How to start a webcomic: Top 7 ways to advertize your webcomic
from the comic bug
In my previous post, “How to start a webcomic: Prerequisites to start a webcomic #3: Know how to promote your webcomic“, I have briefly discussed the importance of promoting your webcomic to the Internet community.
And for this current post, I am going to discuss about the top 7 ways on how to advertize your webcomic to the world.
As I have said, no matter how good your webcomic is, you will not get much readers without knowing how to promote and advertize your webcomic.
How to start a webcomic: Top 7 ways to advertize your webcomic
Now, there are countless of ways to advertize and promote your webcomic, but these top 7 ways to publicize your webcomic do not need money to execute, and thus is free.
You can always pay to advertize and it will be a hundred times more effective, but well it is not an option for many people.
Let us carry on.
#1: Engage yourself in webcomic forums and promote yourself with your webcomic.
This is a tried, tested and proven method to publicize your webcomic, and most of you will probably know.
There are some advices for you on how to engage yourself in webcomic forums.
- Build relationships first before trying to get people to read your webcomic. They don’t want spammers and people need to trust you first.
- Optimize your signature tags. Create a nice banner of your webcomic with a hyperlink to link to your webcomic site, and where ever you post, people will notice your banner.
- Helping others in the forums when they have questions is probably the quickest way for others to know you well.
- You do not have all the time in the world to engage yourself with every webcomic forum in the world. Choose one or two forums with good publicity, and stick to it.
#2: Submit your webcomic to as many directories as you can.
This is another common way to build publicity, however you need to know what makes this work.
There are two things you can get from directories, one is traffic, and the other is backlinks.
About getting traffic from directories, I have seen many directories, and most directories cater to the popular and the older webcomics as they are ranked by the number of visits and rating.
In most cases, people only look at the top ten webcomics, and rarely go beyond to view other webcomics.
So if you are new to webcomics and are expecting to get good traffic from directories, be prepared to be disappointed.
Also, most directories do not “clean up” their listings. Many webcomics may have long discontinued their updates, and the site is just left collecting dust, but webmasters of webcomic directories rarely delete these listings.
It just makes the competition stiffer for beginners.
Unless you already have a good fan base, your fan base can help you promote the number of visits within these webcomic directories, and thus it will add to your popularity if you rank in the top 10.
If any of you chanced upon a good directory that promotes fresh and new webcomics, let me know.
However, do you think you should stop submitting to directories? The answer is a big no!
The other thing you can definitely get from a webcomic directory is backlinks.
The more relevant backlinks you have to your webcomic, the more it helps search engines, such as Google, to rank you accordingly.
So if you do have a thousand webcomic directories linking to your webcomic (if you do have all the time and effort to do that), search engines will naturally rank you better than others who do not have links to their webcomic sites at all.
My advice, take time to submit to directories and build it slowly, maybe one directory a day. In a month, you will have approximately 30 backlinks, and in a year, you will have 365 backlinks to your webcomic site.
Sounds good?
#3: Showcase your illustrations and other artwork at image publishing websites, such as Deviantart or even Flickr.
Showcasing your artwork at Devianart or other image publishing websites helps to build reputation for your skills.
I have seen many artists using this method to build a decent portfolio, which even creates freelance job opportunities such as designing or drawing.
Moreover it creates many fans, and these fans can become a prominent group in helping you to gain popularity.
However, do not post up illustrations and artwork that relates intimately with your webcomic, unless you are prepared and have a plan.
There are people who steal creativity ideas from websites, and if you have not started publishing your webcomic, yet want to post up illustrations of your artwork about it, you may run the risk of having your ideas stolen or copied by someone else.
Instead, just post up good illustrations and artwork that showcase your skills, and not your webcomic.
Tip 1: While editing your illustrations and artwork you post up, do include your url in your image at the side. So that when you do post it up at image publishing sites, it will catch people’s eye.
Tip 2: Name your illustrations and artwork appropriately, and not things liks “01234.jpg”. Search engines do take note of the names of image files, and if you name your image files well, you will have more visitors.
Many visitors to my site came through images that I have posted up.
#4: Engage yourself with Social Bookmarking websites
Facebook and Twitter are some of the best platforms in getting fans.
Needless to say, you can always advertise at Facebook or post up updates at Twitter to increase popularity and keep your loyal fans happy.
Some webcomic artists started a StumbleUpon group and promotes each other’s webcomics through social networking.
You can always join them to gain readers.
Shetoldme is a very good platform to advertise your URLs or website address.
You can just publish a link, which can be your webcomic site or page, and write about 200 words of description about it.
Shetoldme will publish it, and even helps you to rank well in search engines such as Google.
I had a post, “How to start a webcomic: General Steps“, that was promoted to Google’s first page for 24 hours after gaining even popularity from Shetoldme. So I gained good visitors to my blog at that time.
#5: Exchange links with other webcomic artists
Link exchange is one of the most reliable ways to build backlinks and traffic.
When Artpatient took my previous post on “How to start a webcomic: Top 10 mistakes to avoid” and created a link on his page while describing a little about it, my traffic on that day grew about 1000%!
I really thank Artpatient for dropping by at this little blog. Really had not expected that.
So you can see it really works.
Moreover, Artpatient has a good page rank, which even adds more popularity as a backlink to my post for search engines.
However, not many webcomic artists or webmasters are willing to exchange links. That’s because it benefits the webcomic with weaker popularity rather than the stronger one.
And it is not easy to approach another webmaster by emailing him about exchanging links, as we all fear the feeling of rejection.
So if you do have people that are willing to exchange links with you, treasure them with your heart.
#6: Use mirror sites to showcase your webcomics.
It means you sign up for free webcomic hosting, such as Comicfury or SmackJeeves, and then host some of your archived webcomics with them.
This can work well as webcomic readers are found at these free webcomic hosting sites, and you can gain popularity from there.
#7: Write articles about webcomics, drawing tutorials, or even write about your own webcomic, and submit them to article sites.
This is called article marketing.
This is one of the best methods, but a very tedious one, to gain popularity with your webcomics.
Mike Criley uses videos and he post them up on Youtube about drawing manga. There are more than a million views on just one video. I can imagine the amount of fans he really has.
When you write articles about webcomics and drawing tutorials, you are establishing yourself to other people that you do know your stuff. So readers are able to take note of you and you may get more fans.
Bukisa and Hubpages are some of the best online publishing websites for articles, and you are able to earn a little money from them while you are promoting yourself.
What’s more, these online publishing sites rank very well in search engines, especially Google, and they do have a community within, which makes your articles get exposed to many people.
However for this to work well, you do need to know how to title your article with popular keywords that search engines love, and optimize your article with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Also, writing junk into your articles do backfire. So do some research before you write.
Tips on article marketing: Quantity is as important as quality. The more you write, the more your articles will be advertized to the Internet.
Final words for this post
The above methods may be free, but do require lots of effort.
Time management in needed to optimize between drawing your webcomics and advertizing.
Never neglect advertizing in your webcomic, or your webcomic will be doomed for obscurity forever. Word of mouth is not an efficient way of publicizing your webcomic in the Internet.
That’s all for this post. It’s a long one, but it is needed for every webcomic artist. Stay tuned for more updates!
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Comments
3 Comments on How to start a webcomic: Top 7 ways to advertize your webcomic
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delos on
Mon, 4th Jan 2010 1:47 pm
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r2moo2 on
Tue, 5th Jan 2010 1:47 am
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Strip News 1-8-9 | Strip News | ArtPatient.com | ArtPatient.com on
Fri, 8th Jan 2010 10:09 pm
Thanks for the link-love and the shetoldme site. Pretty cool.
No problem! Have fun with shetoldme, because it is really powerful. 
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