What are some inexpensive methods for font marketing?

I am an amateur type designer, and have just published a font. I’m not doing this full-time, so it’s more of a side-gig. Now, what are some simple methods of promoting the font online? I don’t have a budget, at least not yet. I’m currently relying on forums and other online communities for promotion, but currently seeing not much of traction, no surprise there.

What are some other methods of driving up the exposure?

Comments

  • Without a team to help you drive exposure, you need an external team to do it for you.
    Have you checked out MyFonts, or any other reseller? They (as all do) take a cut of your sales, but the exposure can be worth it many times over.
  • Try posting your work in typography related facebook groups with a decent discount. Facebook's paid advertisements can also be very cheap, but I don't think I've ever gotten much success with them.
  • Bhikkhu PesalaBhikkhu Pesala Posts: 210
    edited January 2019
    Create a blog to promote your work, or a website. The blog costs me nothing, the website hosting costs about £40 a year, but free-hosting packages are good enough for something like this. 

    If you're an amateur, and don't need to make money from your fonts, you could add a PayPal link to make it easy to make donations. 
  • Consider with Facebook that images with more than 20% "text" are penalized. Typeface specimens and promo graphics are practically invisible and if you want to pay to boost them, you can't. Don't waste your time with Facebook unless you can come up with ways of thwarting their text detector. There's a tool for testing images. Free sites like DaFont and 1001fonts.com get very high traffic. On Dafont my fonts get about 5 million downloads per year, not sure how many page views.

    I believe that all the traffic MyFonts receives from DaFont is due to you. :D:D

    How does it work???
  • @Ray Larabie and @JoyceKetterer
    Those tips are extremely insightful, thanks.
  • ValKalinicValKalinic Posts: 49
    edited July 2020
    Rob Barba said:
    This one might sound strange, but it's worked for me: Work with indie game developers
    To build on this approach, has anyone here tried selling some of your fonts directly to game developers, by listing them on sites that specialize in selling game development resources in general (such as GameDevMarket)? If so, is it worth the additional effort, and would you recommend some sites to the rest of us?
  • Chris LozosChris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    I did have one gamer buy a font from me just out of the blue.
  • ValKalinicValKalinic Posts: 49
    edited July 2020
    I did have one gamer buy a font from me just out of the blue.
    It definitely happens - a relatively known studio did once buy one of mine (from Fontspring, with a standard application license if I'm not mistaken) but sadly I don't think they ended up using it in the game they were working on at the time.

    While these bigger game developers buy fonts from MyFonts/Fontspring/FontShop as any other company would, the sites that sell general game development resources (such as GameDevMarket) are actually aiming at a different customer base; that of the hobby and indie devs. So the smaller developers who do use these specialized sites, I assume, aren't really looking for fully professional fonts and the typical application prices that go along with them.

    That's why I'm wondering if it's even conceivable to have any success with targeting the developer market directly; the bigger developers will do it through MyFonts(&similar) and the small ones through DaFont(&similar) - there might not be much middle ground.
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