Legit ways to promote Kickstarter?

Afternoon Bombers,

I recently launched my first Kickstarter campaign for a small project I've been working on for the past few months. After a few days of launching I've been receiving a lot of emails from people/agencies offering to promote the campaign... it seemed great at first but up until I actually looked at these agencies' websites it seems like a lot of them are straight up scams.

Right now I'm really confused and you lot are the most chilled/understanding community so I want to ask you two questions -

Where would be a good place to start promoting a Kickstarter campaign?

Are any Kickstarter advertising agencies actually worth it?

Cheers!

I see what you did there, stealth promoting your KS on the forums ;)

But yeah, stay away from those shitty companies. If you don't have a real marketing budget then just hope a games news website or someone internet famous picks up your project and does the marketing for you. If your game is good enough hopefully that will happen.

Your best bet is to network the people you know. And, yeah, tell everyone you know (don't be embarrassed) and urge them to pass on the news because it woudl really help you. All it really takes is a few people with a big network of friends or acquaintances.

No.

If you just google "advertise your kickstarter" there are tons of blogs and people recounting their personal experiences that mostly seem pretty insightful. I'm sure you can learn all you need there.

I'm in a similar position. I just signed up to Patreon and started a new blog to start posting comics. I'm going to be updating twitter whenever I get a new story done on the site and that kind of thing, but I am not starting out with any followers on there and no one really knows about my site.

Part of me wants to leverage the message boards I actually have a presence on, but I also hate the kind of shameless promotion and astroturfing people do for this kind of thing. I put up an update on here, but have resisted blogging or creating a forum about it.

You just have to think really hard about how you want to do this and how to get your current network of aquantainces interested and spreading the word without being a guerilla marketing dick about it. The disavantage you have is that there's a time limit on what you're doing while patreon alows me to spend months building up a small audience. You do have a pretty modest goal, so I don't think you'll have a lot of trouble getting to it with 25 days left (I haven't watched your video because I'm at work, but I'll check it out later.)

I wouldn't bother with the agencies and they'll probably cost a lot more than you're even asking for.

@oraknabo:

Cheers man, I haven't heard of Patreon before but I'll definitely check it out. When you're back from work you should post a link, I'll have a look at your comics.

@berezov: Patreon is like Kickstarter, but instead of getting funding for a single project, you get people to support you long-term. It was created mostly as an alternative to YouTube ads, but lots of journalists, artists and all kinds of other people have jumped into it.

I made this last weekend to put up on the Patreon site, but it also works as something other people can post around:

There are addresses at the end and I put the links in my "About Me" page on here, but I am pretty hesitant to push too hard on here. This will probably be the last time I mention it on the board for at least the rest of the month.

Well if it is a videogame how about you tweet your kickstarter to the game journalist you follow .... maybe soemone will like it and spread the word. Also if you are looking for money for your project , I dont believe you should waste what little you have on paying someone to promote you , I would undertsand if you had that kind of budget , but if you are starting you shouldnt waste it on ifs.

Well since you are only asking for a base goal of 200 pounds I can't imagine any outside agencies are even close to worth the cost even if they did work.

Rent a plane and drop url codes from the sky.

You might need to raise money to do that.

No clue what the best way to do this is. I think once you have enough of a game to play you should fire out demos to YouTubers and any site that is known to cover Kickstarter games.

@geraltitude: I agree. Finding someone with a built in audience and getting them interested can be really effective.