Advertising strategies

[Gar]

So I've been playing around with PW a little bit over the last couple of days. I've been placing a bunch of small bids on low-to-medium traffic websites, and that's been doing OK so far.

Last night, following some advice I got on webcomics.com, I pulled all the ads that had been running for more than a week (figuring they'd probably reached as many eyeballs as they were likely to), and placed a couple of big bids to run for a couple of hours on Dr McNinja and Questionable Content (targeting People Who Like Really Weird Comics, and Female Readers respectively).

I'm now down ten bucks, but up somewhere between 500 and 6,000 uniques (depending on which set of traffic stats you trust) in a single day. Now to see how many of them stick around...

So, opening the floor for discussion: in people's experience, is it better to cast a wide net or to go after the big fish? Do you put your ad on a lot of small sites for a couple of cents a day,  or spend the same amount of money for four hours on one of the really popular sites? (translated for those who don't understand fishing metaphors)

[Alectric]

I've tried hitting the big sites occasionally but never got much luck.  I guess it depends on how much money you're willing to risk and how desperate you are to gain more readers.

[Gibson]

I know this thread is older, but I'd be interested to hear how many of them did stick around. My main strategy on PW recently has been to place low bids on high-traffic, high-bid sites and let them sit and wait on the off chance that the bids dip down. I've been surprised at how often it happens.

I'm not doing any PW advertising right now, though. Instead, I have a big incentive campaign going on with the voting on Top Webcomics where I beg my readers to vote and offer a new incentive every day, mostly wallpapers and some cheesecake art. Essentially, I got my readers all jazzed at the challenge of getting me into the Top Ten there. It worked too, I moved to the #10 spot on Friday and my traffic is up considerably and the readers are all celebrating, which is good too. I did the same thing last year with WebcomicZ and I've been in the Top Ten there more often than I haven't since then. I'm not sure it's something that any comic could do, but it's probably worth thinking about something like it.

[Rob]

I've done really well with smaller campaigns in my overall click through's and cost per click. Getting a whole lot of smaller sites seems to be comparable to one big site. And it often costs less. But one thing I've learned is that if the comic is very different from yours it won't work. Audiences are actually fairly specific to genre. But once thing I have noticed is that middle of the road sites.... ones that get 2-3 dollars a day per ad are... for me anyway, usually the worst return on investment.

This is after about a year of playing with PW. Your mileage may vary. 

[Richard]

I agree with Rob about matching your comic's genre to whoever you're advertising on. Many romance fans don't appreciate super hero ads showing up on their site and vice versa. With a little bit of research you can make quite effective ads to reach very specific audiences.

It's also quite useful while searching for ads on PW to look up keywords. Have a horror comic? Try typing in horror, zombie, vampire, slasher, etc.

[Gar]

Curse my cute kitty comic with adult humour and superhero/fantasy elements!

[Gibson]

I agree with Rob on both points. It's not that the sites need to be the same, though, but they should draw a similar audience. I don't even bid on middle-range ads anymore, it's either under a dollar or more than ten. I don't know that I'd recommend going with many small ads over one big one or not, mostly because of the time involved in finding that many small ads that have the kind of audience you need.

Something I did that seemed to work out well, actually, was to go to really high traffic sites, see who was advertising on them, then click through and put in bids on that site's ads. They were almost always cheaper, not to mention you get to advertise on them while they're experiencing increased traffic from their ad on the big site.

[Gar]

Oooh, sneaky, I like it.

I've been getting decent clickthrough from Reddit. Not so much by actually posting my comics, but by answering questions in the AskReddit section and incorporating a link whenever the opportunity arises.