Recently I was playing Pencilkid’s game Bowja the Ninja and came across a fun, non-intrusive marketing tactic for Flash game developers or publishers to get traffic back to their site. (It worked on me at least!) For those of you who aren’t familiar with this game, I’ve embedded the game for you to play below - or if you’re a publisher, you can grab it from its MochiAds for Publishers page here. In the game, you are a little ninja who is intent on completing a stealth mission to destroy a machine.

Any website owner or developer that distributes their games often want the user to come back to their site. The reasoning for wanting this is pretty clear - the more users that go to your site, the more money you can make from advertising. However, the approach that many take is impeding the user experience in some way. I would call this the “stick approach” where you make it painful for them unless they go. For example, many games require you to visit their site in order to view or submit high scores for that game. I’ve also seen games that only allow you to play the first couple levels, and then afterward you can unlock the remaining levels only if you return to that site. While this is effective, it’s also disruptive to the user’s gaming experience.

So how do you change the stick into a carrot and get the user to want to go? Instead of making it painful for the gamer, Pencilkids entices the user to go back to their site by offering additional value. Once you manage to finally beat the game, you see a screen like this. I’ve blurred out the password so I don’t spoil the fun of playing and beating the game. :)

The site contains a message with a secret code for you to unlock the Bowja vault and claim a secret reward! This was the carrot that got me back to the site. I was really intrigued and went all the way to their site to claim the prize, where I could see there were many other games to play, vaults to unlock, and other things for me to explore.

The Bowja the Ninja vault contains wallpapers, an animated congratulations card, an invitation to purchase their t-shirt, and other goodies. This is a win-win because it builds the game’s brand, provides an exciting reason to go back to the site and the process of finding it exposes the user to tons more ways to interact with your site and brand.

There’s a ton of potential for this. Here are some ideas I came up with:

• AIM buddy icons of your game or character
• Embed codes for users to put on their MySpace page
• Invites to install their apps if you have a Facebook app for your game
• Discount codes for buying a premium version of your game
• Special “secret” level or movie about yourself
• A badge to proudly display on your site or profile that you beat the game
• … so much more!

Kudos to the Pencilkids team for some smart ideas!

What would you put in your vault?