Friday Archive Dive: Web advertising strategy

Since this week's discussion has leaned so heavily towards advertising, today's archive dive take us to January 20, 2010, when member Jeffery Stevenson, of the comic Brat-halla, shared his approach to managing his advertising.
The following was quickly written based on an outline for an article I started working on a few years ago after I took our comic on GraphicSmash from 300-400 pageviews one day to over 80K pageviews the next day through advertising. (What wasn't as easy to see in the stats at GraphicSmash was the jump to around 7500 readers that day). I didn't have the funds to maintain that level every day, but after a few weeks (advertising a couple times a week), I pulled in enough new returning readers to keep us around 5K pageviews a day on average (and we still have a good amount of readers at GraphicSmash even though it isn't our primary site any longer).
Now, even though that one day made a big jump for us, I didn't just go out there on a whim one day to see if I could do it... I planned for months. Here are some of the steps I did in preparing for that day:
