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How not to promote your website at the GMC

Marketing your site is quite obviously one of the most important aspects of running a website. Put simply, what use is a site without any visitors? The Game Maker Community lets members promote their sites in their forum signatures and by creating a topic about it in the Website Announcements section of the forum.

What not to do when posting your site in Website Announcements:

  • Lie about your domain – there is no benefit of doing this, it just makes you look <insert none offensive but still adequately derisory term here>.
  • Post a link to an unfinished site – what do you hope to gain from this, it is also against the forum rules. No link to an example of this, it happens many times a day.
  • Decide to make a new FreeWebs site after being told that FreeWebs is bad
  • Post a forum. Can’t you read?
  • Post a site without any Game Maker related content. Again, it seems that the young generation are become more illiterate (sounds like a thing old people would say – yuk!).
  • Include a long detailed history of the site. A short paragraph detailing what’s on the site and a link is sufficient. People don’t want to read your story of how you are working on your 6th clone game and are now head of your fifth global gaming empire, which by the way you aren’t.
  • Claim to be a registered company or anything similar. This is plain ridiculous – professional companies rarely use the grammar and spelling of people promoting ‘Incorporated’ sites. Unsurprisingly companies also decide against using poor ad-ridden hosts.
  • Reply to your responses with excuses such as you made the site in 6 minutes
  • Slag off around 50% of your potential visitors

Obviously this is not addressed at the typical Game Maker Blog reader.

What do you think?

8 Comments

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  1. The six minutes guy was a legend. He said his site was “back”, despite it not having any content or…anything.

    A fine list. Definately worth reading for advertising-website-on-GMC-typey-folk 🙂

  2. Heh, yah, maybe you should add a disclaimer to that, ex.

    “Disclaimer: the Game Maker Blog will not be held responsible when Leif902 and possibly the forum admin attempt to claim your life after following these suggestions.”

    nah, but you’re right, that is really annoying (I can’t lie, I probably did that too though when I created my first site)

    – Leif

  3. I know I sure did 🙂 DinoLand….

    Guess what it held?

    Ooo, ooo, actually, I’m going to write about it in the next markup, you’ll have to wait and see 🙂

    Robin

  4. Methinks most people will read this, and the go right back and advertise their site wrong again, which is a shame 🙁

    Robin

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