this is the eternal question, which doesn't apply only to games in my opinion but to anything related to internet.
I noticed 1 major fact and i can say its a law of internet, if you want to become successfully or popular for that meanings, since popularity=success on internet, with your app or blog or whatever it is that you do online, you need to have a good idea of how to market the crap out of the thing you do. so the law of internet in end can be call marketing or exposure or whatever word can come into your mind that resembles getting mapped and noticed.
a few easy tricks for games since its our main concern here, if you dont have a prebuilt plan for it, i mean like selling it for specific companys or marketing it for surtain type of stores, and you want to keep your game for yourself as a free developer, and to let people know u do games, and gather more followers, id suggest spread all over community's that offers free game hosting, hell, you can even create your own arcade blog, and post your own, but lets say you dont have the patience so youl just have a few choice, one is spread your game to all websites as newgrounds, kongregate, google chrome store games which is free to submit to , opera store, and many others... i cant really tell right now all of them, but i have over 100 bookmarks for this types of spreading websites. so that might bring u some pretty cash, if ... you have lets say newgrounds ads incorporated which will sum up on your main account, even if you upload in kongregate. other websites have their own api if you want to make a different api version advertising you can do it, depends all on you.
so basically there is no easy way, since involves marketing and sometimes marketing isn't meaning just a twat on twitter or a YouTube Video, those help, if you have active subscribers or followers, if you dont have you can ask a friend that has a built social follower group and give him a threat. marketing is a tedious work, its not that hard to do, but takes time, you always have to be in touch with people, posting new content, original content, facts, etc depends on what type of crowd you want to build. thats why i kinda quite'd game dev for a while and im researching marketing, and ways to build a good arcade website and social network around it.
(also there is a trick for those who have patience, creating arcade blog clones with free hosting will increase ur google indexing on the specific game, its a matter of copy pasting same blog on different domains/sub-domains and so on, also embedding your main source files into the cloned website will bring u more views on your main website which will grow a natural traffic on it, but then its a lot of work, and all major succesfull bussiness like kongregate, newgrounds, arcadegames,armorgames,mochimedia, codemonkeys, etc done it untill the point they dont need to do it anymore-but then there is a downside to it having a lot of accounts free hosting's and blogs, youl need to check in on all each week add new content, but if you have a script that allows u to push notifications or content to all websites from a main administration board will save you a lot of time.)
i can write an entire book based on my experiences with this thing, which eventually cracked me open, and made me quit all this bullshit. its not easy work, and im kinda searching ways to find that golden goose but seems there is no way, unless you got lucky and get viral by no reason at all. hitting that 1% chance in 1 billion and make a hit .. even though going viral is a long process in internet, some big viral games toked even years to reach it.
however i went into another direction and that is growing small, and bit by bit. its the best way in my opinion. dont try to hunt the big bull, but go for small little potatoes, that will help you reach your goals, bit by bit, till eventually you have enough followers and content to work with.
if your going to build your own community or arcadewebsite 1 type i suggest you avoid is those rating websites. those like wow badges and many others, where kids have power to rate your content. i got made a mistake on one of my old domains which ruined my pr from page 9 to 0 just because i was hosting a arcadewebsite with embedded games from unity... so i got a flag saying i got corrupted files, or such things, which i dident.. and then google started indexed that and my website went down and down. so i just pulled the plug off. after 1 year and smth of building it.
which now seems to be bought by a japanese or chinesse company , that i wanted to sell the domain to but i just dident bothered. gcstudio.net anyway i got the main domain still... gamecorpstudio.com which i have to search ideas in building it at the moment i think is still redirecting to gcstudio.net.. but eh.. who cares anymore.
Great stuff ! Thanks for sharing ! My first big step will be making a completed and polished game to online hosts like Kongregate , NewGrounds , GameJolt and what not! Let's hope this will work! I don't know how someone can count his fan base. is it based on social network followers or it is based on views and play ? till now I actually don't know