Left 4 Dead is an upcoming co-op multiplayer game from Valve, the guys behind Half Life 2. It is a 'survival horror' style game where the aim is to escape and evade the hordes of 'infected' (read: Zombies) which inhabit each level.

The blurb from the game developer goes:

The game is now slated for an August or September 2008 release.

I took a look around the 'net and I found very little in the way of decent forums for this game. Just the steampoweredforums section for it and one other fansite with a forum attached (running minibb).

I figured there was a void that could be filled with a dedicated discussion forum so I set up, and recently opened: L4D Forums ~~ Don't get Left 4 Dead

Right now I am trying to gather as much information about the game to post it in the News Forum as possible. I have also submitted sitemaps to both Google and Yahoo so hopefully I'll start getting some hits. Currently I have almost ZERO funds due to having to buy vB and opting for vBSEO for this so I can't launch an adwords campaign just yet. I want to promote this heavily and I want to do it on the cheap.

I'm looking to you guys to help me with promoting the forums. How do I go about it? Any ideas welcomed.

Cheers.

Alan

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I'm not really sure how the steam forums work, but I assume they have signatures. If that's true, just throw the link to your forums in your signature on the steam forums and just make good posts, I could easily see people coming over and joining that way. Other than that, I don't really know, creating interest is something I'm really bad at

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I have registered on steampowered, just waiting for my account to pass through the moderation queue.

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I just checked Google for my ranking on searches for "l4d forums" and "l4d forum". I'm hitting #1 and #2 respectively. Also on the second page, thirteenth result for "l4d" which pleases me. As more content gets added I hope to see that jump up to the first page. Woo!!

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Oh, also, Steampowered do not allow signatures but I do have a homepage link in place.

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Halflife2.net » Left 4 Dead

Munro may also affiliate with you

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This is something I found works good for unreleased games and brings lots of traffic. Bookmark the preview pages on gaming sites (ign, gamespot, etc.) and check daily. As soon as one of them releases new trailer or clip download it, and create a youtube account with a username relating to the game where you can upload all these clips (the gaming sites only put them on their sites not youtube) so try and be the first to get the video on there, use strong keywords in the title and description and put your url as the first thing in description. Your videos will be first and thus will get the most views and if that works out it will be the videos that show up first in search later on because of the number of views and good keywords. Throw in a line in the description of where the video is from if you want (it's probably watermarked already anyways)

This brought the most traffic for me (and still does) for a game specific forum I did

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HTC Mobile Forums - Pocket PC and Smartphone Discussion

That is a fantastic idea.

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I'm very impressed by my Google ranking so far. Currently 8th on a search for L4D. Woo!!

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Cool, really helps to have a good domain like that, did you register the alternates? Like left4deadforums.com? Could redirect to the main domain or could have a keyword rich page that redirects after a few seconds, also helps against competition

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HTC Mobile Forums - Pocket PC and Smartphone Discussion