This post is going to be a little different than most since I will be focusing on helping sponsors rather than developers, but hopefully they will still find it interesting. Alright, so you’ve just sponsored a flash game for $X and you’re trying to at least make it back, what do you need to make this happen?

There are several different strategies used to maximize how many people get to your site from the game you’ve sponsored.

Basics

The Essentials The standard things in every sponsorship include the Splash Screen at the beginning of the game, a More Games link on the menu, and Linked Branding throughout the rest of the rest of the game. These will get you a decent amount of users to come to your site, but nowhere near the amount if you were to implement ALL of the suggested items.

Branding You should have branding on every single screen of the game, and all the branding should be linkable expect in the actual game play. This won’t result in many direct plays, but it constantly plants seeds of your portal in the back of players heads which will make them either likely to visit it on their own or be more likely to click on branding next time they play a game sponsored by you. You should also have Play More Game links on both the game complete/game over screen and the shop/upgrade screen if the game has one.

Advanced

(These may require you to create things for your site)

Exclusive Content This is one that can bring in a huge amount of visitors and force players to continue returning to your site if they want the full experience of the game. This can range from anything as a small aesthetic item for the character to several levels being locked at the sponsors site. Try not to go overboard with this and only ask for some non-essential items to be exclusive (A level editor would be a great example). Make sure it’s advertised clearly in the game.

Badges If your site has badges, take advantage of them! Players love gaining achievements, a lot of players refuse to even touch games before they land on Kongregate because they don’t want to waste time playing somewhere else when they will have to do it again on Kong. A link in the menu should be enough to advertise this feature.

Highscores If the game is relatively short and score based this is a great one to implement. Unlike MochiScores which are all in game, your scores should be located on your site. This forces players to see the sponsors site after they click the submit button. Although this many not transfer to many return visitors, it can be a nice source of traffic.

Walkthroughs A large amount of hits can come from here. The click through rate on walkthroughs can be extremely high assuming the game is fun and has at least one point where the user will get stuck and not know what to do next. I personally end up clicking around 75% of walkthrough links for games that I play for more than 3 minutes. Make sure this is widely visible at all points during the game. If the game is good, this should be able to bring in more plays than any of the prior suggestions.

Other

CPMStar Ads While these won’t drive traffic to your site, they can help you earn a decent amount of money off the game you sponsor. Correctly implemented ads can earn you eCPM’s of $.50 – $1.00 with CPMStar. Placing them both at the beginning of the game, and at the game over screen with a forced action to change screens and a forced load time will result in the highest eCPM possible. If you happened to sponsor a really successful game for a reasonable amount, you can earn your money back from just these.

Performance Based Deals This will probably end up costing you more money in the end, but hopefully it will pay for itself. This type of sponsorship encourages the developer to distribute his game all of the web trying as hard as possible to get on every last portal. Some games are able to reach almost every large portal in existence from just viral distribution, but for the majority of games an extra push from the developer will help the game earn a lot more plays.

Now get to sponsoring (preferably my games).