How do I advertise a game

Can anyone give any advertise my game? It's an online football management game, and it's free. I thought that with it being football, and free, it wouldn't be too difficult to attract at least a few dozen people, but pay-per-click advertising has been a total waste of money and I'm not sure how else to advertise. I don't have a huge budget, but my game is fully working and tested and I'd like to see it running with a small community at least. I'd be happy with 50 players, but since pay-per-click isn't effective, are there any other places people can advise?

I'm searching around for places to link it and so on, but haven't found anything good.

Also, any tips on basic SEO and how to improve my webpage?

damn dude your marketing skills suck? you are asking as for a fcking advice and you can't even market your game to us? where is the link? if you invested all that energy into the game and are asking us to help you using the chance to provide url to your game and give it more exposure would be a good start and it would even be good SEO to have as many links to your webpage as possible. damn newbies! ;)

Here is what I would do, I would make dosen of youtube videos with it showcasing it's best features, put in some cool background music, people on youtube seem to appricate it even more.

Then register at every possible sport forum out there where there is even a slightes chance people may like your game and THEN get this, post this same question you posted to us, and also provide a link to it and few youtube screenshots.

That way people wanting to help you will atleast take a look at your game. And then if after 100 websites nobody is intersted you know what you have to do. You have to be strong and kill it. If you can't do it, I will do it, just give me the gun and I'll kill your game! ;)

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@maximo: Having a bad day?

Try to get it reviewed on a few sites, type "casual game reviews" into Google, etc. You could try BinaryJoy for example. Reviews are the best marketing if it's positive imho but you can also try free listings on popular download sites.

Yeah Maximo, no need to be like that. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was allowed to post links. Anyway, thanks for the tips, will look into it.

maximo: Programmers often make for completely inept salesmen. I find coding comes naturally, but I have the marketing ability of a brick.

on a side note unless you stump up licencing fees you wont be able to use real football names/shirts/players etc
but if you put all this in a text file that the player can edit ...

that shook you up a little bit, now you have a better clue what to do ;) be agressive and do your best :)

Vinyl is right, I can program, but I can't market. I got lucky when I was younger and started my own business, that it seemed to just sell itself. I was hoping the internet with it's vast pool of potential customers would be fairly simple, but I was proved wrong. I'm going to have to do some research and see what I can do.

Ginger, I'm not using real-life football names, so I'm safe on that score.

Here's the link, so you can check :p

http://www.soccerstaronline.com/

And yes, the webpage isn't very good either, I'm not a webpage designer either :p

Try Project Wonderful for some really cheap advertising. You can get a large number of visitors for a dollar or two, and there's quite a big selection of sites to advertise on. After a week or two of using the campaign options, you can usually figure out which adverts convert best to get more out of your budget.

The website is broken. The pictures are links, but they do not link to anything.

The website is not 'broken' the large screens are mostly not there, that's all.

I think overall it's ok, you could do with more than one page though, a separate page for the download with a version number and recommended spec, an about/contact page and maybe a simple intro/home page in addition to the feature page you have now would help. On a design note, the text is a little too close to the edge of the table and the sidebar is a bit too wide.

Yeah, I'm really bad with websites. I basically copied the site from my main site at www.soccerstar.org.uk and have struggled trying to get it all to fit together. I'm not sure why the pictures won't download, I've never had that problem at my end :(

I think the page does the basic job but obviously it could be so much better. Does having multiple pages help the site with rankings etc?

Hmmm actually I see what you mean about the larger pages, something's up there, I'll fix that, thanks for spotting it :)