How to start a webcomic: Prerequisites to start a webcomic #3: Know how to promote your webcomic

We are coming to the third part of prerequisites to start a webcomic.

If any reader wishes to review the previous two prerequisites, this is the link for #1 and #2.

As we have spoken before in previous posts, knowing the general steps of starting a webcomic does not guarentee the success of your webcomic. Many webcomic artists started prematurely and ended without releasing a complete manga or comic series before.

It is important to know what are some of the basic prerequisites or preparations needed before launching our webcomic online.

How to start a webcomic: Prerequisites to start a webcomic #3: Know how to promote your webcomic

One of the basic prerequisite of starting a webcomic is to know how to make your webcomic accessible and known in the Internet.

The rules are the same with traditional paperback manga comics; as visitors in a comic shop has thousands of books to choose from, how are we going to make our webcomic accessible and known to readers online so that they pick our webcomic amongst the thousands of other webcomics?

There are some who think that if their webcomic is quality, readers will automatically approach their site and spread the news of their webcomic by word of mouth.

Nothing could be further from the truth; I just don’t see many of them in Google search engine when I search for webcomics. Instead, I find webcomic directories that houses many webcomics.

And when I click on these webcomic directories, its like a huge library of webcomics which makes their visitors wonder where to start from.

It’s like searching a needle in a haystack; there are just thousands of webcomics out there in the Internet, and how are we expecting people to enter our site and read our webcomics if our webcomics are not accessible or known?

Word of mouth advertisement is the most reliable form of marketing our webcomic in terms of getting loyalty from readers, but in the Internet world it sure isn’t the most efficient way to make a webcomic known and accessible.

Scoring well with search engines and people

It is important to be able to score well with search engines so that our sites can be accessible for readers.

What I am going to suggest are Internet marketing techniques to promote a website or a blog. It is really popular nowadays, and I suggest adopting some of their techniques to promote your webcomics, website or blog.

Tip#1: Article marketing
Description of article marketing: Article marketing is about writing articles online to promote your specific industry or product.

In the context of webcomics, we can write articles about our webcomic or the webcomic industry in general to promote our profile and credibility online, while making people know about us.

These articles are submitted to well known online article websites like Hubpages or Bukisa, where it is possible to make money while you want to promote your webcomics through your articles.

These online article websites rank highly in search engines, especially Google. They promote your article easily in search engines, and you may find your articles in the first page of search engines!

So if your article is featured in the first page of search engines, you can be almost sure that someone will be reading your article, which may also generate traffic for your webcomic as well.

Moreover, many online articles websites have a community within them, and people within these communities are most likely will be exposed to your articles, and in turn to your webcomics too.

Tips #2: Get backlinks to your webcomic website or blog.
Description of backlinks: Backlinks are links that are linking to your website or blog, and these links must come from other websites that has a different url or IP address.

Generally speaking, it is good to get links from other webcomic sites and related websites or blogs, so that you can increase traffic into your webcomic website or blog.

Moreover, Google ranks your site better when we have more backlinks into our sites.

How do we get backlinks from other websites? Ask the website owner to exchange links with you; meaning you put his url as a link in your website, and he will do it for you too.

This is one of the most difficult things to do, but it is absolutely necessary.

We can also use our articles to create backlinks to our sites or blogs; just input a link within our articles and readers will be able to access our websites easily.

Just don’t spam your links! It is possible to be blacklisted by search engines and your site or blog will be doomed for obscurity.

Other tips and advices

The above 2 tips are common Internet marketing techniques to promote our sites and blogs. And these tips are necessary steps to make our webcomic website or blog known.

There are other tips and advices, like joining a webcomic, manga or comic forum, and get to know the people there. Once they know you, you can always welcome them to have a look at your webcomic for a good read or for pointers.

Submitting to webcomic directories is another good method.

However, there are just too many advices and pointers to add, as the list of things-to-do is almost inexhaustible. Maybe in future I will make a concise list of how to promote our webcomic for everyone.

Final words for this article

Knowing how to advertise and promote your webcomic is definitely a must in becoming successful.

Otherwise, be prepared for your webcomic to stay obscure.

That's it for this article. Stay tuned for more updates!

This article is slightly edited and taken from my Manga-Journey.com blog, where I share about my experiences and learning curves of becoming a semi-professional manga comic artist.