Advertising: Investing in yourself

This piece was kindly contributed by Joseph Stillwell of theHiveworks.com.

The goal of marketing something is either brand recognition or conversion (like selling an item). Most webcomics will fall into brand marketing. Other things that run off subscriptions or items will run off conversion marketing. 

First, you have to be realistic about your budget. Marketing can be cheap (handing out pamphlets at a college) or it can get very expensive (like the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to run a U.S. presidential campaign). For most people running webcomics, budgets fall between $1 and $3,000 — pretty small.

For this example, let’s say you have a budget of $1,500 to promote a comic with 1,000 daily users...