What We're Learning: Share the Love


If you're marketing your game, there are few practices easier and more fruitful than marketing other people's games, too. We live in a very small sea and the rising tide lifts all boats. Take a look at the chart above for Josh Roby's Kickstarter campaign for his Houses of the Blooded supplement. Note the spike where Do's Kickstarter launched around April 9th. Josh explains it best via Twitter: "Lookit the curve, man. It had dropped down to nothing, coasting to the deadline, and then all the sudden Boom! I got a lot of backers through You Might Also Like links."

Amazon's On To Something: It shouldn't be surprising that a mega-retailer should know a thing or two about people's buying habits. When a shopper is in a buying mood, they like seeing other things that would complement their recent purchase. Thus, we have the "You Might Also Like..." feature. Get to know what other projects are similar to yours and promote them enthusiastically.

Make Your Project Easy to Stumble Upon: Yeah, this is where "SEO" rears its ugly head. Know what your project is and find the right key words that would make it show up in searches on Kickstarter. In my case, I categorized Do under Games, but I also used key words "storytelling," "evil hat," and "airbender," in the project description.

Share the Love with Greg: Greg Stolze is the most prolific creator on Kickstarter. Not an exaggeration, he's actually had more Kickstarter campaigns than anyone else in the history of the site. Few people have been in the game business as long as Greg who are still innovating new ways to promote and market their games independently. He was holding ransoms even before Fundable got its start. Now that Kickstarter is on the scene, that makes producing small, low-price, open-content PDF supplements that much easier. Toss a couple bucks his way for the new REIGN supplement. It's got giant monsters! Giant monsters! Yay!

You might also like... Amaranthine.

By the way, thank you to everyone who has RT'd a link to Do's Kickstarter. You've given us plenty of love to share.

What We're Learning is a series of lessons we've learned from crowdfunding and marketing Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

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