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Monday, August 15 10:05 am (link) -
The Poop Walker. Seriously.
Monday, August 15 7:47 am (link) -
First, in conjuncture with today's comic, it appears Jenna Bush likes the Secret Machines and Kings of Leon and saw them at the 9:30 Club this weekend. Sounds about right. (P.Fork Kings of Leon Review)
Anyway, I'd said I'd write about The Vagaries of Online Advertising; or, How to Retain Readers. This will be boring and sorta technical, and is encouraged basically just for those who care about this sort of thing. So anyone not interested, you've been warned. Here goes:
April
Started this website about 4 months ago. In the beginning the web traffic was just our friends, or whoever read about the site on LB's Facebook Profile. For the first month we did basically no advertising, except for a little help from our co-conspirator over at Death of the Party. We did, however, post on a fansite about our interview with one of the members of ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead that Kristin did (earned 180 referrals for it). Evan put the word out as well through the emo-tastic livejournal community. Oh, and we posted our comics on Onlinecomics.net, a site that mostly features anime comics. Viewership averages 25 people from that site for Laura Beth, and about one-hand's worth for Evan and I. It seemed unclear if it was worth the effort, but every bit helps, I guess. Our highest day in April was 233 unique visitors, and in the begining of the month we were averaging 25, by the end 100.
May
Laura Beth mentioned the site in her farewell comic in The Daily Cardinal, netting 520 unique visitors. The Avg stayed around 200 until Hanzis Matter linked to my comic that name-dropped them. (I didn't tell them about it) We also linked to our Star Wars related comics on Mike Keller's favorite site, earning us 430 visitors that day. By the end of the month our Avg was in the mid-hundreds.
June
We started June ageraging 200 viewers until Mitch Clem of Nothing Nice to Say linked to LB's comic, put up a nice blog entry about it, and even created a banner ad specifically for her for the week. Boom, 2781 visitors in one day. 40,000+ pageviews. The number slowly dropped down to an average of 1000 a day.
July
Numbers stayed at 1,000, getting a boost from Evan's High Webcomics.com Ranking as well as the mix of Russian-related sites that read LB's strip. Strangely, viewership had not grown at all. It remained static.
August
Paid $10 to advertise at this webcomic called Yirmumah He posted about the ad in the middle of the day, in between his two blog posts for the day and not with the comic, and we ended up getting maybe, MAYBE 30 visitors from the whole deal over the course of this month. And the ad went up 2 weeks ago. At the same time we got 70 visits from the Boxcar comics Forum where I posted, so you can tell how well my money was spent. So no more Yirmama advertising. Big fucking waste. Also, I did a strip for Digital Strips that brought over maybe 3 people. Seriously. Our readership remains at about 900 unique visitors per day right now.
Summary:
Overall, it should be pointed out that Laura Beth easily averages more pageviews than Evan and I combined. Often double the number of the two of us combined. So that's where we stand. Personally, I would have assumed that upon reaching 1,000 daily visitors the numbers would start to climb on their own. They really haven't. I don't know at this point if that's because it just doesn't work that way, or because people get sick/tired of our stuff. I don't really want to advertise anymore after the less-than-stellar-Yirmama results, but we'll see. I still want to get the word out.
Future Goals:
Somebody needs to go to a convention and meet other comic artists and try to get another big mention, like what Nothing Nice did for Laura Beth. That was easily the biggest help. Appealing to people who already like comics seems sensible. At one point I made mini-comics and handed them out after a Bright Eyes show, as well as dropped them off at two comic book shops. They had little visible effect, but the idea of bringing in more indie-rock kids seems like another possible willing audience. Plus, the copier here at my job is free for me.
This document is incomplete. It should be completed by the end of the day. -Joanis
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