If Nevergrind can maintain the recent wave of traffic since March 22nd, this website is on track to hit one million pageviews in a year. That’s a big if, but I think it’s within reach:
Nevergrind has been riding high on a wave of zero-dollar marketing efforts for the recent Kickstarter campaign. The marketing efforts have primarily targeted forums with high degrees of relevance to either indie games, RPGs, browser games, classic EverQuest, Diablo 2, or even in random places based on a gut feeling.
Courting this wide variety of communities was tough at times, as I was often accused of being a spammer. In some eyes that may be the case, but for many others I was greeted with joyous exultation, thanking me for introducing the game to them because it was “exactly what they were looking for”. So it’s a tough gauntlet to negotiate. On one hand people will hate you for sharing a free game in a somewhat relevant forum that you worked on for 31 months. On the other hand you will get through to a percentage of people, all while risking being banned or flamed with impunity.
The only battle damage that I actually took was probably from reddit, which got me shadow banned from at least one sub-reddit (/r/games). None of my comments show up there anymore. For now I just stick to /r/nevergrind, but I’m sure I’ll make a second pass through before the Kickstarter ends. I’ll engage my shields and fly as low as possible. If you want some advice, just completely avoid the large sub-reddits and have someone else post on your behalf. Post in the small, lightly policed sub-reddits and you’ll hardly ever take any flak for self-promotion.
Reddit’s policy is to “be a redditor with a project”, not a “project with a reddit account”. I guess that’s easy for them to say, but I don’t have time to sit on reddit all day posting about cats and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I’m too busy raising three kids and developing Nevergrind! In any case, reddit is definitely worth the hassle. Reddit has been my #1 referral driver by far ever since I waged my assault throughout their inner sanctum. Just be careful in the bigger sub-reddits and don’t get banhammered.
