Hi
I've been meaning to make this thread for a bit. I understand that I'm not an expert digital marketer nor have I been at this for that long but, I want to share some of the ways I promote my comics Hawk and Flo Adventures and Thirley Peak.
I feel now would be a good time to make this thread as I have some down time and :EDIT: H&F has just this minute his 250 subscribers thank you! :D. I started uploading onto Tapas in February and joined the forums in March.
I want to say before I begin that the best way forward for any creator with any work outside of being supportive and active within your community, is to understand the site that you're on. The demographic that site attracts, how that site functions, what type of strategy you need for that site.
I'll use myself as an example of what I mean, In the webcomic community i'm known for my comic series but also for this. 
I'm going to be honest, when it comes to promoting I can be a little hesitant at times, to be entirely truthful I'd rather A. make my own comics or B. Binge read and leave comments. I have a twitter, a blue sky, i'm active on webhosting site forums and I check Reddit every now and then. Though i've been on reddit less and less partly due to how many negative threads I keep running into. Now one thing to think about when you market yourself is this, is there something you do that no one else/ very few people are are doing? If the answer is yes turn it into your brand, it's better to be known for something than nothing at all.
In my case I leave a lot of comments, I myself am a creator, I was also a comic collector growing up, I read and type fast and I live in front of my laptop when I'm awake. In my case I tried to turn the fact that I leave lots of comments into my brand as a creator. So I post it on the social media sites i'm on :).
I've made some effort to market my twitter as a Comic promotion twitter, I tweet about comics I like with the recommended reading list. I set my own comment left goals and I was able to develop a following on there a bit more organically as opposed to going into follow sprees constantly (I used to do them when I was starting off on there I must confess it got tiring).
I post stuff like this on my Twitter and my Bluesky every now and then. (or at least when the number goes up lol). Tapas is a very community driven website, it tells you plain as day how many comments a creator has left which is an incredible feature for someone like me as it meant I didn't have to keep track of it all in my head xD. Lots of creators struggle for reader retention, partly due to the sub for sub culture that the forums promotes. Lots of comics get 1000 subs, hit the front page but will struggle to get 5 comments on just chapter 1. One thing I actually do Is I go through the featured section on Duck and Tapas and type congrats on the feature and try to be supportive of people who are having their moment. It takes about 30 minutes to do admittedly if I go through just one section like 'completed works' or 'staff picks' here on Tapas. I do it and if the person replies i'll try and have a conversation with them.
I frequently go into sub for sub threads with the intention of wanting to read some stuff in my free time. I'll put my own work in them if. I've read and commented in case anybody's curious but if you notice even in my own threads. I don't ask people to sub to me, unless they're already subbed to me on another site in which case I politely ask someone like @MK_Wizard or @ProjectHybrid to sub. If i'm on another site, homie subs are fine. Sub for sub isn't a good way to grow a comic I will not name names, I will not state the name of any Novel or comic to look at but I will share this screen shot. This isn't from any comic in particular but this is not an uncommon sight sadly.
Which is why I make the effort to go leave a basic 'congrats your featured' or 'good luck'. I admit I don't always know what to say sometimes. it is worth doing though and I know it seems like featured stuff is heading to the moon, but anyway moving on.
Now I want to be clear, my method of binge reading en masse isn't flawless either, there's lots of people who click sub back because they're in the habit of sub for subbing, or there are people who sub and forget to read. It happens, but finding readers in other comments sections is a viable strategy, especially on somewhere like the Duck webcomics that's a small site where it's manageable to be up to date with every recently updating comic. Comic Fury works well too, again community driven sites and Tapas have very sociable denizens. It does not; however work on a site where you can't click on people's names to go to profiles, get no notifications when comments are left, there's a comment timer making me count 5 missisispis before I can leave my next comment on the next chapter and there is a comment bot called George Orwell that slows me down while I have one comics 3 site mirrors up, while i'm leaving 15 sets of comments to the same comic in the afternoon and be censored for a multitude of random words! *breathes in deeply
Point is not every strategy is guaranteed to work everywhere sadly Just ask NEC's PC Engine, webhosting sites are like different countries. One thing that France loves isn't necessarily going to be loved in Germany. Mass commenting isn't quite effective on somewhere like Globalcomix where there's a lot of mainstream publishing firms that don't have time to reply to you. Now the creators especially in the vert scroller sections do a lot of the time so it's always worth hitting them up. It can still work though just not to the same extent as Duck, Comic Fury or Tapas.
That being said I was able to get Global to work for me, I socialised with the owners of the site, I have my own recommended reading section in the discord and a promotion section for my own comics. When I post recommended reading lists I can often get into some nice and friendly conversations
I'm a nerdy reader so i'm more than happy to essentially share my reading list in my own comic. I partly got the idea for the reading list from banner swaps, then I just thought, eh i'll promote everyone anyway. They don't have to put my banner at the end i'll do it for free. To be honest I discovered by accident that it's actually more effective for both parties involved, because my readers see some reading suggestions then they go check out another comic. Then there's a likelihood that they talk to that comic's readers and tell them they found the suggestion from me, so they sometimes then go check my stuff out, everybody wins in that regard. I got a discord section out of it in the Globalcomix Discord as they liked that I was making the effort for others.
The last thing i'd like to share with you all is a bit of cross over marketing I do, in the past some of you have seen my 'I'm on so many different sites threads' which I made to help others out. Well a lot of people don't market the fact that they're available on other sites. This is something I think more people should do as letting your readers know where they can find and contact you, or read your stuff on the site mirror you're on that they prefer is a great strategy. The Duck is excellent for this thanks to the site buttons feature, clicking on any of these takes you to any of the other sites i'm on.
Stuff like this is a big reason why I feel in this day and age you need to have a Duck or a Comic Fury or in cases both. Cross over promoting your site mirrors is very easy to do on those sites and it makes it easier to grow everywhere. Readerships are like a river they need to flow and you'll get a bigger lake if more rivers can run into it. On Tapas and Global I sadly don't have the epic Hawk and Flo themed site buttons so I use this page on most of my chapters instead.
I also post threads in the Tapas forums informing everybody of stuff i'm thinking about, but why do I do that?
One word Google
The 5th result is an image from a thread I made talking about the creation of Thirley Peak. One thing that's really great about the Tapas forums is that they come up in Google searches quite easily. One main method of getting eyes on your comic is to optimise your search results as best as you can. Unique names for series are very good for this, as are Duck webcomics community blogs among other things. There are many more things to try out to help improve your visibility, the 2nd biggest source of readers I have for my comic come from Google itself.
Then you keep your fingers crossed that at least one or two people binge read your archive at the same time, click like and comment on every chapter and it puts you up the trending and popular algorithms. Highest Hawk and Flo Adventures has been able to get is 40th on Trending on the whole site. I sadly don't 100% understand how the popular and trending algorithms work. I just know getting Likes, comments and views = good and Active subs = awesome (You know who you are I love you all!).
So yeah I just wanted to share with you all some of the stuff I do to help promote my comics, I hope some of these ideas can help. I figured I could work well as a sort of case study and I expect the replies to have pros and cons which I will leave to all of you. Thank you for reading! I hope this helps out 
