10 Free and Effective Ways to Promote Your Webcomic

[robotthepirate]

I've put my home page up. I'm never too sure how stumbleupon works so I've not considered it too closely. I think it probably works best with gag comics that one could land on any page of and still find funny.
I doubt one could easily get commited readers from it, I know I only ever hit my stumble button (I have the toolbar) when I'm bored.

[LibertyCabbage]

I'm starting up a new campaign. Leaderboard, $0.03 max bid, 1k views minimum, any region, conservative bidding, Monday through Thursday. It's similar to what I did before (with great results), but I'm trying two new things.

1) I'm excluding the webcomics that had no clicks or a high CPC in my previous campaign. I currently have 18 webcomics on my exclude list and can add more. (Is there a limit?) This is a big deal since my previous campaign had some major offenders, like:

Greg - $0.35 - 0 clicks
Dear Toadington - $0.44 - 1 click - $0.44 CPC
Luci Phurr's Imps - $0.70 - 2 clicks - $0.35 CPC

Of the ads that got clicks, 45 of them had a CPC of $0.03 or higher. I expect that blacklisting them will help get my CPC down a lot.

2) I'm only placing bids between 9 a.m. EST and 5 p.m. EST. This should let me take advantage of work and school traffic while turning off my bids when Western webcomic readers are sleeping. Ideally, I would run separate campaigns for European and Elsewhere regions because of the time zone difference, but I'd prefer to keep it simple for the time being and stick to only one campaign. I'll be monitoring the regional traffic and see how the 9-to-5 schedule affects it.

I'm predicting that I'll get few clicks but for a very low CPC, which would be an interesting alternative to previous campaigns, which have tended to get a lot of clicks but drain money fairly quickly.

I also signed The Webcomic Police up on StumbleUpon (assuming I did it correctly, anyways), and I'll be keeping track of the results from that.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

I ran a campaign with my skyscraper ad recently and set it to max bid of 20 cents and "aggressive style" bidding. It was the most successful advertising campaign I've urn yet, so I'll probably repeat that recipe in the future

[LibertyCabbage]

I ran a campaign with my skyscraper ad recently and set it to max bid of 20 cents and "aggressive style" bidding. It was the most successful advertising campaign I've urn yet, so I'll probably repeat that recipe in the future

What CPC did you get?

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

I ran a campaign with my skyscraper ad recently and set it to max bid of 20 cents and "aggressive style" bidding. It was the most successful advertising campaign I've urn yet, so I'll probably repeat that recipe in the future

What CPC did you get?

CPC was .01$. I ended ~30 cents under budget as well, which I thought was interesting! I didn't have any time restrictions and only ran it for about 48 hours. In other campaigns I'd restricted the hours it was running and I think that actually hindered me instead of saving me the money of bidding at those times. It brought in almost as many clicks as my previous two campaigns put together, and they had a much larger budget. I think it's because I "splurged" on 20 cent ads which tend to be sites with better traffic; I also narrowed it down to only bid on regions getting at least 500 hits per day, instead of bidding on sites with 500 hits in one random not necessarily bidded on region or 500 hits across all regions put together. I think that might have made the biggest difference.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

I ran a campaign with my skyscraper ad recently and set it to max bid of 20 cents and "aggressive style" bidding. It was the most successful advertising campaign I've urn yet, so I'll probably repeat that recipe in the future

What CPC did you get?

CPC was .01$. I ended ~30 cents under budget as well, which I thought was interesting! I didn't have any time restrictions and only ran it for about 48 hours. In other campaigns I'd restricted the hours it was running and I think that actually hindered me instead of saving me the money of bidding at those times. It brought in almost as many clicks as my previous two campaigns put together, and they had a much larger budget. I think it's because I "splurged" on 20 cent ads which tend to be sites with better traffic; I also narrowed it down to only bid on regions getting at least 500 hits per day, instead of bidding on sites with 500 hits in one random not necessarily bidded on region or 500 hits across all regions put together. I think that might have made the biggest difference.

[LibertyCabbage]

That's a smart strategy, since I'm guessing a lot of people are doing $0.10 max bids. In that case, a $0.20 aggressive bid would get the spot while still being relatively inexpensive. All of my $0.20-and-higher bids have been manual, so it'd be really interesting to run a campaign doing something like that.

[LibertyCabbage]

I tried a $0.20 skyscraper campaign, and while the sudden traffic spike was nice, I had to stop it early 'cause it was burning through my budget too quickly with a not-so-great CPC. I might try it again with a higher minimum page count and see how it goes. Although, another idea would be to do one big manual bid instead of running a campaign. Like, I saw that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has 100K+ Euro skyscrapers for $3.20.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Interesting. I almost never actually needed to spend the full 20 cents on any of the ad boxes. If I did it was only for a few hours or so until the other person's campaign chilled out and then it went back down to ten cents or less.

[LibertyCabbage]

Interesting. I almost never actually needed to spend the full 20 cents on any of the ad boxes. If I did it was only for a few hours or so until the other person's campaign chilled out and then it went back down to ten cents or less.

I think it was more a matter of quantity, 'cause when I started the campaign yesterday it shot up to, like, 300 high bids almost immediately. I turned off Canada and Elsewhere bids to try to get it under control, but I ended up pausing it this morning 'cause there wasn't enough of an improvement. I'll have to think about how I can optimize it better, 'cause it's nice being able to set up a campaign and then let it run while you do other stuff.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Oh, yeah, that'll contribute to that. I have my maximum high bids set to like 15 or something. Whenever I check in during the day, I've never seen it actually maxed out, it's usually between 7 and like 10 or 11. I think it's because I have other limitors on what sites to advertise on, so that keeps the pool down to begin with.

[LibertyCabbage]

I'm starting up a new campaign. Leaderboard, $0.03 max bid, 1k views minimum, any region, conservative bidding, Monday through Thursday. It's similar to what I did before (with great results), but I'm trying two new things.

So far it's at 191 clicks for $3.76, which is about a $0.02 CPC. I count 12 active days since the campaign started, which makes it about 16 clicks a day for about $0.31 a day. It's a slow and boring method of bidding, but I feel safe saying that it's a reliable method for people to get a good CPC if they're on a tight budget.

[IVstudios]

I haven't done any actual math on this, but I have noticed what seems to be a significant increase in the click-through rate on my PW ads once I changed the art in them from creepy old man face and random junk:


to attractive young women:


Make of that what you will.

[Humbug]

Well, I can tell you why the first ad doesn't work. First off, I have no idea what it is, you say it's a face and random junk. I can see the junk, but not the face. So as it is, the ad looks like a picture with random objects strewn across it. So it's not very interesting to look at. It's also drab and grey. Because there's so much clutter in it and they are more or less the same colour, they just blend together and does not draw the eye to it, so many people will just pass it over.

Compare to your second ad, it's bright and colourful, so it's much easier to notice. The subject matter is also easy to understand, there's 2 cute girls in it and the comic is probably slice of life. Granted, it does not indicate that it also takes place in hell, but there's only so much you can cram into one image.

Here's my ad for example:



It's a simple image, but easy to read, and the contrast of red on white and black makes it pop. I'm also hoping the unconventional portrayal of a strong woman will make more people take notice. I've read that since advertising is oversaturated with T&A women, people just tend to gloss it over. Depending on the positioning of the ad my ctr can get as high as 4% which is probably the best one can hope for.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

I never saw the old man face either

[IVstudios]

Well, it's not his whole face, just his nose and mouth down at the bottom. The fact that you both can't see it is interesting because when I first put it together I wondered if people would be able to tell what it is. To me it's super obvious because I know it's there, but I wasn't sure if anyone else could see it.

I was never super happy with that ad series. I just kind of threw it together because I wanted to give PW a try, and then I was too lazy to make a new one until recently.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

That explains a lot. When you said there was a face there, I was like "well I kind of see a row of teeth and lip and maybe a nose on the bottom, but where's the eyyyyes".

Glad the new campaign is working better for you! You now take up all my ad regions, by the way It's nice to see an ad there for a comic I can vouch for.

[djracodex]

Hey, I don't know if this has been mentioned (because I am lazy and won't search it) but has anyone tried comic aggregators (such as 1, 2)? I've just now stared looking into them (at the advice of my boyfriend with the recent success of his writing blog), and I've noticed a lot of buzz about RSS feeds and stuff (another thing that I have regrettably avoided/ignored. I'm beginning to see a trend in my research, aw man...), anybody got any opinions/insights?

[LibertyCabbage]

Hey, I don't know if this has been mentioned (because I am lazy and won't search it) but has anyone tried comic aggregators (such as 1, 2)? I've just now stared looking into them (at the advice of my boyfriend with the recent success of his writing blog), and I've noticed a lot of buzz about RSS feeds and stuff (another thing that I have regrettably avoided/ignored. I'm beginning to see a trend in my research, aw man...), anybody got any opinions/insights?

I haven't heard of those sites before, and they might be useful, but I think the M.O. these days is following/liking creators on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/DeviantArt and getting updates that way.

[djracodex]

I tried my first campaign on PW. Splurged on the 0.20, 6am - 10pm for pages with around 2k views a day (not sure really what I was doing, but here goes nothing!). Been going for 4 days now (yeah, burnt out my funds Real Quick), but holy shit! It was really successful! Someone even commented on my chat box! Whocares wrote "honestly, this comic is pretty much ****, waste of bandwidth"
and all I can think is

This has worked really well, I hope at least 1% will return