

One thing that needs to be done, that doesn't cost a lot of resources in the way that banner ad place or even adwords does, is some node-specific SEO. I'm telling you, you can increase your download volumes on potential hits by as much as 40% if you optimize the search engine hooks of some of your pages. For instance, Steam Brigade, a quality title that could be a big seller for you, comes up with Arcade Town and Big Fish, then links to meta-content like blog reviews, and Manifesto comes up on the second page. Your unwillingness to host casual games doesn't work both ways, and you're definetly losing sales, perhaps a significant monthly volume, to competing portals because your SEO is below-optimal. This is something that can be done practically for free if you know how, its like an indie dev testing and iterating on the UI of a game and getting a better conversion rate.