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Never thought the hardest I would work would be after the game was already done! It is surprisingly hard to sell a FREE game, don't you agree?

Yeah, free games are hard to sell. I think people naturally assume they aren't worth much. And you can't put them on sale. I wonder if it would give more downloads if I stuck a price on them, so I could put it on sales...

Even if your game is pixelart, avoid use that pixelart font on your sales page.

Bookmark itch.io pages with juicy design, and use them for inspiration. Personally, I'm quite habby with the design of this one: https://kasper-hviid.itch.io/the-shareware-motherlode

Also, don't be humble. Try selling your stuff as aggressively as possible. Like, if you made a mobile game called A Dream of Amber, which has a truly original concept and is totally addictive, try using the flimsiest of excuses to push it into the conversation.

An advice I once heard is that for the hours spent making your game, use half that that much time promoting it. Don't make the mistake of feeling burned out by finally finishing the game, clicking "publish" and then moving on to your next project.

Understand the concept of the marketing tunnel, that is, the way a potential buyer slowly gain more interest in your game. At the top level, he doesn't care about you game at all, he doesn't even know it exist, so you only have a few seconds to make him interested.
- At the top opening state, the potential buyer looks a the front page of itch.io and let his eyes pass over the games available. Here, you have about 0.1 second to make him focus his attention on your games cover image instead of any of the others.
- At the next stage, his eyes are focused on your games banner. Good. You now have about 3 seconds where he skims the art and read the title.
- At the next stage, he may hover his mouse over the cover, to see what pops up.
- At this stage---oh boy---he actually clicks!  Once on the sales page, he skims it over, quickly deciding if he want to venture further, or go looking for another game.

Marketing IS hard. And a constantly evolving world, with different parameters for success, just like development. On top of basic understanding, it just needs dedicated time for experimentation, and working out what works for you. 

We released a free version of our Zero Budget Game Marketing Manual here on Itch.io  last year -- https://svperstring.itch.io/game-marketing-manual

Hopefully sets you down the right path!

As a general rule of thumb, if you advertise to 1000 people, 50 might play it, 5 might purchase an in-game item, and .05 may stick around long enough to become a whale.

So ultimately if you want any sort of play conversions you'll want to start building a community surrounding the game while you're in development. You'll need to be able to publish updates to as many social media platforms as possible (I'd suggest using a management app like "If This Then That"). Stick to a social media schedule, posting at least twice weekly and at most 3 times in a single day. You'll need at least one team member who's really active with the public and has amazing charisma. Hype, hype, hype! And you'll need several ways to support the cost of development: monetizing twitch and youtube channels, regularly creating products that people can purchase (accidentally make a funny joke on twitch? sell t-shirts), sell your code and assets on several marketplaces as you go along, do promotional exchanges with other development teams.

Once the game is out, promote in-game purchases and DLC. Keep the scope of your first 10 games really small so their revolving income can support your more expensive and complex games. Expect income from most games to sputter out after 2-5 years. Also, research the type of game that you're trying to build before writing any code or doing any concept art. Is it popular right now? What were the top 10 grossing games in that genre? What were the bottom 10 grossing games in that genre? Look up google keyword data and see when people search for specific words during specific times of the year. Plan to release your game when the best keywords are most often searched. Commit a percentage of all income to advertisement. Do promotions and ads when keywords are most likely to be searched. I could go on, but at some point this becomes a TED talk.

If I think about the games I've bought, personally I'm only interested about a small subsection of games and game features. If you can get my attention and showcase somehow that your game has those features then I'm ready to search for it in google (or itch or whatever) and read more about it. That could possibly lead to sale, but the game (and the marketing) has to "speak my language" and be convincing with that.

So the way I see it, not only the product has to be interesting specifically to me, you need to really push those key features with your marketing AND you need to get exposure somewhere, preferably somewhere relevant to your potential customers.

Game marketing is changing rapidly. Even 10 years ago, the market and marketing looked completely different than now, he began to count and analyze everything that was happening. Therefore, it is becoming more and more popular to draw attention to your product through the prism of caring for the environment. You can quickly get more information from essays about Environment and find out that now more and more people want to see a product that does not harm nature. Therefore, now almost no one buys games in physical form. I hope they will soon disappear from store shelves altogether.

This was a good topic to read. Thank you

For those interested in picking up The Zero Budget Game Marketing Manual - which covers many of the topics raised in this thread,  offering Brand, PR and Community strategies you can employ without budget - the book currently has 60% off in Itch.io's Creator Day Sale. Just wanted to flag in case that helped folk (and your wallets).