Seth Godin: "What Matters Now"

Passed along by Graham Moogk-Soulis:

This week, Spark, a CBC radio program about technology and culture, aired an interview with Seth Godin, a serial entrepreneur.  Godin's eBook 'What Matters Now' is available free as an eBook.  His upcoming book, 'Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?’ was released today.

In the interview, Godin speaks of a number of things that apply to webcartoonists.  Among other things, he continues the discussion of giving away things for free.

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Banner Ad Hot Seat Part Two: Design

Earlier this week, we started our discussion of Web advertising by analyzing The Message. Today, we're going to focus more on the design of the ad. As always, I'm using as the basis for this discussion my original thoughts on Web advertising that I shared in October.

You only have a second. Use it wisely

Part of designing a good ad is knowing your place. The reader didn't come to the site looking for your ad. They came to the site to see that site's content.

Your job in designing an ad is to steal their attention.

And your best bet in doing that is a strong visual.

If you try to cram too much type into that little space, the result is a jumble of words and too little room for the visual.

And that's no way to steal eyes.

To the right are all ads that could be improved with a little editing.

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Friday Archive Dive: Preorders

Today's Archive Dive takes us back to a May 18, 2009, discussion of preorders.

You need to sell merchandise to make money. But getting the merchandise to sell costs money. Which you don't have. Until you sell the merchandise. It's a dilemma. The solution is a process called "preordering." Offer the merchandise to your readers with the understanding that they are buying an item that has not been created yet (with the understanding that they will receive it shortly after it is). To execute a successful preorder, you have to do a little math.

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Webcomics intervention

This post was contributed by Scott Kurtz.

This is an intervention.

 Your webcomic is horrible. The characters are poorly drawn. The writing isn’t very clear. The concept has been done before. The entire piece is lacking a distinct and unique voice. There’s no cohesion. No consistency. No distinction between characters.

It’s awful. It needs work. And most importantly, it’s not ready to be monetized yet.

This is your first day of rehab. This is your first group session. We’re all in a circle and it’s important that each of us take turns admitting that we’re focusing too much on the web part of webcomics. You have a problem. The first step is admitting it.

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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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