Free Self-Promotion Through Project Wonderful

[PotooGryphon]

Please feel free to offer up your own advice on Project Wonderful. Or ask me anything if confused. Happy Promoting! XD

[minzinger]

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[minzinger]

@CyndiFoster - Thanks so much. This is an incredibly valuable post for any comic creators out there. Extremely well-organized and thoughtful post. You clearly put a lot of time into this and I surely hope many will learn and utilize their newfound knowledge. Incredible! Love this community! Can't thank you enough.

[PotooGryphon]

Aw, thanks.

I tried to make it something pin worthy. It's also something that I feel is very worthwhile, since having more visitors to the Tapastic site benefits all of us, and not just the promoting comic. It's incredibly rare to find a Tapastic user that is subscribed to one comic series only (I haven't found one yet). So bringing in more comic book reading enthusiasts, through whatever self-promotion method, is awesome. And this Project Wonderful method is a fairly untapped resource for us Tapastic creators.

Plus, did I mention it's FREE guys?

[hades]

This is awesome, thank you for your time. :]

[shanecampos]

This is good info and done well! Thanks for putting this together Cindi.

[yuliusefferven]

yes I'd like to express my absolute gratitude for this! And it's so well put together!

[keontan]

This is really helpful, thanks!

[PotooGryphon]

Aw, shucks guys.
I hope to see all your banner ads floating around Project Wonderful.

Also, on a side note, try experimenting placing your ad on sites that aren't affiliated with comics. Since Oops is kid friendly, I've placed my ad on a couple of parenting and kid sites and have gotten awesome results.

Experiment and find what works for you.

[Strontium]

I'm going to try this, when I get the chance! Thanks for the guide!

[globuline]

Excellent guide! I need to try this as soon as I can!

[taihendechu]

Thanks a lot for taking your time for posting this! Really nice and helpful guide!
I'll give it a try as soon as I have time and I'll give some feedback too :3 More traffic is good for us and good for tapastic, which is good for us again. One big family ♥

I never thought about advertising too much.. but I guess I should start considering it more... if you have more tipps and suggestions like that I would love to hear them! Thank you!! :3

[PotooGryphon]

That'd be great! I'd love to hear some feedback of what's working for you guys too.

As for other tips, I've tried a lot of new methods this last month that has helped out my comic A LOT! I posted it on another forum here. But I'll also post it here too, in case it helps someone else out.

Here's what I've done new this past month:

• Posting on ALL my social sites when a new episode is up on Tapastic (facebook, twitter, tumblr, stumbleupon, reddit, etc.). I give a link to the episode, hashtag the post including a Tapastic tag, and I ask everyone to help me by resharing my post or like/share/commenting on the new Tapastic episode.

• Project Wonderful ads. Projectwonderful.com is a free ad site where you can create various sized banners, tell the site where you want the banners to link to, and bid (a lot of them are free) on different sites for your ad to appear. I've done this for my Tapastic site, and it's helped some. (this is how this thread started )

• "Thank you for Subscribing" posts. These are great! They give you an opportunity to tell your reader how much you appreciate them for following, as well as spark a new friendship with your readers. Also, there are some people that find unknown comics by lurking through other people's profile pages and looking at the thank you posts. (I do this) When I finally got on this band wagon I was able to better connect with readers and my subs jumped 20 new subs in a day.

• Get involved in Tapastic activities, contest, and events when they happen.

• And use the forums to help promote.

I started using these avenues to self-promote about a month ago and now I'm averaging about 100-250 page views a day, about 1 new subscriber a day, and A LOT more reader interactions with more readers commenting and sharing the new episode post.

[PotooGryphon]

If you guys don't have a very big following on social media sites, like me, and worry that posting to your own profiles isn't doing much, stop worrying. Most social media sites have groups or communities you can join to help promote on too.

Facebook has groups like Webcomics, Webcomic Creators, and Comic Book Art Discussion.
Twitter has lists you can be apart of.
Google+ has communities.
Deviantart has LOTS of groups you can submit art to their galleries.

Search for the groups/communities for each social network site and promote your comic through these means too. I forgot to add that one to my list above.

[glennsong]

Awesome post. I just started playing with Project Wonderful again so this will be an interesting experiment to try.

[jayorten]

Cool! We here at SomethingandCo. could use some self promotion. I'll think about it.

[globuline]

So I've been trying a bit Project Wonderful with different ads sizes and bids. I tried the free 2 days way and put a bit of money too to see the difference.

Free ads: there are not that many people actually clicking on the ad. I had like 30 bids with each about 100 views and a total of 3 clicks!! No difference in my tapastic stats whatsoever.

Paying ads: I had 150k views on 1 bid and 145 clicks for $3.5. I really saw the difference on my tapastic stats and even some conversion (news subscribers).

So, is free ad a long term strategy that you need to renew every 2 days? Did you guys see a real difference? After how long? Or maybe I'm doing something wrong here.

[PotooGryphon]

Is free a long term strategy? No, however, it's good for testing out some sites. Since I've been doing this on project wonderful for several months now, I've been able to find sites through free listings that has an audience that clicks on my banners. Once I find those sites I create longer running paid ads with those sites. Also since my site also generates ad revenue through pw, it's a self maintaining system where my site generates revenue for me to fund paid ads on sites that have proven to get me more clicks

[globuline]

Ah I see. I have to say, I thought all websites were pretty much the same in terms of audience clicking or not, but I guess I still have a lot to learn.

I was hesitating putting pw on my website to get ad revenues but it's only in French. Do you think that could be an issue?

[PotooGryphon]

Nope, I don't think that'd be an issue. There are people in France that can speak/read more languages than French, and it never hurts to try to get free money. Also, a lot of people placing ads don't even look at the website they're posting on, just the stats on pw. They mainly care about how much traffic your site gets.