I give up, what's the secret to getting people to interact with your personal website?!

[AdrenalineShots]

I'm getting an okay response on comics sites at the moment, and I get a reasonable amount of people who seem to keep coming back to my website... but no comments! Am I doing something wrong?! If so why do they keep coming back?! Curious lol

[jordankotzebu]

I've been in a similar camp. I think if you do some blog posts positing some Q&A, or you ask about controversial topics, people seem more likely to engage. I mentioned that I was thinking about cutting my comic shorter and I got a flood of comments from people who never usually comment. Then they even suggested what would make them engage more.

[respheal]

Not that I've got a large following, but I've found that frequent commenters are much more rare than readers. On a personal site not tied to a community, maybe 1/400 readers will be a frequent commenter. Really the best thing you can do is make commenting as easy as possible. I set up Disqus on my site since it's so easy to log in to (Got a Google or Facebook account? DONE), but they're about to move away from being 100% free (ad-supported or subscription ).

Also I think that people like to know that their comments are being heard. I try to respond to every comment I get O: (if not to every comment, then to every person, at least (like if someone leaves multiple comments).

As for the rest, just patience really. Keep making content and people will comment eventually.

[Overlord_Thundersnow]

I set up Disqus on my site since it's so easy to log in to (Got a Google or Facebook account? DONE), but they're about to move away from being 100% free (ad-supported or subscription ).

Oh wow that's huge news! I had no idea.

As far as interaction goes, I've noticed that A LOT of webcomics hosting their own sites almost never have comments. The exceptions are sites that appear to be a personal site but are in-fact linked within a webcomic farm.

Some of the best webcomics I've ever seen have a comment section that is just a barren desolate wasteland. Perhaps re-posting to a facebook page would generate the interaction you desire, where people are already logged in when they see your page so they don't have to 'log in' just to type a comment?

Before going with Discus I considered just allowing anyone to annonymously post, but that would just get swamped with hundreds of robot spams eventually.

I personally don't get much interaction on my webcomic, but I always make sure to immediately respond as fast as possible to any comments.

Hope this helps!

[abbastudios]

There is no secret. It just happens.

[shazzbaa]

I don't know what the secret is, or if there's a secret.... I do know that responding to the comments you get encourages commenting, but I'm not sure there's a way to make interaction happen.

On my first webcomic, though, I didn't start getting comments from folks outside my circle of friends until I was about 40-50 pages in. It takes a lot of time and you're probably going to see a lot of silent folks following you waaaayyy before you start getting comments. Since it looks like you've only posted a 4 or 5 pages last month, as far as I can tell? I would expect comments to be sparse right now!

A couple things to think about going forward, though:

• Your website is difficult to navigate, for me. It doesn't look like a webcomic, and there's nowhere that feels like a landing page or an archive -- it feels more like an blog where you post art and occasionally comic pages you're workin on. This is exacerbated by the fact that the comic pages actually aren't a readable size on the website itself -- you have to click to open them as a separate image, which is (on my computer at least) too awkwardly large to read comfortably. And right now there aren't many pages, but it's hard to figure out where I would go to start the comic once more are added. The whole website is generally an uncomfortable reading experience, which means I'm less likely to stick around, and even LESS likely to leave a comment.
• There's nothing wrong with letting people know you'd like to hear from them, but it's not the only thing that convinces folks -- if you say "please comment" and I have no idea what I want to say to you, I'm still not going to comment. And having the same "please leave comments, I'd love to hear them!" spiel every time comes off a little impersonal; even your page description ("if you love X, check out this one-shot!") sounds like ad copy. The main reason people comment is when they want to interact with you -- and so it can help to seem like a real person.

[AdrenalineShots]

Thanks so much for taking the time to check it out, and all of the detailed feedback. I'm still learning, and really appreciate you taking the time out to provide some really useful guidance.

[Kawaiiyusra]

No one has any reason to go to websites. It's better to focus on uploading comics on communities where a large people are already hanging out. Websites to me is just fluff, I use to have a website then I realize it was better to just focus on updating on either smack or tap.