Building Your Fan Base! Things You Can do Now…

…If you have some money.

Part 3

So you’ve decided to stop buying a Starbucks coffee every morning so you can spend your hard earned cash on something of value, your website. Congratulations, you have now accessed a level up in your Internet marketing. So assuming you really are saving that four dollars a day and putting it into your business that means you now have about $120 a month. Perfect! Now what are the best ways to use that money each month to help build your following? Hopefully I can answer that. At least I’ll answer in the ways that I’ve found helpful.

First of all, let me add that having some funds set aside each month for this kind of thing will boost your hits and subscribers like crazy. There’s a reason corporations spend millions and billions of dollars a year to gain exposure. Because it works. But you don’t have to spend billions to get exposure when you have AMAZING CONTENT! Haha! I said it again. If none of the things below work for you then it might be time to take a look at your content and presentation because paying for people to come check you out will be a hard pill to swallow if they just end up turning around and never coming back.

This article will focus on the top right portion of our chart (in red) directed towards webcomic/blogs getting less than 500 visitors a day AND/OR have less than 6 months of content.

If you missed the first strategies for getting traffic without spending money, check them out here:

Prologue - Growing Your Audience is like Growing a Tree

Part 1 - How to Grow Your Audience if You Have no Money

Part 2 – How to Grow Your Audience if You Have no Money

Okay, lets move on to our current topic of quickly building traffic if you have some money to spend.

Buy advertising:

There are two challenges when buying advertising: Designing a good banner, and finding the best place to advertise.

In case you’re skeptical, banner advertising really does work for webcomics. Really! When I first started considering advertising, I didn’t know where to start and it was daunting to learn from scratch. Luckily I’ve tried a few sites that I highly recommend to get you started and I have a few suggestions to skip because I found that they just didn’t work.

The biggest trick is to find a site or webcomic that is similar to yours. This is where you will want to do most of your advertising. If you have a space opera webcomic then go look for other space opera’s to advertise on. If you have a fantasy comic, look for fantasy comic sites. If you focus on high quality art then advertise on sites with high quality art. If you focus on writing then find sites where writing is the focus. Easy right?

It’s a simple concept really, you want to tap into an audience that is already primed for your content. Even though some webcomics might get a million hits a month, if it’s about badly drawn dinosaurs, you probably will not get much attention with your political CG noir. You’ll just end up blowing through your budget without much to show for it.

Making Good Banners:

Also a thing on making banners. Don’t clutter it up with too much text or information. My most successful banner was one with Victuals standing in the rain. The cycling animated rain caught eyes and the art and image drew them in. A banner is only good if it gets your attention and makes you want more. Simple but very hard to do well. Here they are, my most successful banners.

Here is an article I wrote on buying banners on some Top List Sites:
Advertising with Top List Sites – I’m sure there are more Top List sites by now so if you know some other good ones let me know and I’ll update the information.

And here is an article I wrote while learning to advertise with Project Wonderful:
Advertising with ProjectWonderful.com

The only other place I suggest advertising is on big comic related forums although they tend to be a bit more expensive. I haven’t tried this yet because of the cost but I want to try it out once I start posting reMIND Volume 2 later this year. I’ll let you know how it goes. Also, if you’ve had success with advertising on forums please let me know in the comments below!

Google Adwords:

I don’t have an opinion yet with Google Adwords because I haven’t tried it with this site. I tried it out years ago with text ads for an old comic and I couldn’t figure out the best way to use it so I stopped. That doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad service though. I’m just not convinced that it’s ideal for webcomics. It’s a pay-per-click situation and it costs more per click depending on the keywords you select to use. This can get REALLY expensive fast. Maybe if you are a business selling massive amounts of products then this will be a good return on investment but I can’t find a way to make it worth it for a free webcomic.

Sometimes Google advertises $100 or $75 in advertising credits. This would be a good way to try it if you wanted. As for me, I’ll pass for now.

Don’t Buy Advertising on Facebook, StumbleUpon or DeviantArt.

Perhaps I don’t have the right approach or maybe these sites are just bad ways to advertise a webcomic. Who knows. Maybe one of them will work for you but I’ve X’ed ‘em off my list.

 

Facebook advertising – I got all the way through the process until it told me that I was going to pay like 50 cents if someone clicked on my stupid little badge. Okay, I guess I didn’t try Facebook advertising but I don’t need to be a marketing genius to see that it’s never going to pay off. Facebook is full of people who just like to click on things and then click on the next thing. Even if they give it a “like” doesn’t hardly mean a thing. It’s just too expensive to send people to a free webcomic.

Here’s even an article claiming that Facebook advertising is a Ponzi Scheme:
http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme

StumbleUpon Advertising – This one is interesting because you position a page of your website in with the regular pages that StubleUpon suggests to people. Your page can then get thumbs up or down and in turn it might go viral. BUT you are paying 5+ cents every time your page is displayed until it starts getting some thumbs up. If not enough people like your page then it just burns through your daily budget and ends. Once again, StumbleUpon is great for really specific things, as stated in my last article, but not necessarily an online graphic novel. But if this takes off for you then it might be an amazing way to advertise. However it wasn’t successful enough for me.

DeviantArt Advertising – When I tried it in late 2010, I paid for a specific amount of clicks that I wanted. It was like $50 for 500 clicks or something like that. (I honestly can’t remember because it was so worthless that I blocked it out of my memory to alleviate the pain) So, I paid for a number of clicks and waited for the magic to happen. AND it didn’t. It seems to me like this is great for photographers who use DeviantArt to sell prints of their work IN DeviantArt but it’s not so great for sending someone to a website outside the DA community. But I could be wrong. If you’ve had success with DA ads then tell me all about your technique and why you think it worked in the comments below.

Twitter Marketing Software – Tweet Adder:

This is a program that you can purchase for $50 that really helps with your marketing on Twitter. Now, I’m sure there are many who oppose using an automated program for Twitter because supposedly it’s not 100% real but thinking you can follow more than 100 people at a time isn’t really real in my opinion either. I look at Twitter as a marketing tool. I’m not on Twitter to engage in long conversations with friends. If Twitter didn’t bring traffic to my site in some way then I wouldn’t be near it.

Now, just because I’m saying I like this program doesn’t mean I think you should use all its features. There are a lot that make my skin crawl like little robotic generated tweets and auto retweeting and auto everything so that you are 100% robot.

So before I get into how I recommend using the program let me just go into the basic known ways of using Twitter effectively to build an audience. Many articles claim that the way to build a Twitter following consists of these core things:

• Tweet witty or funny things daily to show your personality.

• Tweet about things focused around your niche. People search Twitter all the time and most likely you will get a follower every time you tweet about things related to your subject.

• Tweet helpful links to good articles relating to your niche subject. If you tweet good stuff like this then people like you. If you spam them with articles then people hate you. Also try tweeting links to more than just your website.

• ReTweet things that others are saying as well as good links or cool art tweets. People like to be ReTweeted and everyone benefits from it.

• Reply to a Tweet. Start a long disjointed conversation.

• Follow Fridays – On Fridays use the hashtag #FF and name off some cool people that you like to follow. It’s a way of promoting good tweeters to your fellow tweeters. I get tons of followers when I participate in this for some reason.

• If you can do all the above every day (about 3 to 5 tweets a day) then you will find yourself with a big following after a year or so. That’s what they say anyway.

• Obviously there’s more than that but what do I know.

There are other ways to get followers like following 2000 people in 2 days. Usually about 30% will follow you back and then you spend the time to unfollow anyone who didn’t follow you back and start over. But this is frowned upon by Twitter and your account can get banned for doing this in high volumes.

Now even though Twitter doesn’t like this method, it’s probably the most common thing on Twitter that you see happening. Why am I getting “Suzie Hipster Rapper” following me out of the blue on Twitter? Do you think “Suzie Hipster Rapper” really cares about my tweets? No. She’s following me because a Twitter publicity company is trying to get “Suzie Hipster Rapper” a bunch of followers. I have no desire to follow “Suzie Hipster Rapper”, EVER. If I ignore her then in a few days she will silently unfollow me and start following someone else hoping for reciprication.There are even Twitter users who say follow me and I’ll follow you. It’s a game to people to see how many followers they can get so they look popular or something.

There are even sites where you can buy Twitter followers for cheap. BUT PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY, don’t buy Twitter followers. What a waste of time and money. The main problem with this method is you end up with a bunch of robot followers and spammers. Why would you ever want a bunch of empty followers. Even if they were real people why would you want people following you who don’t really care to follow you in the first place.

Remember that this is all about Opt-In relationships. If I’m going to use Twitter I want to get followers who are interested in my art. People who are potential fans and customers in the future. People who chose to follow me. Now, the trick is finding those potential followers and showing them that I exist so they can see if they want to follow me back.

I always thought finding potential followers was a hard thing. I thought it was a matter of searching for keywords or something, but I never had much luck with it.

Then a friend introduced me to the concept of finding a Twitter user who is REALLY similar to yourself or has a similar art style. Once you find that twitter user, go and start following the people who are following him/her. Why? Because you are essentially introducing yourself to an audience who is already interested in someone almost exactly like yourself. If you have a good relevant description of who you are in your user profile then most likely they will follow you back after briefly checking you out. My Twitter profile says “I’m an illustrator working at Dreamworks Animation. I also write and draw graphic novels.” It clear, specific and true. They can see that I’m posting sketches on Twitter and they can easily see the link to my blog and find my graphic novel. After that it’s up to them to decide to opt-in and follow me back. I get about 50% reciprocation doing this. After a week or so I unsubscribe from the people who are not interested in following me back. Okay so I’m doing something really similar to “Suzie Hipster Rapper” but I think this method is a bit more targeted than just trying to blast everyone based on some keyword searches. In my experience, following people based on keywords doesn’t work very well and you end up annoying people.

So there’s the trick but don’t go overboard with it. Twitter will shut you down if you do mass following and unfollowing in a short period of time. The main thing is to find an audience who is subscribed to someone like yourself already so you can introduce yourself. That’s all. In a way you are reaching out to future fans one at a time. I think it’s pretty cool and I’ve gotten to know quite a few great artists by doing this as well.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s a ton of work! Yeah, it is. So lets go back and talk about Tweet Adder now. With this program, you can enter a user name and download all their followers into the program. Then you can tell it to follow 20 (or 200 if you want) new users a day from that list. You can tell it to wait a week and unsubscribe from anyone who didn’t follow you back. You can automatically send a welcome message to new followers with a link to your website too. It can stagger the time between each action and then you can focus on the things you should be focusing on like witty comments and talking smack. (That was a joke)

You can even have the program “auto follow” anyone who follows you first but I don’t like doing that because, like I said, I’m interested in people following me because they are interested in becoming a fan of my work not because they want me to follow them back. If they decide to unfollow me later then I really don’t care because the end result is not to have a massive twitter following, but to introduce myself to new people who might be interested in my work.

If you’re interested in trying out Tweet Adder, it has a free working demo that you can download here: Tweet Adder Download

If you end up buying it from my link then I’ll get a commission. (That was just a little disclaimer)
Oh yeah, I was able to get a 20% discount code as well.

reMINDBlog Coupon Code:  JBRU20

So there you go. Try it for free and get 20% off if you decide to buy it.

Buy your own host and domain:

The first thing anyone should do if they have a little money to invest is to buy a hosting service and your own Domain name. This isn’t really that expensive and it will improve your chances of success more than you might think. I’ve preached this several times in the past and I’ll say it again.

Why buy your own host and site? Because people will start taking you serious. If you have a free site then you are always going to look like a beginner and you will have a hard time getting people to follow you seriously too. Don’t just use a free blog platform like Blogger even though it’s easier. You want to have complete control over your hyperlinks and control over your art and blog posts. Don’t treat your Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr account as if it were your main site either because they can change their rules or features at anytime. Your website is your HOME BASE! This is a place that you completely control and make your own rules. This is where you will want to focus most of your efforts because this is where you will be able to generate the most income from as well. Anyone of these free companies could decide to pull the plug on your account and all your hard work in building an audience will be for nothing. Think of this as a long term business. Not a 6 month project. If you can’t think of it long term then your chances of finding an audience are slim to nothing unless you have a slick gimmick. If you suddenly get popular then you risk loosing subscribers when you finally transfer over to your own site and host. But then again, that’s all just my opinion, but I believe it 100%.

Here’s an article I wrote on the advantages of buying your own domain name and host:
http://www.remindblog.com/2010/02/04/blogger-vs-wordpress-artists/

And because I really love my host and get a commission for getting people to sign up, I’m going to recommend you check out Bluehost.com. They have push button installation for WordPress.org AND WordPress recommends them above all other hosting sites to run WordPress on. They give you a FREE domain name for life as well which is usually around $10 a year if you were to go buy one. It’s only $5.95 a month and it’s UNLIMITED EVERYTHING! Serious. It’s really a good deal and I’ve hardly had any problems since using them and I’ve tried a TON of other hosts in the past which were all miserable. Anyway, enough of my sales pitch. If you are interested then click on my link below to go see what they offer and I’ll get paid if you sign up. By the way, they give GREAT commissions too! Just another reason to use them. ;)

BLUEHOST.COM

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I hope this article doesn’t feel too much like a big sales pitch for Bluehost and Tweet Adder. I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t like them a lot. The commissions really help me on advertising and paying my flatter. Thanks again if you choose to make a purchase from any of my links.

The next article will talk about what you can do if you are starting to get some good traffic to your site or if you have over 6 months of content already. This is where it gets fun! See you soon.

By the way please reTweet this. Thanks!