Well, it’s the 1st of September and I have a new goal.
Every month TopWebComics resets and all your hard earned votes go back to zero. So, I decided to be serious about voting this month. To prove how serious I am, I’m going to try to update the voting incentive twice a week to spur everyone to vote for reMIND. Today’s voting incentive is a new wallpaper I made for anyone who donates. To be fair to the donators, I’m only showing a medium sized version when you vote along with a watermark.
My goal with the incentives this month is to try to get into the top 25 on TopWebComics. Getting ranked high on this list is better than any advertising because most people only click on what seems popular before wasting their time digging down a long list. When I got into the top 50 a month ago, I started seeing around 25 new visitors a day from TopWebComics. The only way they could have found me was by digging through the top-list because I wasn’t advertising at the time. I have to admit, I’ve clicked on all the top 50 webcomics before just to see why they got so many votes.
Anyway, I promise to make an effort to update incentives this month if you keep voting. So here we go.
Today’s incentive is a preview of my sweet new wallpaper.
LOL. My 'Comics' button auto-opens 12 tabs of web comics I follow and most of them want to get high on TopWebComics. It seems to be the 'it' ranking website for online comics these days.
I just checked it out, and 7 of the comics I keep up with are in the top 50 (including yours). Oddly enough they aren't ranked in what I would consider 'order of awesomeness.'
I also notice some old comics I use to read, but stopped… generally due to the artist being lazy and not posting enough or the updates always being late. That is a bad thing for an artist to do and it ticks readers off if they always do it (points at noob comic)
However, if they do cool things like pin-ups when they take time off… readers easily forgive him :D
Man, I hardly consider TWC to be a reliable list of good webcomics. Most of the very best comics I follow don't bother with the silly ranking website, and a most are significantly more popular than those on the list. The most reliable indicator is personal recommendations–from other authors, and from fellow webcomics fans whom you know have good taste.
In fact some of those comics in the top 25 are just… bad. In fact, kind of awful. Mediocre art, gratingly unfunny jokes, painfully hackneyed storylines. Some of them are genuinely incredible, but some definitively aren't. I really can't imagine why anyone would use TWC as a source of good comics.
I agree that it has more bad comics than good ones even in the top 10 but when someone is starting out he/she needs to get exposure and TWC is good exposure. It's hard to get another webcomic to recommend you from the start so you have to resort to things like TWC.
Once I start getting 100k unique viewers to reMIND daily I'll consider removing reMIND from the list but honestly, if I'm in the top 10 that alone will pull in hundreds of new viewers a day. Free advertising.
It's funny, the pursuit of webcomic rankings is like the pursuit of Nielsen ratings writ large. I have occasionally done drives that, for my little corner of the web, have been very successful. Like, week-long "pledge drives," where I post a new incentive every day. The pursuit of rankings can often become an end in itself, though. I think you're going at it the right way, with a definite goal in mind – one wouldn't want to have the voting incentives end up interfering with the actual comic.
–m
Also, I absolutely should not have used "whom" in that post. Now I feel like a tool. :/
Whom is a lovely word. For whom the bell tolls…
Unfortunately, I think "whom" is wrong in that sentence. It's a great word, but if I use it incorrectly I just sound pretentious and dumb.
Now I'm actually not sure if "who" or "whom" goes there… must consult a grammar expert.
You probably don't need something extravagant every time for your incentives. Most authors/artists will just put up a page or two from their sketchbook, or something else that they've been working on. Even if it's just a small sketch, that's more than enough to get me to vote (or rather, it reminds me to vote). Otherwise I just start glossing over the voting button.