General Tips for Promoting Webcomics

by carly on December 28, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Posted In: Tutorials

There are three very basics tips that should be at the core of your online publishing strategy.

1) CONSISTENCY: Don’t upload all your content at once. Build a backlog if you can so you’re always ahead of the game! You’re doing this so you can establish a regular update schedule and stick to it. Reliability and consistency are the key to getting readers to check you out and keep coming back regularly. If you have long “dead periods” with no content, your audience will quickly begin to drop off, possibly never to return! Even if it’s just a blog update, or sharing ancillary content, or fan art, seeing something new will keep your audience engaged.

2) CONSOLIDATION: There’s no need to send your audience to an archive on another hosting site. Why divide your hits? Find ways to syndicate your content and reach out to new audiences, BUT make sure you are sending them back “home” to get a scoop on the mother load. If your hits are spread out across several communities it can be hard to accurately judge (and prove to potential partners) how big your audience actually is!

3) COMMUNICATION: If you’re posting old content, make it new by adding comments like a director’s commentary. Just a few sentences with your pages helps people see that there is a person behind the comic they love. The more you can let them know that there’s someone behind the curtain, the more they will come back. Also leverage the audiences you have through social networks! Make sure when you update you let EVERYONE know where to check it out, later on, when you have a special request or promotion, your audience will be ready to jump to and help their “friend” rather than the guy that only sends a message when HE needs something.

That should get you to a good start in promoting webcomics. These are basic strategies to keep in mind when forming a marketing plan, but feel free to get creative, we are artists after all. Check back for more tips soon!

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STICKINESS: Getting Fans To Come Back

by carly on December 28, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Posted In: Tutorials

Let’s talk about pro-active stickiness. That’s things that you should be doing regularly to promote your comic.

Hopefully you got a bunch of Likes with pro-active contact like emails and reminders. But getting those people to keep coming back without you having to hassle them? That’s called STICKINESS.

People come back for one main reason:

New content.

This can be content you generate, curate or simply catalyze. Let’s break it down.

1. CONTENT YOU GENERATE
The secret is reliability and predictability.

Create a schedule and then be really public about it. People should know which days you’re updating and when that update goes live. Midday PST? 9am EST? Whenever it is, make sure it’s known and that you can stick to it.

Places to let people know:

1. On your homepage.

2. In your twitter feed.

3. Any blog entries (on all sites!).

4. On your Facebook page.

Get into a habit and people will fall in with you.


2. CONTENT YOU CURATE
So maybe you can’t come up with content every day. That’s ok. Everyone else is. There’s plenty of stuff out there. Find stuff that’s similar to your comic that your fans will like. Don’t just grab everything you like. Only grab stuff that’s similar to what you’re producing. Are you doing a comic about supervillains? Find that great list of 100 things I would do if I was a supervillain: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

Maybe your comic is inspired by someone? Send links to their work or books they might like. Become a content hub for things that are similar to your comic. People will come back every day for content similar to what you’re doing that they will like.

And make sure you credit people. You want people to link to you and credit you, so do likewise.

3. CONTENT YOU CATALYZE
This is the best content you can create. If you can find the magical mixture that gets conversation going on your boards and audience comments, you’re laughing. The best way to do this is to keep throwing crap at the wall. Eventually some of it will stick. Be vocal. Be endearing. Be charismatic and approachable. Get people chatting and reply to everyone. Eventually you will get that rock over the hill. When it rolls down the other side in a landslide of conversation you’re laughing.

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The Basics of Project Wonderful!

by carly on December 28, 2011 at 10:11 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Project Wonderful Part 1: What is Project Wonderful?
www.projectwonderful.com

This introduction will provide basic information on what Project Wonderful is and how to get started marketing your comic. Next lesson, Part Two will be about how use the Project Wonderful tools.

What is Project Wonderful?
Unlike most advertising channels where you pay a set fee to place your ad for a period of time or where you pay-per-ad-click, Project Wonderful uses a bidding system to place your ad on websites registered with them. The Project Wonderful site directory is primarily made up of webcomic sites and independent artists so it’s like tapping into your target audience.

Creating you Ads
Before we jump into the mechanics of the site there are some preliminary things we must do first, and the first thing I can think of is create your advertising assets. Project Wonderful accepts static JPGs and animated GIFs, BUT not all sites allow animated advertising so keep that in mind when you’re deciding what type of ads to create. The sizes of ads that Project Wonderful accepts are:

Button: 117×30

Square: 125×125

Half Banner: 234×60

Banner: 468×60

Rectangle: 300×250

Leaderboard: 728×90

Skyscraper: 160×600

Now don’t feel you need to create ads for all of these spots, that is just what’s available. I tell everyone you should have a button as it’s cheap and easy to get placement, then pick one of the medium sizes (Square, Half Banner, rectangle) and one of the large sizes (half banner, banner, skyscraper), but I do find that Square and Leaderboard seem to have less placements come up.

Onto design, I’m not going to go into great detail here as people have written whole books on this subject, but there are some basic criteria to follow.

1) Put the name of the comic on the ad and mention that it’s a comic and that the viewer can read it. Viewers need to know what it’s ad for, and what it’s offering.

2) When choosing a piece of art for your ad what you need to keep front of mind is “what is most representative of my comic?” I don’t just mean art-wise, but also representative of you’re story’s tone and content.


Creating a Strategy
You don’t need to sit down and write out a twelve-month marketing plan, but there are some bare basics to establish before you jump into this.

1) Establish a budget. Decide how much you’re going to spend and over what length time period. Once you have this you can develop a bidding and campaign strategy, but we’ll discuss those in detail in part two. For example I break my budget into weeks, and I spend the same amount each week.

2) Set Goals. If you don’t do this in the beginning you’re just spinning your wheels with no way to measure if what you’re doing is successful. Is what you want simply page views? Maybe unique users is more important to you. Just take a minute to step back and ask yourself what you want to get from your advertising efforts.

That’s all for part one of the Project Wonderful tutorial. In part two we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of Project Wonderful and how it works.

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