Traffic Cop

One of the issues I think with being a small comic is getting traffic. There are a few ways to do it.

Whore It: This can take many shapes but afaik the most common is the forum whore. Forum whores spam a forum about their website, failing to recognise that they are obnoxious and irritating and the general populace will choose to avoid their site like the plague.

Piggy Back: This basically means getting a link from someone more successful than you. Which usually requires them to have read your website. So is really only an option if they are your friend or if you've gained a certain level of success. Alternatively you could email them the url and hope they're in a good mood. But generally I get the impression most people are loathe to link to someone who asked for the link and I can't honestly blame them.

It'd be nice if there was a website where people specifically sent their urls to have their site reviewed. Crap sites would either get a bad review or none at all. But good sites could get a little boost. It would just require someone (or a group of people maybe) who is respected already in webcomics circles to read a whole lot of junk and then write reviews. In an ideal world...

Subscribe: This path is basically signing up to every single webcomics promotion or rating site that you can in the hope it will boost your traffic. Now this isn't as bad an option because those sites actually want you on their list. But the thing is I personally want their publicity but don't want to be associated with their sites. Not to mention at this point I have about four comics up and I think maybe I should aim for at least thirty before I start looking for traffic. Mind you this site isn't exclusively about the comic so I have more content than just four comics but I doubt most people want to read all my crap.

I read a call for help on Websnark yesterday, asking for webcomic artists to make comics for a Hurricane Appeal Webcomics Telethon. So I whipped one up in about an hour. It's pretty short but I think it's funny and doesn't really require any prior knowledge of injokes or the comic (not that there's much knowledge of the comic it could possibly require anyway). I'll post it up here whether they use it or not but I better wait and see.

Also according to my mate, Bert, the next comic is funny. So bully for Bert.