Assuming you have access to very cost-effective Flash animation professionals, would designing and making flash games that can be easily passed on to friends a good way to virally promote your service/product site? Perhaps if the focus of the game is both to educate the consumer as well as offer value to his social network maybe this would "prequalify" a large pool of users and result in targeted clicks? Your thoughs.
I think is a good way of promoting your site, specially with the amount of free arcades that are everywhere this days. You can do something like offering your free games to sites like http://www.gamesitescript.com/ for them to include your games on their packages. Also get in contact with arcade sites already running and with good traffic asking them to include your game. I think that will be a good promotion.
Very good point! Use existing games libraries as partners in distributing my promotional materials in addition to the viral network of a "refer a friend" function built into the game itself.
This is being done successfully by several entities! You even have the big corporations behind Pepsi, Coke, Miller Lite, Bud Lite, etc doing this. I would have thought this was a pretty obvious yes. Care to share access to your "very cost-effective Flash animation professionals" ? Thanks!
I would also like to know how you can do it cost effectively. I was looking into doing something like this, but didn't get anywhere. I had contacted a few game developers that already have a few games made that can be brought and included into your site, but unfortunately I could only include these games in my site and couldn't give them away for free with my link attached. I then looked into learning Flash MX so that I could creat some flash games of my own, but with other things that I have to do, I just couldn't find the time and also found it rather hard to learn as I was trying to learn it to quickly.
I'm friends with a kid here in Thailand that is a really good flash developer. I don't know what's on his plate right now, but if you PM me I can send him your contact details.
How does $799 a month Flash animator sound? I think that's cost-effective. One thing to keep in mind though: flash game promotion entails not just high quality animation work but story/gameplay/copy development.