Zorphbert & Fred by Dawn Griffin

Here’s another “Tips and Tricks” for you, geared towards the advertising service “Project Wonderful”. I dig it. I would suggest trying it out if you don’t already. Cents a day, people, this doesn’t have to be a big expense. It seems to be especially popular in the webcomic groups.. There’s a TON of webcomic sites open for bidding!

Okay, off the bat, I am going to declare that I am no pro, I do not have the “secret” to maximize your advertising, get the most for your buck. I’m simply going to explain what I have tried. I would love to hear from you guys, what has worked for you! When I first started, I dove right into the campaigns. If you have no desire or time to keep up with your bids, campaigns are terrific. You lay out your advertising model- how much to spend a day, what type of sites (keywords, tags) you’ll advertise on, how long the campaign will run, etc., and PW does all the work. At first, this worked great, my hits went up and I was a happy camper. But after a few months, the hits dwindled and it wasn’t much worth it. I figured maybe my ads needed a sprucing up. I added animated ads, with a brief explanation of the comic, colors that popped. Again, the hits increased… But later decreased again. If I gave PW a break for a month and came back, I’d get a sudden jump, and then slowly work my way back down. It’s a rollercoaster. I do not have an answer for why the page views die off using campaigns.

If you study your bids performance, you can get an idea of how much you are paying “per click”… And how many viewers out of the masses actually click your ad. I started researching more… What keywords/tags should I search? Should I be super specific, or broader? Should I only advertise on a site with huge page views (50K and up), or bid on a ton of smaller sites? After some research, you start to see what works for you and what doesn’t… and checking out your bid’s performance is where you start! Below is an example :

I am currently testing out manual bidding. I try a bunch of sites, give them a couple days.. And see what my “cost per click” is. I try to keep it under 10 cents, once it goes over that I cancel the bid. Different sites get different results. A site that gets 50K hits a day, may only result in 3 clicks a day. But a site that gets 1K hits a day, might usher in 50 people to my site! Actually, I find this is more the case… Maybe the communities of larger sites are more likely to ignore their ads? Whereas smaller sites have a closer-knit relationship with the webmaster.. And help out by checking out their “sponsors”. Who knows, but it is working better than a campaign for me right now. My suggestion is to dabble around and see what works best for you- there is no one answer.

Please respond with any findings & experience you came across, love to hear ’em!

As an afterthought, there’s a lot I could talk about when it comes to designing online ads & the type of tags (webcomics? Pets? Sci-fi?) I have tried out. Hmmmm…maybe that’ll be a future “T&T”. Stay tuned!

And a little plug: if you want to advertize on zfcomics.com, click HERE. Or, HERE.