Community Advertising ?! Ideas

[Skynyrd]

This post is mainly for Jack and any other members whom have experience in this type of avenue.

We all promote UO Lost Lands aggressively in our inter web of UO buddies but what can the community do advertising wise to make some semblance of impact in getting the word out there?

I know Jack has spent his own time/$ advertising , I also remember a conversation we had and he seemed to have done a great deal of research on what was successful in promoting UO servers and what was not ?

Jack + Community , what advertising avenues could we do in our spare time to help the server grow ?
I recently stumbled upon a Reddit post of a group of friends looking for a SMALL t2a server on Reddit , unfortunately they were only pushed towards one server that was not lost lands. 

What type of websites , boards , links , etc can we do to make a difference ?
Reddit ?
YouTube videos ? 
Gaming forums ? 

If we had 25 members spending 30-45 minutes a week doing various advertising for the server I think it would be interesting to see the results. As at this point I don't believe retention or server quality is the issue , just getting people inside Britannia !

[Skrap]

Videos, Videos, Videos.

[Jack]

I think the answer is... well, anywhere really. Getting 1 new person to play the shard is a win and really makes more of a difference than you'd think.

Other shards have had large influxes of people in the past from unlikely places, I know UOForever had a lot of people join after someone posted about it on a body building forum a long while back. If you are part of any online communities, you might be surprised how many new players could be gained by posting about the shard in their off-topic section.

Reddit does bring in a number of players. The /r/ultimaonline sub is probably the easiest place to post about the shard, and it does result in players joining, it's just not a good idea to spam on reddit. I have posted in various other subreddits including /r/mmorpg and /r/pcgaming (there's probably a lot of others to tap into). When the shard came up we had a pretty huge response from /r/pcgaming resulting in 1000s of page views on our site. Ultimately a percentage of page views turn into players, so the biggest thing is getting people to visit our page in the first place.

Linking to http://uolostlands.com#video will also open a promotional video in a modal, on top of being a direct link to the site.

I have tried paid advertising including Facebook ads, but the Facebook advertisement was entirely a waste of money, I don't believe we got a single player from it. There may be other avenues I haven't thought of.

If we had 25 members spending 30-45 minutes a week doing various advertising for the server I think it would be interesting to see the results.

I totally agree. I'm aware most people wouldn't be interested in doing this, or think it wouldn't have much effect. But in my experience it certainly does. The effect is often delayed as people bookmark the shard to play when they have more free time.


Somewhat off topic to advertising:

People will come and go on UOLL, it's a matter of fact. The average person that starts up on a shard is going to last a couple of months or less. So not only do new people need to find us in order to gain players, but new players need to find us just to maintain the current client count. It's clients in vs clients out vs the amount of time it takes the average player to get bored.

What UOLL really has going for it now, that it didn't a year ago (on top of a great website, better Google ranks and many more activities for players to partake in), is we have nearly 3000 accounts made. That's a greater brand awareness, and many of those players will eventually pop their heads back in to play again.

[Abyz]

New faces are trickling in... It's getting better and better here. One thing that's pretty heartwarming to me is that we have a lot of strong competition in the current pvper ranks. Keep it up Jack!

[Skynyrd]

Thanks Jack I'll browse around and see what we can come up with.
If anyone has any other ideas post them here !

[Skrap]

I will advertise in the Magic: The Gathering blogs that I frequent.

[Skynyrd]

I have accounts in several darkfall / mortal online communities. Most people on there are former Uo players or sand boxers in general. As many people know darkfall players are either really unhappy w unholy wars or waiting 2 years for the darkfall 1 emu to be released. Could grab some attention that way.

The common theme I have come across following the gaming community. Almost every "new idea" "sandbox in early release" has someone posting somewhere "omfg remember ultima online I want that again "

I don't know any of these but I do know if you tap into the right role playing community you can up your client counts in a hurry. But not sure I know of any active ORC groups as I havnt seen a big one since it ipy

[Rapture]

There has been mention of a want for a heavier RP community from several new players I've seen peer into IRC. As Jack mentioned, it's just a matter of keeping the ones that come.