Direct More Attention to Your Blog

Your blog is the heartbeat of your community-building effort. The comic brings your readers in, but your blog makes them feel as if they belong. Unfortunately, it's incredibly hard to jam both into the "first screen" of a typical reader.

We've discussed this extensively in the past, but even the most maximized webcomic sites are going to face a little trouble directing eyes down to the blog.

And let's face it, even if your blog is first-screen maximized, all of the action takes place in the area the comic inhabits. The vast majority of your readers are going to zoom in on the space and then zoom out. Your challenge is to try to catch their attention in that nanosecond between the last panel and your reader's departure -- and direct it to the blog.

Here's a good strategy for doing just that.

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Keep 'em Home

If you're running ads on a CPM (cost per thousand views) basis, it's in your best interest to generate as many pageviews as possible. Priority One, of course, is to do the best comic you possibly can. Second on the list is to engender a sense of community among your fans. Third is maximizing your archives, and last month, I discussed a few thoughts about maximizing your pageviews by finding creative ways to send your readers back through your archives.

But there's one more strategy I'd like to share to increase pageviews -- and that involves keeping readers on your site longer.

Think about it. You spend an awful lot of time trying to get a reader to come to your site, and yet, if you're like a lot of site owners, you're pretty callous about sending them away. I'd like to share a strategy that I've been using to get them to stay longer -- one that has made a noticeable improvement on my pageviews.

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Friday Archive Dive: Building a Media Kit

Today's Archive Dive is from May 5, 2009, and with convention season closer than you think, it's a good time to start preparing. I like to have a media kit at the ready when I exhibit. I hand it out to journalists who might want to include me in their coverage. It makes them much more likely to do so -- and it helps to ensure that, if they do write about me, they write the story I want told -- in the way I want it told.

In this month's To-Do list, it is suggested that you prepare a media kit for the summer convention season. What is a media kit, and why do you need one? A media kit is a folder that contains information about you and your comic, along with samples of your work, recent press releases and other promotional material. It is handed to a member of the media to enable (or encourge) them to cover your work in their publication. In short, a media kit is, as the name implies, the building blocks to the story that you want the world to know. In preparing the media kit, you are giving the journalist everything she needs to tellthe story that you want to have told. Here are a few things you might like to consider including in yours:

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Longform strategy

Humor-based comic strips have an incredible power on the Web. As I've said before, they're tailor-made to retain a dedicated readership -- the kind a Web site needs to thrive.

Does that mean that a dramatic, longform comic can't succeed on the Web? Of course it doesn't. But I think that it means creators of these kinds of comics have to approach their craft somewhat differently than they would in a traditional print setting.

As I've written in the past, I've identified three major keys to a webcomics' success -- beyond the overall quality of the comic itself:

• Frequent updates: The updates have to appear at the most frequent rate possible to ensure reader retention without sacrificing quality. If you can do your best work five days a week, that's probably very close to the optimum. (Web traffic droops so much on the weekends, it's hard to justify six or seven days.)
• Consistent updates: Once you've committed to an update schedule, stick to it. A huge part of retaining readers is making your comic habitual. You can't go from updating daily to a M-W-F schedule without losing or confusing a significant portion of your readers.
• Significant updates: Each update has to be significant -- both to your regular readers and to the reader who is arriving to your site for the first time that day. For a humor comic, that requirement is easily served by a well-written punchline. For a dramatic story, it's got to depend on a plot point.

Now, it's easy to see how the first two can be applied to a longform comic, but applying that third point becomes a major hang-up. For example, like one cartoonist who e-mailed me put it: "Sometimes you just need that full-page establishing shot." Or that ubiquitous full-page falling-down-a-well scene.

And they're right. However...

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Banner Ad Hot Seat: Call for Submissions

Next week, we're going to workshop a few of your ads. So if you have an ad that you'd like some feedback on, please post it here (or post a link to it). We're talk about what you're doing right and discuss where improvements can be made. Submit any kind of ad -- leaderboard, skyscraper, square -- and try to find ways you can get the most for your ad dollar.

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