Welcome to the third community writing challenge! Here's how it's going to work for the month of June. Each day or so I'm going to post a new community challenge topic. All you need to do is provide a response to it according to the supplied rules. The winning response according to the MOST upvotes at the end of the month will receive a month of GDNet+.

We are looking to collectively as a community build a list to as many valuable resources on the posted challenge as possible.

Some rules for every challenge:

1. You do NOT need to supply a complete answer or topic reference, but it may help garner more upvotes

2. All descriptions must be written by you with your own justifications for inclusion of the resource

CHALLENGE #2: How would you promote a new Indie game?

Description: You've slaved for thousands of hours and put in that monumental effort needed to complete your game project. For a moment let's say that the platform can be whatever you want it to be. What would you do to get out there and try to make it a commercial success? What strategies would you employ starting from ground zero to get the word out? Share your own ideas or provide links to other sites that have helpful resources on marketing your game.

Rules:

1. Write your own original ideas on how you promote a new game or share links to sites that are awesome for that purpose
2. Post one or more links to great resources with the following: title, url, author, and a brief description of what the tool is
3. Anything you post is fair game to be included in an article without attribution - we are just looking to create awesome resource pages here of the best stuff
4. Any site online is fair game as long as you link to the final tool destination (ie. don't link to any other resource mega list pages)
5. You may update your original responses as many times as you like!

I'm sure it's easier when you have a ton of social reach to begin with, but what do you do to bootstrap your efforts and get things off the ground? Right now even if you have a few ideas take a moment and share. This challenge will remain open until June 11th.

I'm with Marc... cross platform is the way to go - but not only that, you need to spread the word as much as you can.

My "Escape from Alcatraz" game is doing better than I expected: around 15k downloads, most of them (around 9k) from iOS.

I submitted the game to several review sites (I just googled "Android review" and "iOS review" - but I don't think any review has been published about it), I posted on twitter, on facebook... and although I do not have many followers, the word is spreading I guess :)

Some evidence that my game is 'appearing' to the public is that its listed on Metacritic and on GameSpot (first of my games to achieve this!), and I even found a page where people asks for hints to pass certain parts of the game =)

I'm developing a word puzzle game called word smashing and have recently run into this problem.

I'm trying to get to as many platforms as possible, so far you can play on facebook, chrome webstore and on the website, soon it will be games.com, many other portals and eventually mobile.

I think its important to give users a lot of ways to share your game.

Also something important that i need to do is to think of some way of monetizing so that i can actually afford advertising (create a paid version, subscription, in game purchases ect).

It's very difficult to make it by yourself and its surprising how much help is out there for people who ask, i would even suggest to the brave putting code publicly on github and asking friends to have a look (even if your code is a mess it could help get your name out).

Using forums like this to get help and get your name out there is great.

One thing that has helped me a great deal is that the company i work for helped me run a free logo design contest, so reach out to your employers or friends in business as well and they could be surprisingly supportive.

There are several things that Indies should be aware of before they try to make it big with some of their proudest title.

1. Indies are proactive individuals with very different kind of approach towards creation. Therefore the way you approach promoting your game is in similar way as you create your game. You will most probably be doing it on your own. Twitter, Facebook, and a blog dedicated to your title. People love picture more than words. So really start talking a snapping pictures early. This will create some sort of place where they can go to find your game but also find out more about it.

2. As Indie don't advertise on big sites. Even when you have lot of money which I guess not it will be absolutely pointless because there will be better titles than yours. You will be wasting time and money. Rather find small or medium sites where your title has much better chance to attract. Think about who loudly play your game but be realistic about it and think where these people gather.

3. Do not release your game as soon as you Finnish it. Create an interests first. If you have spent all your time making it than you should spent at least half of the time on promoting it and creating awareness. Screenshots, videos even trailers. You don't stand a chance with one screenshot of your game saying coming soon. Give people a story on how did you created your masterpeace. Some people might wanna create something like you have and tell everyone around that their game is like yours.

Last - don't stop believing in yourself. You can always make it better second time.

Mike