This guide is on how to promote gaming lead gens on Facebook/other social networks + PPV.

Online Gaming Prelude
-Online gaming is huge! Notice all the new games coming out that are promoted via affiliate marketing. 1 year ago it wasn’t like this at all. Game leadgens weren’t nearly as popular. There were no where near as many niches to choose from, and new games weren’t popping up every week. It’s now the opposite! New games are always coming out for you to promote and switch to increase your leads, and you now have games in specific niches for much more accurate targeting which in turn should boost your ROI.

Top 3 Gaming Leadgen Offers [As of Dec 21st, 2010]
*Payouts will change based on country the lead is from.

Neverblue’s Top 3
1. Dungeons and Dragons Online ($1.30)
2. Outspark Games – Fiesta ($1.65)
3. Grand Chase ($1.50)

EWA’s Top 3
1. Wizard101 ($0.95)
2. Shaiya (INTL)
3. Shaiya (North America)

WolfStormMedia Top 3
1. Zoomumba
2. Aika
3. Castle of Heroes

Those are the top 3 games for each of those networks.
As you can see not all networks share the same games. This is a good thing though! More options and more niches so you can diversify yourself and not be cluttered with everyone else!

Gamer Demographics (your target market?)
-Like most offers, games will convert with everyone, but theirs always a target market that will perform best. In this case it’s pretty well known that games are more commonly played by Males 12-20. This is your target market, but you don’t want to end there AT ALL! If you want to scale and double or triple your gross revenue you need to expand these games into other well converting demo’s and you can do that by being creative with good targeting.

UPDATE:
Justin Dupre mentioned that promoting gaming lead gens to people under 18 will likely get you booted from the offer. Which is true, because the games need to convert to paying users eventually. So you want to promote game lead gens to over 18! If your promoting game ‘downloads’, then under 18 is as good as gold!

By using certain keywords & images:
- You can target Males 21-30
- Females 12-20 (There are female orientated games too!)
- International countries
I’ll talk about all this in more detail below.

Facebook Keywords
This is your key weapon for diversifying yourself from the crowd so you have little to no competition and can keep your campaigns running for months instead of days. This is when you have to be creative and think of unique angles to take when promoting the game of your choice. Let me explain with examples.

You can advertise MMORPG games to people who already “like”
- Warcraft, World of Warcraft, Diablo II, Diablo III, etc…

You can advertise Shooter games to people who “like”
- COD, Counter Strike, etc…

You can advertise Racing games to people who “like”
- The Fast & The Furious, Tokyo Drift, Gran Turismo, Ken Block

Get even more specific, make a “rally” only campaign for a racing game
Advertise racing games to people who “like”
- World Rally Championship (WRC), DiRT, Ken Block, Subaru, WRX, STi, Travis Pastrana, Monster Energy Drink, Redbull, Jalopnik…

See what i’m doing here? I’m creating my own niche around a related game. The competition here will be ZERO!!!!

Go more general and advertise one of the top Network games to people who “like”
-Gamespot.com, Gotfrag.com, Forums.Filefront.com, Gamertalk.com, Gamehourz.com (these are all keywords on Facebook, just drop the .com’s)

Just make sure your images work as a team with your keywords! I’ll explain more below.

Creating CTR Without Limits
Everything i mentioned about Facebook keywords is 100% completely useless unless your images and copy relate to your “idea”.

Your CTR is going to be strongly affected by your images, so you want unique images that capture a high CTR, but that also connect well to your keywords. I’ve reached 2% CTR before on Facebook, and this combo is the way to do it. (For the record 2% CTR gives you 1cent clicks for weeks straight!)

Tip:
Usually ‘gameplay’ images don’t yield high CTR. ie: screenshots from the game.

I can’t show you good images for a unique campaign with keywords, you’ll have to come up with that yourself. Here’s some examples of good and bad images for a general gaming campaign.

Good (high CTR)

Bad (low CTR)

PPC Traffic Sources:
Facebook
Myspace
Mochi Media

Gaming Media Buys:
(these are networks with a large inventory of gaming-only website publishers)
Oberon Media
Ad2Games

Targeting Females
Girls play these games too, i promise you that! You just need to refine your targeting. Keywords are a MUST when targeting girls with game offers. This is an untapped market, just choose a top converting game that doesn’t look like the movie Rambo, and target it around some popular media… vampires, werewolves, ryan shackler, hairstyling, ideas are endless! Oh look free inspiration –> http://www.seventeen.com/

International
The following games accept international traffic! (+Many many more that i haven’t listed)
- Outspark Games – Fiesta ($1.65)
- Grand Chase ($1.50)
- Shaiya INTL
- Zoomumba

Expand into international lands, or even start off there! Why are you not advertising in India, what are you scared of?

These game offers can be pushed year around, they’re stable, and there are so many angles to take that if your creative you’ll never run out of ideas! Start promoting them now, follow this guide and you can’t fail!

Part 2 will show you how to promote these offers with PPV traffic!