Web-advertising strategy

This piece was submitted by Jeffery Stevenson of the comic Brat-halla.

It was originally a reply to a forum thread, but I wanted to pull it out here to make sure no one missed it. It contains some great advice.

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:

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Hand-lettering basics

In response to a request for a guide to hand-lettering, I prepared the brief overview. The basics I'm describing below apply to a pretty straightforward alphabet. As you get better, you will find small ways of personalizing this that will end up identifying your lettering as your own style.

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Banner Ad Hot Seat Part One: The message

We're going to approach the Banner Ad Hot Seat a little differently than the Web Design Hot Seat. Instead of taking each ad on an individual basis, I'm going to group a few ads together that I think share some common properties and talk about them as a group.

First, let's talk about an ad on a Web site. This is what I've experienced in Web advertising.

• People tend to jump over them on the way to the content
• If people do look at them, they don't look long
• People don't click ads freely -- they have to be enticed.

So...

• Your ad has to stand out visually
• It has to be compelling enough to get the reader to want to click on it
• And, most importantly, it has to deliver a message.

Let's face it, you can design the most beautiful ad in the world -- but if it doesn't convey a message, it won't be as successful as it should be. Let's take a moment to talk about message.

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Friday Archive Dive: Project Wonderful Strategy

Today's Archive Dive is from May 6, 2009. It's my own personal strategy for maximizing the use of Project Wonderful. Before you read, please realize, this will only work if you're also selling merchandise.

Project Wonderful is a very useful tool for displaying ads on your webcomic site. Through this system, prospective advertisers bid on ad space on your site. The highest bidder wins the space. However, I think many webcartoonists are undermining their own best interests by not using PW to its fullest extent. Specifically, they're not setting their minimum bids high enough and they're misusing their "Your ad here" message

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Robert Khoo: Webcomics, the model

For those who don't know, my background is primarily in management consulting. It was a career filled with two-week stints in hostile environments that, in short, needed to figure out how to achieve X with the means of Y. Even though I specialized in enterprise technology, each segment was a little different and each company had their own way of doing things. In order to cope with these variances within tight timetables, every consultant had these very broad-stroke models beat into our heads to help understand how  certain industries ticked. Businesses are businesses, but there are certain base-layer truisms across the board, often portrayed as simplified charts or graphs that give an easy-to-understand perspectives that, although usually fitting no single company, gave you an understanding on what the landscape was.

From those experiences I've been permanently wired to think that way. Everything I see has structure. There's always some sort of system, and no matter how organic the scenario, I immediately compartmentalize it into something that I can base my thinking and learning on. 

That said, I figured I'd be a good exercise for my initial piece to give the webcomic space a go, as we could base future discussions and discourse on it. By no means is it the end-all, be-all snapshot of the industry, but it's a solid starting point in which to gain perspective from. You guys are paying for this stuff, so I'll try to use as many hard numbers as I can to give you a good idea of what category you may fall into. I'll also preface this by saying again, not everyone will fit into this paradigm, as there are always exceptions to any ecosystem.

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