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Advertising on Project Wonderful
What's the best way to spend money on Project Wonderful ?
I'm always learning. But I have some suggestions based on my experience.
- During your first three months online with your comic, skip advertising, or dabble. You have plenty to do improving your site and building up archives to show you're serious. If you've added too much stuff to your site in your initial rush of enthusiasm, trim it out.
- By months 4-6 you should be easy to find on Google, and unless you update just 4 - 8 times a month, your archive is getting much bigger. People who update less often should change 4 - 6 to a somewhat later schedule.
- Your second quarter is your surge time. You are ready to stop looking at a flat, almost non-existent readership and start proving yourself. Make some ads and do not immediately place them on highly popular comics -- a mistake that most of us make. Place them on comics that cost a penny to a dime a day, and maybe later add some higher priced ones for short periods, to test them.
- Big comics sites always seem like a great place to advertise, but be careful. Most people think the same thing, and the ads can be overpriced. Focus on individual comics and perhaps a few webcomic blogs.
- Look at every site where you place an ad. Pay much less for sites where the ad placement is poor, like at the bottom of a long blog.
- Try different sizes, but if you can make a button that pops, definitely put it to work.
- Sites hosting ads can easily adjust the spacing between ads using the control panel on Project Wonderful, and they don't have to interrupt the ads to do so. If you find a place you'd like to advertise, but the ads are squashed together, suggest to the site owner that they place 8-10 pixels between the ads.
- Animated GIFs lose their value when placed near other animations. Since you don't know what ad will pop up next to yours an hour from now, limit animated GIFs to ad boxes with fewer slots.
- Match your ad color to the site color. Don't put a brown ad on a brown background.
- Depending on how much you spend and factors that can't be predicted easily, a good comic with a good ad campaign may start to grow organically faster than it grows from ads. That's when you start phasing out ads, starting with your least productive.
- Keep an eye on your Google Analytics. If a negative trend develops, and you are not gaining steady readers each month, something is wrong. It may be your comic quality, your update schedule or lack of one, your site design or many other things. Use forums to solicit advice from people, and listen for things that ring true amidst the clutter.
- For many people, spending heavily on an unproven comic is scary. Look at it this way: $100 now is going to do you much more good than $200 a year from now, because you will grow faster, and those readers will tell other readers who will tell other readers... If you wait forever, you'll be a year behind in growth and never recover. Few comics make significant money in less than 2-3 years (or more), so that money you saved has pushed your earning potential farther into the future.
- However much you spend, it will be a bargain if you find out people don't like your comic. If you advertise like crazy and get lots of visitors, but your actual core readership isn't growing, no amount of advertising is going to fix it.
- If you do well and are rolling back advertising in favor of organic growth, consider special event advertising. The event can be tied to your comic's story line, or be general, like Independence Day. This is a great way to keep your comic's name out there without looking needy, and without running the same ad into the ground. Consider using your tired ads to support new comics on the scene.
Some other tips: - At Project Wonderful, you can set your controls to get email whenever an ad is outbid or is high bidder. Accept those controls at first, to gain experience. Later, you can change the settings so that only your higher priced ads, or no ads, send such alerts. Accepting email when you have five ads is no big deal. If you build up to several hundred ads, your entire day will be consumed by ad management.
- You can email ad hosting sites via Project Wonderful. This is easiest way to say, I'd love to advertise on your site, if.. (you put spaces between the ads, you offer a particular size, you set a more realistic minimum price, etc.).
- Some sites set minimum prices. Look at how many readers they have -- it's a rare site that's worth more than a dime/1000, and any floor price should be lower than that by half. If no one else is bidding, that's another sign the price is too high.
- Before you chew someone out for being greedy, there are some reasons why people set high floor prices. One is, they may be hosting Google ads, which are pricier, but they want to try PW without irritating their Google customers. Others just don't know any better, or only want to bother with it beyond a certain price.
- PW customer service is great, but they get a lot of the same questions. Read the short FAQ, and consider asking a friend or other advertiser your question to see if it's easily solved. It might save you a day or two of waiting.
- After a while, an ad that performed great will become less effective. You may have to rotate it, or lower your bid price and settle for fewer displays. Or, rest that site for a while, and go elsewhere. Having your own PW bookmarks helps you remember favorite spots you have idling.
- Many people want to see their cost per click be three cents or less. Anything lower is considered doing pretty well. Under some circumstances, you may tolerate a higher expense because you find that visitors from that site tend to become regulars. (This kind of fact is learned by talking to readers who write you, or who participate on your blog or forum.) Opinions differ on the exact amount, but don't spend $10 of your time trying to save ten cents.
- PW is run by webcomics people. The owner, Ryan North, does Dinosaur Comics and several other useful web sites, such as RSSpect, a feed site. He understands the frustrations you might encounter better than anyone, and it's easier if your letters to customer service are friendly, polite and patient. The staff are not there to punch a clock. They truly want to help you.
- If you have an interesting second site, consider running a few ads for it. A blog might interest people in you, and lead people to your comic, for example. My own multiple sites send a fair amount of traffic to one another.
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