10 Free and Effective Ways to Promote Your Webcomic

[Montyandwoolley]

The problem I have, is having so many avenues - how do you pin down what's worth investing your time in for advertising? I'm stuck with who I have added on FB who are invited to my comics page, but then how do i expand from there?

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Sheesh, now I'm so excited about advertising that I'm spending more time bidding on ads than I am actually working on my comic

Have to set a standard for myself: Time spent on advertising must be less than, and nowhere near equal to, time spent on actual comic.

[IVstudios]

How do you go about finding places to advertise? If you use the "search for new places to bid" option, it shouldn't take more than a half hour to do your 200 free bids (unless you're really picky about what sites you put ads on).

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

How do you go about finding places to advertise? If you use the "search for new places to bid" option, it shouldn't take more than a half hour to do your 200 free bids (unless you're really picky about what sites you put ads on).

No, it doesn't take long at all. But then I keep going back and checking to see if any more are available. It's not the duration, it's the frequency.

[McDuffies]

Mostly through tags and people re-blogging your stuff. Tumblr isn't especially social, you can't really chat with people or have "friends." It's basically just a blog; you post stuff, people follow you, you follow other people, if you see something cool you reblog it.

It works well for self promotion because people are constantly sharing and reposting other people's stuff, but it all leads back to the original poster (as long as the person re-blogging isn't a dick who removes the history of posts. Which does happen but Tumblr makes it so much easier not to do that it's usually not an issue.)

I guess the best way to describe it would be that each user is in their own little bubble. No one else can come in, but they can all see in and if you do something cool someone can point to your bubble and say "Hey look, that guy is doing something awesome!" and a bunch of other people will turn and look at your bubble.

Now I see why comics where each page is a self-sustained gag are such a big deal now, I tended to think it was because of Cyanide&Happyness' success, but it may be that such comics are most heavily promoted thanks to social media.

[LibertyCabbage]

13 now!! Damn!

That's about what I was expecting. I think it's a pretty reasonable method, especially once you do it more often and get faster at it. You can also check out the statistics after the bids expire and see which banners are working the best and what sites are giving the best response.

The problem I have, is having so many avenues - how do you pin down what's worth investing your time in for advertising?

I'd take Dawn Griffin's advice: "Be a social media whore. Promote, promote, promote." That means doing every method I listed, and possibly more.

I'm stuck with who I have added on FB who are invited to my comics page, but then how do i expand from there?

I think you're already doing pretty good by inviting people and having a link to the Facebook page on your comic's home page. If you have extra time for social networking, I expect you'll get better results with Twitter or Tumblr.

No, it doesn't take long at all. But then I keep going back and checking to see if any more are available. It's not the duration, it's the frequency.

The maximum duration for free bids is two days, so, for my blog, I've been keeping a schedule of placing bids on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That means I pretty much always have ads going aside from Sunday-Monday. I've also gotten faster at it, and when I timed myself this morning, it took me about seven minutes to set up 200 bids.

Now, you could free up bids by canceling the spaces you're outbid on, but that doesn't sound fun or time-effective. Beyond your initial two-day setup, you're probably better off messing around with social media, or doing something like leaving comments on people's webcomics (which is another one worth mentioning that didn't end up in my list).

Now I see why comics where each page is a self-sustained gag are such a big deal now, I tended to think it was because of Cyanide&Happyness' success, but it may be that such comics are most heavily promoted thanks to social media.

It's definitely a real thing. It's much more intuitive to say, "lol check out this funny strip" than to say, "hey i like this page but you have to read the last two years' worth of archives to understand what's going on."

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Wow!! 30 clicks now! Six of those are from today alone. this is quite splendid.

[LibertyCabbage]

Wow!! 30 clicks now! Six of those are from today alone. this is quite splendid.

I'm glad it's working out so well for you! I'm looking forward to putting my own comic on there eventually, although I probably don't have enough pages yet to really consider it. Also, if you ever wanna promote more aggressively, you could look into doing penny bids to give us freeloaders the middle finger.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

The lowest it lets you pay is 1$ a day, which I actually did on a few sites that I saw I was getting clicks from. I set it to maximum 1$ expense, so most of them I've only spent 10-40 cents on so far in the days they've been running. As soon as that dollar runs out for the site the bid ends, so I don't have to worry about using up all the money I put in there from paypal

[IVstudios]

Nah, you can do ¢1 bids. The $1 minimum is for spending limits, ie. "stop this bid once it's cost $1 to run." The way around that is to use a time limit instead of a cost limit. Set a ¢1 bit to run for 30 days or whatever.

[LibertyCabbage]

Yeah, I think there's two ways to bid. There's a "campaign," where you give PW money and they spend it automatically for you, and there's manual bidding, where you do it yourself. It depends how much you wanna micro-manage things. And yeah, I see $0.01 and $0.02 bids all the time.

[Humbug]

It's easy to find 1cent bids, just do a search for max bid 0.01.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Okay, sounds like I was kinda doing that then, just not knowing it. Neat!


Edit: I just went through another round of dropping $ on a few ads. Since American traffic costs so much on some of them, and since bizarrely I enjoy a fair amount of traffic from non-US readers, I saved myself a little money and probably extended the life of many of my bids by just bidding on Canadian/European/Elsewhere traffic.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Holy shit. Sorry to keep bumping this thread with my own shit, but I just got 100 clicks from one of my paid bids today. Holy. Shit.

[Humbug]

Lol, that's what paid advertising can do for you.

[LibertyCabbage]

Holy shit. Sorry to keep bumping this thread with my own shit, but I just got 100 clicks from one of my paid bids today. Holy. Shit.

Awesome!

Also, the guy who does Insert Image posted some helpful tips here on getting the most out of social media.

[LibertyCabbage]

A li'l update, I've been messing around with this site http://www.justunfollow.com, and it's pretty sweet, although it isn't fully functional unless you pay for it. It also has an iOS version, and there's another app called Unfollow that's similar.

[Humbug]

Just a little update about Deviantart, I posted the first page of ToP, submitted to the relevant groups and so far got 100 views and 14 faves. Not too bad, and I see no reason why the numbers won't grow as I update regularly. I haven't linked to my website yet, but it's a good idea to gather a following first. And besides, the Deviantart version contains no text so if they wish to read the comic they will have to visit the site. :3

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

I reached a dropoff with my Project Wonderful ad clicks. I guess I ought to cool it a while and then advertise again. Perhaps everyone who's seeing the ads now has already seen them, and anyone wanting to click them has already clicked them. Meh

[LibertyCabbage]

A li'l update, I've been messing around with this site http://www.justunfollow.com, and it's pretty sweet, although it isn't fully functional unless you pay for it. It also has an iOS version, and there's another app called Unfollow that's similar.

I was almost gonna make a follow-up post about how effective JustUnfollow has been, and then I got my @LCabbages account suspended for using it. I should be able to get my account back, but I'm done messing around with these dopey third-party apps. In my defense, I don't remember being informed by Twitter that using apps like this isn't allowed.