A lot of things have been said already, so I'll add just one idea to the topic, but this one has really surprised me.
Our itch.io site got over 500 views from a mere comment that we wrote in the article of a national newspaper (Austria). Our game is free, but according to the analytics, one of those views even resulted in a fairly generous donation. The article was gaming related, but the newspaper overall is a mainstream one and aiming for high quality articles. Whenever doing something like that I recommend being an actual part of the community and not just abusing the site to promote the game. This principle applies to most sites.