The neverending question, where are you getting your readers?
Early this morning I had a very interesting conversation. A comic author asked me where was I getting my readers. The answer was more simple then I thought it would be, it was from search engines; people searching for something I had posted about; either a tutorial or informational guide.
On an average all of my different websites gets around 450,000 hits daily. On the car shop site its about 90% of the 300k+ hits daily I get come from search engines from people searching for information regarding posts that I made concerning car repair.
This is just an observation, there needs to be some serious look at your site and it’s content. I am a firm believer that if along with your comic you post information and things that you are interested in; either tutorials or observations, that you would get a boost in hits from search engines from people looking for that type of content.
Information that is NOT relevant and specific to your comic, multiple diverse posts.
On the frumph.net sites though my hits are quite a bit lower (uh, yeah QUITE a bit) – this is what google analyticator reports in the dashboard.
- frumph – 49 Visits
- comicpress child themes – 31 Visits
- noblogredirect – 31 Visits
- comicpress – 27 Visits
- comicpress easel avatar mod – 27 Visits
Basically this is telling me that people are searching for “me” cool! also about child themes and the avatar mod for comicpress/easel and my post about the noblogredirect post I made.
… Now to explain why I am bringing this up. I have said this on several occasions that comic readers and advertising tends to be in-bred within the community itself, people trying to ‘snag’ readers from other authors and so forth, generally using Project Wonderful to do this. There’s really nothing wrong with that and its a decent idea to do. Cross promoting has its place.
Should you stop there? No.
What I am thinking is that if people do searches for content that you have posted about in your blog post area they can go “oh hey, there’s a comic here too”. This will gather some more people into hitting your site (ad revenue ftw, more readers).
What does google analytics report are the top search results for people hitting your site? Are they relevant to your comic or something you did thats ‘not comic based’ information in one of your posts?
Should we continue to do this? I think so, what do you think?
– Phil
I agree wholeheartedly. While my comic continues to bring in new people at a fairly steady rate it’s my blog that by far gets the most Google hits. In my case I review a randomly selected TV episode every day and put it up in the blog. The more obscure a TV show is the more likely it is to show up high in Google results and those people looking for information about that show find me. Some stay for the comic but most don’t. That’s OK because A) I enjoy dong it and B) some do stay who otherwise would never have found me and C) it also gives my loyal comic readers another reason to hang out on my site. Just recently one of my reviews got some Twitter juice and more than doubled my hits for a couple of days. That happened without me even tweeting about the review in the first place. I guess the point is that keeping a blog separate from your comic is like another form of free advertising.
Yes! I think this also highlights the usefulness of doing transcripts for comics (though, uh, I haven’t started doing it yet myself). Not only does it increase accessibility, it makes it much easier for people to find your site through searches related to the content of your comics.