Last month I embarked on some modest advertising of my web comic, inspired by the adage “you have to spend money to make money.”

What have I learned? Aim big – it’s better to spend $25 in one paid slot that reaches a quarter million eyeballs (well literally half a million eyeballs) than to try to nickel and dime your way via lower impressions on smaller sites. Common sense? Perhaps in hindsight.

The resulting chatter from the costliest-ad yet is returning heavy traffic weeks after the original ad aired. Want to know the irony? The chatter was a thread in a forum discussing “Awful Web Comics”. Without emoticon and eyes-rolling, when a member of that community was calling my strip the “best web comic ever” I signed up to thank them!

This by no means discouraged or offended me, because

1. I knew the thread was called “Awful Web Comics”
2. You develop a thick skin doing graphic design professionally as long as I have
3. This community is not my intended audience. If you are into furry animals in your mid-twenties, then you’re probably not interested in my content (but Mom and Dad may “get it”) and finally
4. any publicity is good publicity.

All this analysis speaks to my impatience; I will be dutifully creating the best comic I am able. Paid advertising was a means to insure that readership, which was critical to my first full month. My goal for November 2009: no paid advertising whatsoever until the end of month. I’ll do my part on Black Friday (staying away from the stores) and spend my entire monthly budget in one shot.

The comic I’m considering advertising on is called “Questionable Content”.

I never thought I’d see the day that this topic would interest me; or indeed that I would post my findings, but here goes:

I’m not producing a webcomic “My Life In The Trenches” to make money, but I certainly want readers. To that end, there is a time-proven adage that states “you need to spend money to make money.”

Last week I embarked on a very low-rent experiment and dabbled in paid ads for two separate, three day windows:

• Facebook
  Paid USD 7.50 for 11 clicks
• Project Wonderful
  Auction-based ads, read more about how it works at the creator’s wiki page.
  Paid USD 8.93 for 32 clicks

How They Are Similar

Both do what they promise, Facebook serving 55,213 impressions and PW 77,750. Say what you want about ads on the net, but to have your product seen by approximately 132,000 people (even if they ignore the call to action) is fascinating.

Both have very polished management tools, ostensibly making it crystal clear that you should advertise more with them!

Both use the CPC (cost-per-click) model. For PW the average cost per click was 28 cents and Facebook a whopping 68 cents.

How They Differ

The only hitch was that the approval process on the PW ad was thwarted twice; by no fault of the thorough and helpful customer support – but by the esteemed comic’s webmaster that I targeted; an ad must be manually approved and this only happened with the help of customer support at Project Wonderful.

Does Facebook need – or even have – Customer Service? I didn’t use it for the ad manager, since they pretty quickly approved the ad as there is no uncontrollable third-party in the mix. However, I yielded twice as much traffic by announcing to my Facebook friends that my webcomic launched than paying for it; admittedly this is a slippery slope that I don’t want to overdo – but it was free.

Conclusion
Facebookers seem unlikely to stop whatever it is that brought them to Facebook to branch off to check out a comic. The ads may be “unseen” as white noise; a necessary evil. Alternately, by paying for a Project Wonderful ad (since it was invented by a comic artist) on a kindred webcomic site that you select, you’re essentially “preaching to the choir” and readers are more likely to click-through to discover new comics. For my purposes, Project Wonderful is the way to go when paying for a webcomic ad.

After many weeks in my dwindling free time, I managed to complete my Kindle 2 video review. You can check it out on my YouTube Channel.

This is the second episode of “Tim’s Gear Review”. There will not be that many more that I can foresee; I have a Korg synthesizer that musicians may be interested in buying used that will lead them to a search for video review, but beyond that….

This continues to be hard work, primarily because I’m using aging equipment for an application that is known as “expensive” (in terms of CPU power required) – nonlinear video editing. I’m optimistic that a planned year-end upgrade to my computer hardware may “re-inject the fun”.

Some lessons learned:

Lapel (lavalier) mic:
From my results in the first video gear review, this became a must because of the hum introduced by lights for any onscreen appearances. I went with an affordable one from the local “Shack” because I was in a hurry to record, but I want to upgrade this in the future.

This same mic should not be used for off-screen voice over narration if you have any alternative. I tried and found the overall quality to be inferior to the results with the condensor mic I use on my podcast “Everybody Else Is Too Loud”, so I had to re-record.

Thanks for checking it out and please leave a comment.

The day before yesterday, I flipped the switch and went with a “soft launch” on my webcomic My Life In The Trenches. It’s a semi-autobiographical strip that publishes weekly on Tuesdays.

Here are some thoughts and some webcomic production lessons learned:

• The personal excitement and emotional investment was akin to having another child. In fact, it proved to be harder work than actual childbirth; at least my contribution(!). The great WordPress plugin ComicPress release a major, feature-rich update to a heavily widget-ized version that simply “broke” my comic. I was able to roll-back to the previous version, and may still want to explore this when time permits; just not on launch day.
• I’m an infrequent Facebook updater, but I thought it important enough to inform my friends and family about this new chapter in my artistic life. My announcement netted comments and “thumbs up” from about a third of my close friends and family.
• It doesn’t make much sense to start paid advertising campaigns until the archive is filled beyond the intial kick-off comic. Let’s face it, word of mouth alone isn’t going to cut it. What that magic number of strips is, I’m unsure – but I can create the banners in the meantime. Seems Project Wonderful is better for my intended audience than Google Ads.
• Finally, as a follow-up to my post that explores webcomic workflows, my initial hunch to flatten the process and keep everything in Photoshop is the way to go. I may someday write the Part II to that post, but suffice it to say that after watching a streaming demo by a leading webcomic artist about how he achieves his crisp lines, it’s simply easier (read: more fun) to stay inside one graphcs program from beginning to end.

I’m planning for a bump in website traffic with a promised guest strip that I recently did for one of my favorite webcomics, Jefbot by Jeff Schuetze. The practice of guest-strips is a free marketing technique to drive traffic, insofar as the time is donated on spec that the strip will reach a larger audience. In fact, this was the reason for launching slightly sooner than planned. It was a lot of fun to draw in the style of another comic artist whose linework I love.

I fear I may be exhausting all possible angles at this “hang”, which has become my favorite place to take a break from my personal projects that keep me so busy.

Game designer Mike Sweeney has started a blog called “One Game Every Day” where he reviews a game daily. This only further motivates me to draw every day, which is sometimes difficult.

I’ll likely discuss Mike’s blog when I record my podcast tonight.

I have been bitten by the podcast bug, and even though audio mp3 podcasts seem to be soundly trashed by the ease of vlogging, the following is my workflow of my podcast “Everybody Else Is Too Loud¹“.

A little back-story first: from my musical hobby I have amassed some respectable gear, and even though your mileage may vary, if you want quality results there are a few things you’ll need:

Sound card

The integrated sound chip that you have already installed on your mother board is best for playing the system alert sounds, but if you want to record your voice so that it is pleasing to listen to, you’ll need to make this upgrade. There are prices to match every budget, but look to spend $100.

I’ll spare the technical details, but be sure that you can sample 24bit, 96khz. You will “downsample” this when making your mp3, but the logic goes that if you capture “better bits”, the compressed end result will be richer.

Good microphone

Garbage in, garbage out. There are fundamentally two types: condensor and dynamic mics. I have both but only use the condensor mics from MXL, although you could get a dynamic mic for less; and they are more rugged.
The sensitivity of the condensor mic requires a windscreen or pop filter, due to the ungainly way it captures plosives.

DAW software

The sky is the limit here and a more detailed round-up is beyond the scope of this post. Recommended reading is “Podcast for Dummies”. There is an open-source (free) option called Audacity, and Mac users may opt for Garageband for the recording and editing.

I’m chiefly concerned with the quickest possible recording and editing. This means that my five minute podcast takes no more than one hour to record, edit and upload to the podcast’s website.

In support of flattening these steps, most DAWs allow the creating of template files. This is typically helpful when composing music and you have wired all your MIDI instruments to connect automatically. However I find this to be less useful for podcasting than setting the software to open the “last file used” – that way I merely delete the previous week’s main audio talk-track and retain the consistent show opener and closer, and music beds.

For recording on Friday night , I start amassing notes on my iPhone of topics of interest approximately a day or two before; it’s typically good to have one more than needed. If there is a particular webcomic I want to highlight or industry news that is particularly compelling, I’ll note it here.

Finally, I found that as I wrap editing, it’s pretty undesirable to start typing the requisite show notes, so lately I’ve been starting the “Draft” post status in WordPress and use it as my talking points, to keep me on track. The WordPress plugin that makes it all possible is Blubrry Powerpress.

Since this is relatively short podcast, this is merely a process that works for me.
If you have a podcast and have any tips, please let me know what works for you!

1. The title of my podcast was inspired by the Who song “The Quiet One”, by John Entwistle and paraphrases the lyric “I ain’t quiet, everybody else is too loud.”

from Starbucks. God, I wish I had a model to fill this chair.

Happy Labor Day weekend!

It’s Friday night and I usually don’t post, since it’s Podcast night. However here’s a fresh sketch from the Nanuet, NY store.

Last week I stopped before heading home and they were playing Sinatra, the music I heard when I was in the womb and am only now starting to fully appreciate. The place was lightly trafficked, and I figured this was my new “hang”; to unwind with chai latte, sketch and people-watch before transitioning entirely to home life from work life.

This harmonic convergence turned out to be less predictable than I anticipated. Tonight was merely tolerable, they were playing neo-reggae which is fine, but coupled with a too-chatty girl sitting nearby at the counter had me rattling this sketch out and leaving pretty quickly.

This outing, coupled with my tired eyes on a Friday night after capping off a busy week, remind me how quickly my vision is deteriorating. Simply compare this sketch with a “boob tube” doodle of Jesse Ventura merely a year ago, and it’s clear that my beginner reading glasses prescription is going to need to be amped up, and soon.

On a related note, I’ve signed on to flicker.com and started a modest Watercolor set of images, and am toying with a Starbucks Sketch set.

It’s Monday, so there must be an Indie game industry blog post announcing another new title.

A recent Gamasutra blog post suggests that there are certain “badges of honor” that indie game developers sport. One of the trade-offs of a low (i.e. zero) budget is polish, the author explains. I’ll infer by polish, he’s referring to the visual presentation of the game.

Polished, quality art does not come cheaply – certainly not for free, even though everything is negotiable these days. If you’re an artist with game development credentials, you have nothing to prove; doing art “on spec” is not economically worthwhile for the professional. That your work “will be seen by lots of people” does not pay bills; it appeals only to those starting out; recent grads in need of resume bullet points.

The double whammy of programmer/artist is encountered rarely. There are notable exceptions: James daSilva, the 2007 Dream-Build-Play competitition winner for The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, and Steve Demeter, the creator of the Trism iPhone game. Most notably game designer Jonathan Blow conceived Braid, and had the good sense to hire artist David Hellman with ten years experience under his belt. Would Braid have fared as well had “programmer art” or recent grad art been used?

To those who feel “graphics matter less than gameplay”, you are correct. Conversely if the art is immature or repelling, are you likely to part with your cash?