Advertising & Promotion. What do you use?
I think this is an underrated aspect of being a creator.
Advertising and promotion can range from plastering telephone poles to store signings or micro ads on blogs, from appearing at conventions to writing a solicitation, from writing comments on forums (sequentialworkshop, facebook or Twitter, et.) to podcasts and Youtube.
Let's talk about it. What are you doing? Or... why are you *not* doing something.
Do you have a blog? Facebook page? A website? Do you sell your own product? How do you advertise? Do you place it all at the feet of your publisher? What technology are you using and what responses are you getting? Share your insights and what you might feel are new directions to reach the audiences that we create for.
Comments
I'm unconvinced of its usefulness. I get a bunch of new people on board
every time, but I can't tell if they have any idea who I am or what I do, let alone whether it has any impact on sales. It's promotional wankery, really.
Still, that page is about all I use to announce/promote things, mainly because I just can't seem to get my shit together to update anything else. For a long time, I also used my regular FB page to announce/promote, but I've been getting more and more uncomfortable about the weird crossover between different aspects of my life on that page, and just went on a huge defriending binge there, dumping most of my comics industry contacts and suggesting they got over to the other page instead...apologies to those of you who were among the ditched, but as I went along I started getting more and more drastic in my cuts and in the end left pretty much only family, co-workers, and over-to-the-house-on-a-regular-basis friends on my regular FB page. I have a feeling that this act may have had a greater marketing impact for me than anything else I've done in a while, and not a positive one.
Yeah, it all sometimes feels a bit useless. Like, if you put out good product, you should let others decide if it's worth talking about in social media. But, as Greg mentioned earlier, sometimes you have to push it out to let the world know that good product is there.
I still can't figure out the right formula, and I work in social media/electronic marketing PROFESSIONALLY when I'm not doing comics, illustration or journalism. This all takes a lot of time and effort and analyzing and ... well, we'd all be better off putting that effort into creating more/better product.
For my webcomic, PW has created some nice traffic once I got the hang of where to advertise. (I found that prose sites seem to work better for my long-form comics than gag comoic sites, with the strange exception of Sinfest. My theory is that gag readers are just stopping by for a quick fix of laughs, whereas prose readers are already sparing time for reading, so they won't mind reading some more.) But I can't really say how much of it was quality traffic, e.g. people who stick around.
InkOutbreak and Just The First Frame have brought in nice new numbers recently, too.
In Germany, there's the Webcomic-Verzeichnis and about three comics-related forums to post in - one advantage of having a rather small scene. English language traffic seems a bit more difficult to generate. I've been meaning to hook up with some Buffy fan forums and stuff because a lot of my readers are Buffy fans, for some reason.
I mean, take my buddy Yale's thing, JL8: http://jl8comic.tumblr.com/
Those notes? That's 600 plus comments, reblogs, likes, etc.
That's a lot of reach. Which I would like to try and mimic.
- It's the 12th
- Tumblr hosts 54.8 million
But your theory is correct - the "cohesive Internet presence" means you are reaching everyone no matter where they are or how they search. It's exhausting (and as someone who also does social media marketing for money, I know), but kinda necessary these days. Even I have trouble keeping up.most popular website in the U.S., with 17 billion monthly page views
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