Comic Book Marketing 101

by Mat Nastos

Copyright 2011 by Mat Nastos

OTHER WORKS BY MAT NASTOS:

CHRONICLES OF THE WALKER

Cora and the Clockwork Men (short)

AEGISTEEL EMPIRE

The Old Sergeant (short)

FENRIS CASEFILES

Frank Versus The Vampire

NOW ON DVD

Stinger

Bite Me, Fanboy

DEDICATION

To My Parents for buying me that copy of Warlock #14 back in 1977 and starting my life-long comic book addiction.

Publisher’s Notes

This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination, and any similarities to actual persons, living or dead, places, locales or events are entirely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

WHAT THE COMIC INDUSTRY IS SAYING:

Mat’s advice has been invaluable in helping me self-publish and sell thousands of comics books. I’ve made a few mistakes along the way but far fewer than I would have without his words of wisdom. -Shawn Granger, writer of “Familly Bones”, “Innocent”, “Gene Gardens” and currently working on a Southern Gothic mystery novel.

When it comes to comic marketing, Mat Nastos is my hero. His articles never fail to entertain. Also, I agree with him a lot. That helps. -Shaun McLaughlin, writer/director, former producer at WB Animation.

Whether you publish 100 issues a month or you’re just getting started, not having a solid marketing plan for your comic is the #1 reason for series failure. Mat Nastos has compiled nearly 2 decades worth of experience on not just successfully finding readers that will love your comic, but how to keep them coming back for more! -J. Wichmann, writer/artist of “The Thief of Hearts”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Comic Book Market Analysis - Why the Hell Aren’t You Already Doing it?

Chapter 2 - What is Your Niche Market?

Chapter 3 - 4 Simplified Steps of Market Research

Chapter 4 - Expose Yourself With Keyword Research

Chapter 5 - The 4 Parts of a Successful Comic Book Marketing Plan

Chapter 6 - 2 Ways to Make Sure Your Comic Books Will Actually Sell

Chapter 7 - Google Yo’ Bad Self: The Importance of Online Branding

Chapter 8 - The Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers

Chapter 9 - 7 Quick Tips for Creating Comic Book Content With SEO That Scores in Search Engines

Chapter 10 - The Sad Tale of a Comic Book Publisher’s Failed Product Launch

Chapter 11 - How to Launch a Comic Book Series - An Introduction

Chapter 12 - Building a Foundation for a Successful Comic Book Product Launch

Chapter 13 - Connecting With Your Audience

Chapter 14 - The Curious Case of Moonstone Books: E-Commerce Mistakes to Avoid

Chapter 15 - The 3 Steps to Getting Retailers to BUY Your Comic Book

Chapter 16 - 5 Tips to Going Viral

Chapter 17 - 4 Tips for Social Networking Your Way to More Sales

Chapter 18 - 4 Ways to Use Your Email List to Increase Your Comic Book Sales

Chapter 19 - Getting Your Work On TV, Google TV Ads That Is

Chapter 20 - 5 Tips for Successful Comic Book Blogging

Chapter 21 - The Failure of Licensed Comic Book Publishers Redux

INTRODUCTION

What you’re holding in your hot little hands is the result of about 14 months of my bitching and complaining about the horrendous state of marketing in the comic book industry - with a focus on the Internet marketing side of things. That “bitching and complaining” was a result of my deep-rooted love of comic books as a medium, combined with my own experiences as an Internet marketing guy.

During the writing, I had a lot of fun, met some really cool new people and, most importantly, pissed off a lot of the so-called “marketing” people at various comic book publishers. One publisher was so pissed off after I turned down work with him that he blocked me on Twitter and Facebook, and started a very impressive campaign of trash talk. At another publisher, a marketing guy was let go because of the information I was posting freely online.

It was interesting to see the anger that came out of a lot of the marketing people currently working in comics, especially from those freelancers who were trying to sell shoddy service and no results to small publishers for way too much money. Surprisingly, there are a lot of those charlatans out there!

On the flip side, there was a ton of fantastic responses to the material and the fact that I was so free at releasing it. I was given support from some of the top comic retailers in the country (shout-outs to Jimmy Jay of Jay Company Comics and Larry Doherty of Larry’s Comics!), indie publishers (Chip Mosher at Boom Studios, Michael DeVito of Th3rd World, Jessie Garza of Viper, Andy Schmidt formerly of IDW, and others), and creators (way too many to list).

In spite of my ranting and raving, I believe there is still a HUGE amount of untapped potential for growth in the comic book industry, with Internet marketing in particular, and I hope that my work and research can help that growth.

Please enjoy the material here in this book - it is a compilation of 21 of my most popular articles on comic book marketing/sales/distribution. If you do like the work, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@niftymat) or on the web at www.MatNastos.net.

Take care!

-Mat Nastos, 2011

CHAPTER 1: Comic Book Market Analysis - Why the hell aren’t you already doing it?

One of the single most asked questions I get in terms of selling or marketing comic books is: “Okay, Mat, I’ve got my comic book done, how do I get people to buy it?” Being the incredibly rude person I am, I generally answer that question with a question of my own. That question is one of the single most important questions for a comic book publisher (or anyone with a product or service to sell) to ask:

“What can you tell me about your market?” Or, “Tell me about the market analysis/research you’ve done.”

Unfortunately, instead of well-thought out answers to one of the most basic of business questions, I’m usually met with blank stares. Worse than those whose looks of confusion give me my answer are those who smile smugly and say, “Comic book fans.”

Those individuals in the latter group, which does include most of the mid and larger tier comic book publishers, are the ones I want to punch right in the Gooch.

One of the most important things a comic book publisher must do - heck, anyone looking to invest time and/or money into a business - is to know their product and know their market. If they have an idea for a product (be in a new comic book, new computer or new feminine hygiene product) then the following questions must be asked as early in to the product development cycle (in this case, the creation of the comic book) as possible:

1. Who has a need for my product and how many potential customers are there?

2. How much are they willing to spend to fill that need?

3. Does my product fill that need? If so, does my product fill that need in a new or unique way? In other words, what is it about this product that appeals to a customer enough to make them open their wallets?

4. Where are those potential customers found?

Answering these questions is essential for any product to succeed in business - even within the comic book industry. You should be trying to answer these questions at the very beginning of creating your comic - even as early as in the idea/concept stage. Yes, that’s right, I’m telling you that business and marketing needs to come in to play as soon as you start thinking about creating a new comic book. This may sound counter-intuitive to a creative person, but it will save you money, time and frustration in the long run. I’m not saying you have to BEGIN the creation process from a marketing stand point, although it can be a successful path to development if the creative power is there, but I am saying that all ideas should be checked with those four questions from the very beginning.

Have an idea for a new comic based on basket weaving? Jump online and analyze the market a bit. Find out who buys basket-weaving paraphernalia. Figure out where they congregate. Find out the size of the industry, how much money is spent within it each year and so on. Try talking to actual members of that niche market to get some baseline reactions to your new comic.

As you answer these questions, you will begin to put together a better understanding of the “big picture” of your market. From there you will continue to drill down in to the specific that will affect your product.

In other words, discover the market and then gain intimate knowledge of your potential customers. Find out exactly what they are thinking and feeling, and why they do so.

As you drill down in to your research on your market, you’re going to be looking to find out the following information. This information should help you determine whether or not you’ve found a market that can support your new product (your new comic book - I know some people are uncomfortable calling their comics “products,” but that is what they are). The specific information you’re going to be interested in finding out is:

Market Information:

This is everything to do with the make-up of the market itself and includes:

1. Market Size: We’re taking number of potential buyers, how much they spend per year and the total dollar value of the market itself, along with the projected future of the market.

2. Market Growth Rate: the percentage the market is growing or shrinking each year. One of the things to be wary of, especially if you’re looking at a long-term comic product, is a shrinking market. If you discover an intriguing shrinking market, you need to figure out why it is shrinking and what that shrinkage means to the future of your product.

3. Market Profitability: Will the size of your chosen market, and the dollars available in the market, be significant enough to offset your production costs and still give you a profit large enough to be attractive. This profit is affected by the spending power of the buyers, discounts to suppliers/vendors and any other barriers to marketplace entry.

4. Distribution Channels: This is going to be similar to what you’re already used to dealing with in the comic book industry. Figure out what distribution channels are in place - in other words, where is the product most often sold/bought and how does product arrive there. Finding a market with a solid distribution infrastructure in place, and one open to new product, is essential to success.

Market Segmentation:

This will include all information on the make-up of the buyers in the market itself, in terms of both business-to-business and the end-customer themselves. You’ll also be looking at any divisions of the market itself into segments or subgroups - be it by geography, demographic differences or any other.

Market Trends:

This one is going to be the most difficult to figure out if a comic book product is new to your market. What you’re interested in figuring out is the ups-and-downs of the market over a set period of time. When is the market busiest, when is it slowest, does the size of the market vary, and so on. Part of your research here will focus on any competitors in the market itself for your product. Even if there are no other comic books in your chose basket weaving market, there are most definitely going to be competitors for the limited number of dollars spent in the market itself. Find out what those competitors are and, as I mentioned above, begin to figure out if your comic book fills a need no other products currently do.

Now, as a comic book guy myself, I know that this stuff looks like it can be a real pain-in-the-butt. I mean, we all do comics so we don’t have to do all that crappy business stuff, right? Well, that particular attitude is one of the reasons so many comic book fail…and not just those from tiny independent publishers. This sort of market research - and choosing the correct market to take a product do - is sorely lacking from the industry at all levels. What is even worse are those companies out there who are producing product that could address a need in a number of given new markets and who are ignoring the potential. To me, there is nothing worse than leaving money behind due to sheer laziness.

Yes, I’m talking again about licensed comic publishers. Damn those poor bastards.

Ahem. But I digress.

What I’m saying here is that, as you are coming up with new comic books to put together, while you’re doing that amazing fun and rewarding portion of the job that is comic book creation, take a few minutes to ask yourself these questions:

Who is going to buy my book?

Why on Earth should they buy my book?

Where are they going to buy it?

If you can answer those questions in some way other than “comic book fans,” “because it’s cool” and “at comic shops,” then you, my friend, have a shot at creating a successful comic book business. If those are your only answers to the questions, then you had best add one more to the list:

“Would you like fries with that?”

CHAPTER 2: What is your Niche Market

I’m going to start off today’s article by correct a horrible error that has been propagated by comic book fans and pros alike. The statement I’m about to make may or may not cause you to think I’m an idiot. OK, MORE of an idiot than you already do.

Here we go:

Comic books are NOT a niche market.

Comic books are a medium - like music, but they are not themselves a niche market. Well, they’re more of a format or delivery system for visual storytelling (as CD’s are for music), but let’s not nitpick. For the sake of this post I’ll be using “comic books” as a stand-in for “visual storytelling” to keep things from getting too complicated and off-topic.

That’s right. Comic books are NOT a niche market. However, the comic book INDUSTRY has turned itself into one and that is one of the reasons it is in such bad shape. You see, when a format or medium becomes a niche market, then it is on the road to disappearing from the marketplace. 8-track cassette collecting may be a niche market, but music will never be. The comic book industry has quickly allowed itself to become 8-track cassette collecting and is in danger of going down that dark path to obscurity and derision. Luckily comic books (or, visual storytelling for those of you who are anal), by nature, are not a niche market.

The reason I spend the extra time and space on pointing that out is because of the answer I get from comic book publishers/creators when I ask the question “what is your niche market?” The answer I almost universally receive (even from larger publishers) is “comic book fans” or “comic buyers.”

Needless to say, hearing that makes me want to cause physical harm to anyone unluckily enough to be near me. What an answer like that says to me is one of two things:

1. The “publisher” has put absolutely no thought in to the business aspects of comic book publishing or sales. Or,

2. The “publisher” is a complete retard.

More than likely, knowing the comic industry as I do, it’s a combination of the two.

So, that brings us back to today’s topic: what is a Niche market and how do you develop one for your product (yes, yes, your “comic book”)?

“The definition from Wikipedia reads:

“A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.”

That’s a pretty good definition, but may be a bit too “business” for comic book publishers. Let’s try something a bit less specific, from Wictionary.org:

“…a relatively small and specialist, yet profitable, market”

Hmmm. That’s a bit too broad. Here’s one a bit closer, from Groundbreaking.com:

“An easily identifiable market that can be targeted for direct promotion”

I kind of like that, but let’s try this one from Entrepreneur.com:

“A portion of a market that you’ve identified as having some special characteristic and that’s worth marketing to.”

There we go! That’s as close to a perfect definition for “niche market” as I’ve seen anywhere. A niche market is specific group of buyers (or fans or whatever you want to call them) who are tied together with an interest and who are (hopefully) responsive to your product. In other words, a group of people who want to buy your comics.

That brings us to one of my most asked questions - one I hear almost every day from comic book publishers and creators looking to sell their product:

“How do I find my niche market?”

As I’ve talked about a few times before, to have the best chance at success, finding your niche market should be done at the product development stage and not once you have a finished product. Use your niche market research to help make sure you have a sellable product before you pay to have it produced - I don’t necessarily mean for you to begin the process with the niche market research, but use it as a “check” to make sure you have a commercial product.

Here is a list of steps in the process of finding your niche market.

3 Steps to finding your perfect niche market!

1. Define your market.

Take a moment to think about what it is you are selling - look at the essence of the comics you want to produce. Analyze what it is that you are selling and what you want to sell. Start with your analysis in the most general of terms: who might be interested in this? Let’s use my buddy, Shawn Granger, and his book Family Bones as an example.

Family Bones is the true story of a pair of serial killers, the Copelands, who lived in Missouri.

Here are the questions I’d ask him: Does your comic interest people interested in true stories? OK, now that’s a pretty general market, but it’s a good place to start. Does it interest those who are in to true crime stories? Getting a bit better and more defined, but we’ve still got room to focus. Yes, you could stop there, but you’ll find with a bit more thought there could be an even better focus. Does your comic interest fans of serial killers? Bingo!

From there you could also pursue those interested in the history of Missouri, as well. Once you have your main niche market down, it is easy to expand your target a bit. Let me repeat that - once you have your main niche market down. In other words, start smaller and then grow.

The better you can define that group of buyers, the easier it is going to be to track them down and get them to buy your books.

I know there will be a few people out there who say “but isn’t that limiting my chance at sales?” Not really. If you go broad - say with “anyone in the world who reads English” - you have no practical way to market your material. You are also going to be faced with a lot more competition. And, you can always grow your market once you have a base established. Become profitable before you worry about growth. Don’t be Crossgen.

As a sub-question here you also need to answer: “Is there a sufficient demand for your product” and “is the niche market big enough.” Find out not only if there is a demand/need for your product but also if you’ve narrowed down your niche too far. Too tight of a focus can be worse than not focusing enough.

2. Who is your customer?

At a glance, this may seem like the same question as number 1, but here we are talking about the actual buyers themselves and not the market. You’ve found out WHAT your niche market is and now you need to figure out WHO they are. Once you’ve defined your market, as with “fans of serial killers,” you can begin to figure out who those people are, where they are and what they want specifically.

What you’re doing here is called “defining your customer’s worldview.” Define your potential customers - who they are and what needs they have. Figuring this step out is one of the most important and it will begin to answer the last portion of the question: where are they?

The best way to do this research is to go out and actually talk to members of the niche market you’ve selected. Find members of the market online, in person - anywhere you can. Talk to them. Knowing your market is essential.

3. Answer the question “Why Buy From You?”

Defining your base niche market is only the beginning because even the best niche markets will have competition in them. You may not be competing against other comic books for sales, but there will be other product (generally already established product) fighting for a niche buyer’s attention and cash. This is where you have to answer the standard marketing question “Why should I buy from YOU?”

How do you stand out from the crowd?

How you answer this, and it should be with considerable thought and reflection, will help determine your success in the marketplace. If you can’t give buyers a reason to buy your product, then they won’t buy your product. It’s as simple as that.

From here the tactics become those I detail over in the chapter “Expose Yourself with Keyword Research”. This is where that keyword research comes in to play. Rather than recapping that, I’m just going to direct you over there.

As I wrap this article up, I do want to address something else I hear a lot, which are publishers asking me “how do I pick a niche market” or “what niche markets are out there that want comics?”

Those are two questions I can’t answer for you. There is no easy way to do this - no Philosopher’s Stone method to make it all fast and simple. You’re going to have to sit down and KNOW your product. Then you’re going to have to go online and find WHO will buy it. What I’m giving you is a set of bumpers to keep your car on the right road and to keep you focused. It all starts with defining your product and extends out from there. Make a list of keyword terms relating to your product and then get ready to Google the hell out of it.

Make a lot of notes.

Drink LOTS of coffee.

Properly researching and finding your niche market is a key to success for every business out there. With comic book publishing it is just as important. Know what you are selling, whom you are selling to and why your product should be purchased. This is the foundation for success.

CHAPTER 3: The 4 Simplified Steps of Market Research

What I’ve done is to boil down the process of market research to the most basic of steps and ideas to keep in mind. This is the simplest description and outline of market research I can come up with. What I’d like everyone to remember is that every product is going to force you to approach the research in a slightly different manner, but the general method is going to be:

1. Identify your product. Be it a previously done comic or an idea you want to test out. Sit down and tell yourself about what the product is, who it might interest and would other products/services/etc are similar to it.

2. Take those lists and start searching online. Find where the product is sold, who is buying it, who is selling it, where it is talked about online and off. This can be a long process, with a lot of false starts. Get used to doing a lot of research…very, very boring research.

3. Contact those people. Talk to vendors, dealers, distributors, customers, fans and even haters of the products and markets you come across. See what they want. Find out what their needs are. Then, tell them about your product and see how they respond. Feedback from your target audience is some of the best feedback you can get.

4. Take another look at your product and see if it fits in to that market. Does it match what the market wants or needs? Did the market respond well to it? If your answer is a resounding “yes,” then you’re on the right track for picking your niche market.

There are other ways to start your market research if you have more resources. I mentioned CommScore and Nielsen. There are a lot of companies out there that will give you information on various demographics - middle class teen males, 24-45 year old females in urban areas, etc. If you have the resources to use them, they can help you track down the target audiences used by products/services similar to yours and give you a bit of information on them. They are valuable tools to help find potential target markets, but they can be dangerous to use on their own. Make sure to “check your work” with them by using the Internet as I’ve described above (and in my keyword research article).

The more footwork you do before you’ve got five thousand printed comic books sitting in your garage, annoying your wife, the better.

CHAPTER 4: Expose Yourself with Keyword Research

Questions I have been asked quite a bit recently by Comic Book Publishers and Creators alike are:

Why do I need to rank well in Google?

Or, Why should I care if people find me online?

These questions are generally followed by statements similar to:

The people who are going to buy our books know where to look to find us.

Or, We’re in Previews.

Or, People searching online aren’t looking for our comics.

Or, my favorite, If they want our stuff, they’ll find us.

My patent response there is: How is that working out for you so far?

The reason my response is a little snippy is because I get frustrated at Comic Publishers. You hear comic book creators and publishers alike complaining daily about the current state of the comic book industry. You hear them complaining about poor distribution and lack of a way to reach the mainstream.

Guess what? It’s been here since the mid-90s and it’s called the World Wide Web.

There is absolutely no better way to reach and develop a new audience than the Internet right now - if you know what you’re doing it can be more effective than television commercials.

Here’s an interesting fact for you: In 2009, there were in excess of 3 billion Google searches each day - 34,000 per second! What that means is, in any given second, you’ve got potential customers searching for product related to the comic books you’ve created.

This is going to be where the publishers with the personality of “Comic Book Guy” from the Simpsons jump up and say, “AHA! If someone is looking for a Radioactive Man Comic, and type in ‘Radioactive Man Comic,’ we’re right there! I am already a Jedi master of your Ess-Eee-Oh techniques and I didn’t have to do anything! Bwahahaha!”

If a similar comment popped in to you head, please stop reading now and go back to slabbing your comics and arguing over which was the ultimate Sci-Fi TV show, Babylon 5 or the new Battlestar Galactica (the answer is, of course, Babylon 5).

Ok, for those of you who are still with me, let’s continue. The way to use the web to your greatest benefit isn’t just to provide information to those customers who ALREADY know about your product (although, that is one valid reason), it is to attract and connect with POTENTIAL customers who AREN’T aware of your product.

That’s right, you can use the Internet to attract potential customers who are interested in things related to your product, even in the most tenuous of ways. Using the web in this manner becomes all about expanding your market and increasing your sales outside of your current customer-base…and that should be one of the primary purposes of any business. One of the major ways to get on that path to an increased market size is by using Keyword research.

The simplest way to explain the phrase “keyword research” is this: researching the words and/or phrases potential customers are already actively searching for that are related to your product(s). Even simpler, figuring out what people are looking for and making sure you’re there.

I know what you’re all thinking right now – “How in the hell do I do that?” My friend, that is exactly what I’m going to go over right now: developing your keyword research for proper SEO and targeting new markets for your comic books.

Before we get started, there are a couple of things that need to be taken into consideration.

First off, you need to know your product and have an understanding of what it is and who it might appeal to. Meaning, if you’re doing ElfQuest, know that you’ll potentially be targeting fantasy fans, folklore/fairytale fans, elf fans and a bunch of others. Take some time to think through other products that deal with a similar fanbase to what you are going to be aiming at - that “other product” could be games, toys, magazines, other books/properties, movies, clothing and so on. Make sure to keep your mind wide open to possibilities because that will help you down the road during actual keyword research.

Second, getting traffic and bringing potential customers back to your site is easy. Where the real work comes in is making sure your product (and even your website) is sellable is a whole other job. If your product is unsellable (unprofessional, poorly conceived, whatever), then no amount of SEO or marketing is going to help. Some product will just never find a market and that’s where the chapter on Market Analysis & Research comes in to play. Make sure you’ve got something people will want before you create your product and start trying to sell it.

Make A List of Initial Keywords

When you site down to begin your keyword research - which you’re doing in order to figure out how large a potential traffic stream there is for your various keywords and target market online - you need to start with a list of keywords related to your chosen markets. Where do you get those keywords?

To be honest, it’s going to start with a lot of intuition and guess work. The quickest way to start is by thinking about how people search online and using those phrases in relation to your markets. At this stage there is no right and wrong. Just start listing words and phrases that come to your mind. Start playing with those words in Google to see what comes up. Keep a list of competitors or related product that comes up doing those searches. Having that list will help in the next part.

The main three sources for keywords are going to be:

1. Your own knowledge of your product and your target markets. Think about words or phrases used to describe or find information about your target market (or products in that market) in a search engine.

2. Customers/members of that market. Who better to ask about a product or niche market than those who are active in it? Talk to some fans or customers in your target market and find out what they are looking for and, even more important, how they are looking for it. If you talk to a sampling of people, you’ll find a lot of similar terms and phrases popping up as those that are most commonly searched for.

3. Competitors. That’s right, “the enemy.” Perhaps even better than asking customers is seeing what successful companies or products already in your target market are doing. Find out what keywords they are targeting and which they are appearing in.

Make Use of Keyword Tools

OK, so you’ve got your giant list of keywords and phrases. What now? How do you figure out what terms are getting the traffic and what terms are a waste of time? Luckily, this is something every e-commerce company must deal with, so a number of keyword research tools are available online i many of them for free!

1. Google Keyword Tool: One of the best keyword tools around, the Google Keyword Tool is an amazing free resource for doing research. With it you can:

Input keywords or phrases to see Ad competition (for Adwords), determine global traffic and even get information on traffic local to your area.

Input a website (yours or even a competitors) to get keyword suggestions. Google will generate a list of keywords based on content from a site (along with links to and from the site), with which you’ll be able to see traffic, competition and so on.

The Google Keyword Tool is great because it will give you examples of phrases searched for by real people out on the Internet.

2. Subscription/Pay Keyword Tools: There are quite a few services out there that give you even more information than the free Google Keyword Tool, and some even offer free or demo trials. Two of the better ones are WordTracker and Keyword Discovery.

In my opinion, the free version of WordTracker may be the best of the bunch because it still gives you a huge amount of data and suggestions to shift through. However, I tend to use multiple tools for each project in order to get the widest sampling of data I can.

As you go through your list, you’ll be getting more and more suggestions, as well as knocking others off the list due to lack of traffic or searches. Your time working your keyword list through the keyword tools is essential. Don’t ignore it because the time you spend now will help your site in the long run and keep you from wasting time focusing on keywords with little or no traffic.

Develop Keyword Specific Content

Once you’re happy with your list of keywords and the traffic they get, you’re going to need begin to develop content targeting those keywords and phrases. I’m going to address ways to target keywords in your content (and creating content that will rank high in search engine results) more down the road. However, to get things started, I’ll go over a quick list of how I do things right now.

1. Group & Prioritize your keywords. Take your list of keywords and begin to break them down into related groups and categories. These are going to be groups of keywords that are related to or even share similar keywords in them (comic book marketing and comic book publishing, for example, share 66% of their words and could be grouped together on a content page). This will allow you to maximize your keyword use per page and keep you from trying to target too many keywords at a time.

2. Start with your current content and begin to work in your keyword terms into pages already indexed by Google. Starting with current pages will give you the quickest results in Goolge, and generally the best results to start. Use your index/home page to target the top level or most general keywords, and individual pages to capture traffic on more specific ones.

3. Develop new, keyword specific content pages and/or microsites. If you’ve got keywords that don’t currently fit in (or don’t fit in well) with pages already on your website, begin to build keyword specific content based on tight groups of keywords. Try to keep your targeted keywords down to 2-3 per page. This allows you to maximize the effectiveness of your content and to keep things from becoming diluted. Google and the other search engines react best when the main keywords on a page are limited to only a few examples, and keeping that in mind will help your page results.

4. Proper tagging/labeling and titling based on Keywords. As I’ve mentioned in other articles, make sure to include your keywords in your page title, Meta tags, image alt-tags, image names, headers and links. These are all great ways to put in additional instances of your keywords without annoying your visitors or having the search engines flag your site as a source of SPAM.

5. Keep keyword duplication to a minimum across the site. While it is ok to have keywords popping up on multiple pages, you want to avoid creating keyword specific content for the same keywords on multiple pages. In other words, don’t focus on building multiple pages for, as an example, “urban fantasy stories” because Google will judge which page is most relevant and then relegate all others to a drop down “see additional pages from” link. If you’re going to build additional content pages, the correct strategy is to place them on microsites found on different, or their own, domains. Don’t water-down a target keyword by spreading its content out onto multiple pages without having a specific reason or strategy behind it.

6. Use Keyword based links as anchor text & backlinks. I’ve talked about this in the past as well, but make sure to use the keywords found on a page as the anchor text or backlink text linking back to that page. This strategy helps the search engines determine a keyword is specific and important to a given page.

7. Don’t be afraid of less competitive keywords. This may sound strange, but often you can increase your traffic and web presence considerably by targeting keywords or phrases with less competition. Finding keywords with decent search traffic, but little competition (either from search engine results or from ad traffic), is an excellent strategy, particularly for sites just starting out with a target market or keyword. Dominate the mid or lesser competitive keywords and you’ll find word getting out on your product and traffic increasing as quickly as if you target the harder keywords. Plus, they are easier to achieve higher rankings with!

The key to what you are doing here is exposing your product to those who either don’t know it exists or may not even realize comic books are still being made at all! Don’t just target the limited cash resources of the comic book buying public. Get out there into the mainstream, or in to other niche markets, where there is more money available and fewer direct competitors.

CHAPTER 5: The 4 Parts of a Successful Comic Book Marketing Plan

When I bring up the phrase “marketing plan” to comic book publishers or creators, I generally get one of two responses, neither of which is very encouraging.

The first, and more prevalent of the responses, is one of confusion. The comic publisher really has no idea what this “marketing” thing is, doesn’t understand how it relates to comics or, even if they have heard the term before, have no clue how to do it.

The other reaction, which has been known to get a bit heated, is one of anger and usually comes from either the “marketing” person of a small to mid sized comic book publisher or from a failed comic creator/publisher. These people are convinced they’ve done “everything possible” when it comes to selling their comics and are convinced their lack of sales come solely from problems in the industry itself. They get insulted when anyone brings up new ideas (or, in my case, old, established ones that work successfully in every marketplace on the planet) and are blinded by their own short-sightedness.

To these people, comic book “marketing” is made up of sending out solicitations to Diamond, sending out press releases to Comic Book Resources or Newsarama (or any other online comic book media outlet), potentially sending out some review copies and, in the case of the mid-sized publishers, buying a lot of beer for retailers at conventions. For them, schmoozing people at conventions is the height of marketing technique. Well, that and tossing out variant covers to try and make up for shrinking sales numbers — to those small and mid-sized publishers, it’s better to bleed your current customer base dry than to try and build a larger audience…but, that’s a subject for another day!

Now, to be completely fair to these people, that is absolutely the pinnacle of sales and marketing techniques within the comic book direct market: buying beers, talking to CBR (et al) and writing up solicitations for Previews. Unfortunately, this “pinnacle” really hasn’t changed since about 1995 (and, if you replace CBR with things like “Amazing Heroes” or “Comics Interview,” they haven’t really changed since the mid 80s). Comic book publishers have very rarely ever tried “real” marketing or sales tactics because, in those times, they were a bit more difficult to enact without the Internet.

Amazingly, though, the World Wide Web has been around for more than 15 years now and those same publishers have done all they can to remain stuck in the pre-Internet business world. What’s even worse is the comic book industry’s tendency to just toss out a new comic book series and “hope for the best” when it comes to sales, with no pre-planning or market research done before a book is released.

Heck, I’ve even been told by the marketing folks at a certain publishing company the only thing that affects sales numbers is how well a creative team is doing and that marketing isn’t effective in growing sales or worth doing.

Um…you know, what? I’m going to stop there before I go off on another tirade.

Anyway, I’ve talked about market research in a couple of the other chapters, so what I’d like to go over today is the 4 steps to creating a comic book marketing plan.

The 4 Parts of a Successful Comic Book Marketing Plan

Most comic book people make the mistake of thinking that “marketing” just means advertising, public relations (PR) or promotion. In fact, almost all comic industry marketing is made up of those things alone. What they are missing is that marketing and a marketing plan is so much more - it includes understanding your product, knowing the market and audience you’re going to be selling your product to and putting together a plan to reach that market and a lot more.

Marketing and your marketing plan is your road map to success! The four parts of a successful comic book marketing plan are as follows:

1. Overview.

This is a brief and succinct summary of your business, your market and the major points of your marketing plan. Even though this comes at the top of the list and is the first thing read in a marketing plan, the Overview is the last thing written. In the overview, you’ll break your marketing plan down in to a one to two page description.

If you can’t break down your plan into a concise overview, then you don’t understand your market, your product or your plan as well as you should.

2. SWOT Analysis.

SWOT stands for: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The meat of this portion of your marketing plan is going to come from all of the market research you’ve done (or will need to go and do now!) in conjunction with your product development. In it you’re going to take a long, hard and objective look at your product (in this case, a comic book series or graphic novel) and will be identifying anything and everything that will affect it, be it from internal or external forces.

Your SWOT Analysis should begin by defining your desired end result (for example: selling 10,000 copies of a new comic or keeping your Dungeons & Dragons license from losing you money after a couple of issues). From there, your SWOT Analysis will become the basis for your market strategy.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page in regards to what the various pieces of a SWOT analysis actually are, let’s take a page from Wikipedia:

Strengths: characteristics of the business or team that give it an advantage over others in the industry.

Weaknesses: are characteristics that place the firm at a disadvantage relative to others.

Opportunities: external chances to make greater sales or profits in the environment.

Threats: external elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business.

The SWOT Analysis is one of the most important pieces of your marketing plan and should be where you determine whether or not a new comic book project has a chance of success. It will also give you the head’s up on any potential problems your comic may run in to over the course of its promotion and sales.

3. Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve done your SWOT Analysis, the next step is to take what you’ve learned about your product and market and you’re going to put together your plan of attack for your product or product line. You’re going to take your business specific goals and define your strategy and tactics for reaching those goals.

The way to start is to set the goals for your brand new comic book series, generally laid out over a year. You want to make those goals realistic and make sure they are quantifiable. Lay them out in simple, concise (there’s that word again) terms: “Captain Chivalrous will reach 10,000 units sold per issue by the end of the year.”

Next up, you’re going to outline one of a marketing person’s favorite things, the “Four Ps” of your product. What are the “Four Ps,” you ask? They are:

Product - what are you selling?

Price - your initial pricing strategy. How much your product is going to cost its end user and retailer alike.

Place - where your product is going to be sold. Your distribution and sales channel(s).

Promotion - the channels, methods and techniques for reaching your target customers. Advertising, PR and so on.

From there, you’re going to set up the specifics and tactics for actually reaching the goals you’ve laid out. These things are going to include:

Advertising (print, online, etc)

Conventions

Public relations

Viral marketing

Defining specific retail sales channels (don’t forget, as a publisher, you have to sell to retailers AND to your end customers). Don’t underestimate the power of sales channels outside of the comic book direct market. There are amazing opportunities for additional sales from outside the direct market or from directing new readers back into it.

Make sure to detail the specifics of each tactic you list - summarize it, discuss why it is being used, what you expect to get out of the tactic and how much it will cost.

4. Project Timeline and Budget

At the end of your report, you’re going to want to detail your estimated timeline (setting milestones, short term and long term goals and the like) and summarize your cost and budget. Yes, cost and budget are two different things - one is the estimate of what you THINK your plan is going to cost and the other is how much you ACTUALLY have to spend.

A detailed timeline can be an incredibly handy tool when it comes to planning, implementing and tracking of your marketing and sales efforts. It will lay out the road you’re going to be following to reach your goals. Without it, you’d best become very religious because you’re going to spend a whole lot of time praying.

CHAPTER 6: 2 Ways to Make Sure Your Comic Books Will Actually Sell

When I started out as a comic book publisher, and even as a freelance comic artist, one of the things I hated more than anything else was selling. Selling myself, selling my product…I hated it all. It all seemed very unnatural to me and very much against my creative side. It made me uncomfortable. And I was terrible at it.

Terrible, not just because of how much I disliked the entire process, but also because I had no idea of where to start or what to do. I didn’t know who to sell to, where to sell, how to sell or even why stuff sold. To me, it was an incredibly arcane and indecipherable art that mere mortals were not meant to understand.

What I’m going to do today is give you two quick, yet very important, sales/marketing tips to keep in mind as you head out to sell your comics. These are two tips that should never be far from your mind and should be the foundations for every marketing plan you put together for your comic book publishing business. Keeping these tips in mind will help make sure you stay on the right road to success…or, at least, in the same neighborhood.

2 Ways to Make Sure Your Comic Books Will Actually Sell

1. Go where your audience is

One of the things a lot of business owners (and marketers) fail to understand is that there is a major difference between the world at large and your potential audience, and this is as true on the Internet as it is offline. You see, for some reason, a lot of people think that by just being online that everyone with an Internet connection is going to interested in what they’re selling.

It’s just not true. Even worse, that sort of thinking can cost a business a lot in terms of time, resources and money. Three things in very short supply for most comic book publishers. It’s much too hard and ineffective to try and sell something to everyone. This goes for advertising, PR and even your keywords.

A great example I like to use is the word “Nifty.” My publishing site, Nifty Comics, ranks on Google Page 1 for the word “Nifty.” It is a HUGE keyword, with over 49,000,000 (forty-nine million) results and an insane amount of traffic. You’d think ranking well with that keyword would a huge boost for my site. Well, I do get thousands of unique visitors from Google. Unfortunately, they are nearly 100% uninterested in comic books or anything outside of the word “Nifty.” For a different kind of site, unfiltered traffic might be a boon, but for a small press comic book publisher, it is a complete waste of time and resources. It’d be much better to rank well on a less common, less trafficked word than on one so big and general in nature.

The most effective plan of attack is to identify your target audience and spend your time and resources communicating with them. Why spend thousands of dollars on a Google Ad aimed at millions of people who won’t buy, when you spend $50 on one placed on an active forum for your niche?

Don’t just shout at the crowd, make sure you’re shouting at a crowd that will listen.

2. Sell ‘em what they WANT

This is one of the most basic sales/marketing concepts for offline and Internet business, and one that most marketers completely ignore. Your marketing shouldn’t just be aimed at selling your product. Nope, your marketing should be focused on selling customers what they WANT or NEED, not what you have.

Does that sound completely insane? Well, it’s not. Every sale made, every item or service paid for, stems from the wants or needs of a customer and NOT from a company needing to sell a product. If a customer doesn’t want or need what you’re selling, they aren’t going to buy it no matter how good it is. Period.

Now, does this mean you need to change your comic book to match needs? Not at all. What it does mean it that your marketing and sales techniques need to focus around the customer’s perception. Make them see your comics as something that fills their current needs - make the customer perceive that they need your work and you’ll start to see it “fly off the shelves.”

Doing some research on things like previous buying patterns, lifestyles, interests and so on can help you identify customer needs and wants, which will help you target your sales and marketing techniques to meet those desires.

CHAPTER 7: Google Yo’ Bad Self - The Importance of Online Branding in Comic Book Marketing

The Internet search engine, Google, is now one of the most powerful tools to use for marketing, sales, PR, research and just about everything else you can think of. I’m going to say with extreme confidence that if you can work Google to your advantage, you have the potential to reach more people than a prime time television commercial.

Heck, Google has become so ingrained into our existence that the search engine’s funky name has even been accepted into our language as a verb. That’s right, friends, Google is now a verb in the dictionary.

Google is the main way almost everyone on the planet will use to get information. And it should be the tool business use to check on their own status and branding. What comes up when someone “Googles You” is how the world at large will perceive you.

I know, whenever I get a new client or even meet a new person, the very first thing I do is pop their name in to Google to see what I find. Whatever shows on those first two pages of search engine results is going to color my opinion on the person, brand, product or company. This is going to be true for 99% of your potential customers. What they see on Google is going to be the baseline of their opinion on you.

In addition to branding, Google is also going to be the first place those potential customers go to find information on product they want to buy. If a customer is looking to purchase something (or even just looking for more information on an interest of theirs), having your website, or websites you control, show up in the first two pages of Google results is going to give you a shot at converting that sale.

In other words, a customer can’t buy your comic book if he can’t find it. This is especially true for licensed comic book publishers (although, I’ve already talked about that in the “The Failure of Licensed Publishers” chapter, so I won’t waste our space here).

My question for you is: have you done a Google search for your product, company, name or service? If so, what comes up?

More than likely, Googling yourself is going to give you one of a few different results (or, more accurately, a few instances of each):

1. Your website and all the information you really want people to see about yourself.

2. Someone with a similar product/service/name horning in on your sales!

3. Information you’d rather people not know or see about yourself - “hater” websites, bad reviews and so on.

4. Completely unrelated sites, which just happen to have the same keywords or names as you.

Obviously, everyone wants to make sure they rank #1 in Google in order to get the first chance at traffic. And, to be honest, that’s not a bad plan. However, what you’re forgetting is that people will continue to look down the page of search results, even if exactly what they are looking for is right there at the top.

Even scarier is the fact that a lot of web surfers now mistrust the #1 search engine result in Google, especially if it is a company sponsor or owned site. This mistrust dates back to when Google would run sponsored AdWords ads at the top of search engine results, which had a lot of people thinking they were getting a natural listing when, in fact, they were just clicking through to a paid advertisement.

The key to controlling your brand and/or funneling sales to your pocket is to dominate the Google listings. What I mean by that is to make sure sites your control (or own) take up the majority of the results on Google page 1 (and Pages 2-3 if you can). This gives the searcher no choice but to take in the message or branding you want to give.

Take my name, Mat Nastos. In Google, my sites, or sites I control (through profiles, postings or straight out owning) completely dominate the first 3-4 pages of Google. On page 1 you’ve got this site (www.MatNastos.com), Nifty Comics (my publishing site), my IMDB entry (where I entered my profile info), www.ElfSong.com (my portfolio site), www.FilmSensei.com (my top 50 ranked filmmaking blog), my Twitter profile, www.12parsecstudios.com (another portfolio site). In addition, you’re seeing a Wikiepedia page on one of my films and an interview with me on YouTube.

Pages 2+ continue that theme, with my Digg, Linked In and Facebook profiles, other sites I own and so on.

What I’ve done is to completely control (or nearly completely) what people are reading about when they look for information on me. My branding information is all they see and the only place they see to buy my products is on sites I control.

Now, this sort of thing can be a bit daunting, especially if you’ve got a more common name than Mat Nastos, or are targeting keywords not in your name or even are trying to do damage control on your brand (say, if there is a site ranking #1 on Google saying disparaging things about your work!). How the heck do you control multiple results if you online have a single website?!

Fear not, my children, I can help you. What you’ll find below is a list of ways to generate additional Google results without a whole lot of work, all for free!

1. Microsites

A “microsite” is just a very brief website, on its own domain, that is built around just a couple of keywords/phrases/brand names - often, focusing on just a single one. Having problems getting your company to show up when people are looking for “Darkwing Duck?” Build a couple of 2000+ word microsites on Darkwing Duck and link those back to your online store for ease of purpose. These sites can rank very well, especially once they’ve been given a bit of time to mature online, AND can do some fantastic work as a pre-sales piece. I’ve found a higher percentage of sales conversions often come from a well-built microsite.

2. Social Network Profiles

Everyone is incredibly hip on Social Networking right now and think it is going to change the universe, is the answer to all business problems and so forth. That’s not completely true and I’ll be going in to the specific uses of Social Networking in regards to generating sales/marketing in a later chapter. What is true is, if you know how to write for SEO, those sale Social Networking profiles can rank astonishingly well in Google.

First up, make sure the name of your profile (or username or whatever) is made up of your brand/keywords. This is hugely important. Having an indecipherable or unrelated screenname does you no good in terms of branding. Google loves it when your keyword is your profile name.

Next up is the profile description - the “About Me” section of the profile. Instead of just tossing in a few words about yourself (or brand or product or keywords of choice or whatever), take some time to generate a nice content block targeting the keywords you want to rank on. Fill as much space as the profile will allow and pad it with your laser-targeted terms.

Finally, make sure to include hyperlinks back to your website. A lot of people forget to do this, especially on places like YouTube, where the traffic generated can be of epic proportions.

3. Syndicated Content

Develop content with your branding, product info, etc., and get that content aggregated out on to other websites. This could be in the form of posts/articles, comments, video (tagged/described properly), press releases and so on. These things will give you a presence on “non-controlled” sites and still give you the ability to control what people see when they are searching online.

Make sure to try and target sites that already rank well in Google. For comics, those are sites like Comic Book Resources, Bleeding Cool, Ain’t It Cool News, About.com, the various “How To” instruction sites, Yahoo Answers and so on. For video, you can use free services like TubeMogul to automate your content syndication, freeing up your time for other marketing!

Those are the top three ways to help you dominate the search engine results in Google. This can be done with everything from Brand or product names (Dungeons & Dragons) to keyword results (fantasy comics). If you put together a strong enough keyword and marketing strategy, there’s no end to what you can do.

CHAPTER 8: The Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers

To be completely honest, I was originally going to title this “An Exploration of Mental Retardation,” but was advised against it by my wife. She’s a lot smarter than I am.

There is absolutely no doubt that the Internet is the present and future of any form of sales, marketing and promotion for any industry looking to reach the public and make a profit. For a comic book publisher with a small or non-existent marketing budget this is even truer. Truerer? Truerist? Whatever.

The Internet can offer a level playing field, regardless of a company’s size, budget or manpower, when it comes to having access to the hundreds of millions of people online looking for somewhere to spend their money. It can give a company almost unlimited access to potential customers, as long as they actively target their markets and let those potential customers know about their products.

For a run-of-the-mill, industry standard superhero comic, or even an original non-superhero title, figuring out that target market can be a grueling and often mind-numbing task. That is where the beauty of a licensed property comic comes in. You see, with a comic based on a licensed movie, television or video game property, you are immediately widening your potential audience to now include fans of that property. You gain access to those (hopefully) millions of people online looking for more products based on their favorite media properties. You should be achieving sales in excess of non-licensed titles in exponential amounts. You should be guaranteed to have a hit book on your hands.

In theory.

That is, unless you are a modern comic book publisher.

Modern comic book publishers, in spite of going through the trouble (and cost) of obtaining a licensed property, will almost universally ignore the drawing power of that license, as well as the targeting and funneling power of the Internet. This is an extremely amusing realization for me in light of how often you hear publishers talking about how digital comics are the future of the industry or how the Internet will replace the current direct market and comic book shops.

The very same companies making these statements are some of the worst at actually understanding or using what we all accept as the future. In general, comic book publishers are actively ignoring the Internet as a selling and promotion tool…and, no, setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts don’t count. Completely ignored are market research, search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research and about a hundred other, very basic marketing and sales practices. Things that most other industries automatically do.

Where this lack of marketing and sales ability is on amazing display is with those publishers who deal with the licensed properties. For the most part, they seem to be assuming that just having a license will magically bring people in. When, in truth, their brand of marketing/sales is really just limiting their sales to current comic book fans that happen to also be fans of their licenses (versus the millions of mainstream fans who are out there on the internet looking for product merchandised from their favorite property). In other words, they are sectioning off an already too-small pool of potential customers instead of opening that pool up into the ocean.

To successfully take advantage of a licensed property, fans of that property have to be able to find it. With the Internet being everyone’s primary source of information and research, making sure your licensed comics show up when potential new customers search for the property is going to be one of the most basic, and most important, things you can do.

Going with that thought, let’s jump over to everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, and see how a few comic book publishers do with the licensed properties they have spent so much money obtaining.

(As a point of fact: I searched a number of terms for each license, including the name of the property (with and without quotes if needed), along with additional searches based on “buying keywords” I’ve found work almost universally well with all product online. I stopped my searches after page 6 because, as we all know, most Internet searches actually end after page 3)

IDW Publishing: As one of the “big boys” of the comic industry, and a company whose sales seem to be based very heavily on licensed properties, I expected IDW to do very well with in the searches.

No rankings were found at all in the first 6 pages of Google (I stopped on page 6) for the following licensed titles: Transformers, True Blood, GI Joe, Ghostbusters and Doctor Who.

Astonishingly, I did find them pop up for Star Trek in the middle of page 5. Even more surprising, they don’t even rank on page 1 for their own “30 Days of Night” comic. That’s right, they come in on the middle of page 2. Well, at least they rank well on “IDW Publishing.”

For Boom! Studios: Boom is a smaller publisher who seems to be trying to use licensed titles as a way to move up in sales and market share.

No rankings were found in the first 6 pages of search results (again, I stopped after page 6) for the following Boom! Studios licensed comics: Farscape, Muppets/Muppet Show, Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Disney Cars/Pixar Cars (Cars by itself is a worthless search term and an impossible one to get a high ranking on for small websites), The Incredibles/Disney Incredibles/Pixar Incredibles, Toy Story, Mickey Mouse, Finding Nemo and 28 Days Later.

The Uncle Scrooge results gave me a chuckle. You see, on page 2, we find a link to an old Dark Horse offering. So, I’m guessing that Boom feels you should buy Dark Horse before buying Boom in this case.

Darkwing Duck, a term with very little competition and one that should be easy to dominate the results with, barely makes page 5 of Google. You can, however, find some fanfic of the character on page 2.

Walt Disney Comics as a complete term does rank towards the bottom of Google Search Engine Results page 2 for Boom, but the link itself goes to a blog entry and not to information about the comic itself. I’m glad to see them rank well for at least one of their many licensed titles, especially one like “Walt Disney Comics” that has almost no competition.

For Ape Entertainment: These are little guys in the world of licensed comics, but they have produced some high quality non-licensed books in the past.

No rankings…yadda yadda…first 6 pages…yadda yadda…you know the drill: Black Dynamite, Shrek (they do get a page 5 ranking if you search for “Shrek Comic), Penguins of Madagascar and Megamind.

I did go ahead and do searches for Richie Rich and Strawberry Shortcake, but didn’t realistically expect to find anything since Ape had just announced acquiring those licenses. Still, would have been nice to see well-written press releases pop up during my searches.

What I very quickly discovered was that all of the publishers were completely missing the point of their licenses and, in all honesty, are all completely wasting whatever fees they paid out for those licenses. The question I have for all of the companies is: If you’re going to pay for a license with wider recognition and accessibility, why ignore those two very important factors and just limit your sales to the comic industry itself. That is exactly what they are doing – people who are fans of the True Blood TV show have almost no chance of finding out about the IDW True Blood comic books, unless they are already exposed to comics and are already at a comic store or searching on comic book specific sites.

If a company isn’t using the potential of its license and the power of the Internet to grow their sales and market share, then they are absolutely wasting their time, their manpower and their money.

What’s even worse is the nature of a licensed property – that nature being: the comic publisher doesn’t own it. That’s right, at least with a low-selling company-owned comic you’ll still own the property in a few years. With a licensed property, at some point, those rights will revert back to its owners and all you are left with are memories of a product that didn’t sell well and a lot of time wasted on it.

To close out, I’m going to end things with a list of sales estimates for licensed comics from earlier this year:

From August 2010 Diamond Sales Estimates:

True Blood #2 26,000 (best seller of the bunch!) – somehow, one of the hottest properties and shows on the planet is selling fewer copies than the 4th issue of Zatanna.

Angel #36 16,000 – 5 seasons of Angel and 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, countless BtVS conventions, fan groups and more, and it sells less than a Booster Gold comic.

GI Joe #157 14,000 – the best selling comic book of the 80s, one of the greatest cartoons of all-time and a property supported by both toy and cartoon interest. What’s worse is the rest of the GI Joe titles all sell fewer than 10,000!

Doctor Who #14 6,500 – no clue what to say about this one. This property has been around for almost 50 years, supports its own conventions, has its own dedicated international magazine, is incredibly hot on TV and has had an amazing amount of press this year. Yet, it isn’t selling much over five thousand copies.

Darkwing Duck #3 6,300 – I think this was the highest ranked Boom title after Irredeemable this month. You’d think a company basing itself on licensed titles would be able to muster a few of those titles up over 10,000 in sales.

From there things get really depressing. How depressing? Donald Duck & Friends sold right at 3,000 copies. Something is very wrong here.

Licensed comic publishers, you really need to get your sh!t together. If you’re selling product based on a popular property, get a marketing plan together and start actually trying to sell it instead of sitting back and hoping for the best.

CHAPTER 9: 7 Quick Tips for Creating Comic Book Content with SEO that Scores in Search Engines

Now, if you’re in the comic industry, you may wonder what the heck the Internet, search engines or search terms have to do with making good comics. In terms of “making comics,” those things are, for the most part, completely unrelated. Where they come in to play is if you’re going to try and SELL comics or want to expand brand/product awareness of your product. Obviously, something that is very important to comic publishers.

Going back to the chapter “The Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers,” it may have seemed like the various publishers were going out of their way to avoid doing proper Internet marketing for their product, which is most definitely not the case. The issue is that a lot of companies who business has been sold offline for the majority of their existence, really just don’t understand what is available to them — oft times for free — and how the Internet can not only keep their present customers/readers informed about product, but can also aid in expanding product to new markets.

Think of the Internet being similar to having an Ad during the Super Bowl. You have the potential for hundreds of millions of people to see your product, so capturing even the smallest or fraction of a percent of those “eyes” can result in some health market expansion.

What I’m going to do in this article is go over some of the basic ways a comic book publisher can supplement what they are doing with a website and pass along some tips for starting to improve your Search Engine Results. These are some quick fixes and techniques I’ve used on my own sites - sites that will generate well over four million dollars in sales ($4,000,000.00) in 2010 alone. Those sales are all without the use of paid advertising and generally only use the power of properly written content to rank in Google.

For the sake of this article, I’m going to use IDW Publishing as an example - not because I have anything against them, but because they are currently publishing a comic based on one of my favorite properties: Dungeons & Dragons. I want to make sure this comic succeeds and lasts for many issues, so I’m tossing out some tips that I hope will help them pull in additional traffic to their website.

To start off, IDW Publishing isn’t ranking anywhere online when you do a search for “Dungeons & Dragons” or its various spellings. It does hit Google Page 3 when you search for “Dungeons & Dragons Comics,” which is still not quite where they want to be. I mean, if you’re publishing a D&D comic, you want to be on Google Page 1 where everyone can see it!

To be fair, IDW’s Dungeons & Dragons comics are mentioned on other sites and blogs higher up in the search engine results - Comic Book Resources, for example - but they have no control over those links, so they aren’t quite as valuable. Right now I’m just focusing on some tips on writing for SEO, but in the future I’ll deal with things like achieving multiple listings in search engine results, aggregating content, backlinking strategy, interior link strategy, keyword research, market research, building up your site’s “expert status” and other ways to score well in Google and the other search engine sites.

Let’s take a look at IDW’s Dungeons & Dragons Comic page - here is the link for the D&D Comic Product page - taken a look? Cool. Let’s get started.

1. PROPER URL FORMATTING

As an Internet Marketing guy, the first thing I notice is the URL of the site itself. For reference, that URL is: http://idwpublishing.com/catalog/series/1451 . The reason that is a problem is because IDW Publishing is using an ID style number for the Dungeons & Dragons comic book page instead of taking advantage of that space to get keywords in. What I mean there is this, when it comes to SEO, content is king and making sure a website has its keyword appear as often as is viable is important. One of the primary spots the search engines look for keywords is in the URL of a webpage. In this case, IDW is telling us that the most important keyword to this page is “1451.” This should immediately be changed to a URL containing their targeted keywords: in this case, Dungeons & Dragons Comic (or some variation thereof).

With URLs you want to make sure you know how to use dashes (“-”) versus underscores (“_”). They look similar, but work in two very different ways when it comes to URLs and how search engines view them. A dash will allow you to link words together and have them viewable in any order (dungeons-and-dragons-comics could be seen as dragon comics and dungeons). On the other hand, underscores work the same way quotation marks do in a web search – by linking the words together in a precise order. In other words, dungeons_and_dragons_comics will only be read as keywords in that order. It limits (or laser targets) your phrases if you have need of doing so. For the most part, go with dashes to be safe.

2. TITLE YOUR PAGES!

The next piece I notice is a lack of a personalized title for the page. Right now we’re getting the standard line about “IDW Publishing - the home of (yadda, yadd)” and no mention of our targeted keywords. While Meta titles aren’t quite as effective as they had been in the past, Google still does take notice of them and properly formatted titles can help your page ranking. A problem with going with the same Meta title on all the pages is that it could potentially be seen as duplicate content or Spam by the search engines. Duplicate content is one of the things that can bog down a site’s rankings if you aren’t careful. What I’d do is change the title to something like “IDW Publishing: Home of the Dungeons & Dragons Comic.” Down the road, I’d consider including my secondary keywords in there as well (fantasy comic, for example), but we’re keeping things simple right now.

3. META KEYWORDS ARE STILL USEFUL

Popping open the page’s source code, I notice a lack of Meta Keywords. Much like the Meta title, the meta keyword spot in code isn’t quite as powerful as it used to be. In the old days of the web, you could pad the hell out of your Meta keywords, tossing in hundreds of words that didn’t necessarily even relate to your content. That is no longer the case. However, proper Meta keywords, if used sparingly, will still very much help ranking on your keywords and phrases. In this case, make sure “Dungeons & Dragons Comics” appears as your main Meta tag keywords.

A KEYWORD ASIDE

A quick digression: you need to be careful with your keywords. You want to make sure to select only the most important few keywords or phrases for each page and then target the hell out of them. Having too many chosen keywords or phrases can dilute the effectiveness of your page. You also need to be careful that you aren’t spamming keywords in your content. I’ve found having the keywords appear 2-3 times per paragraph, especially in content of 1000 words or more, is as close to the magic number as you can get. Keep that in mind as you write.

4. IMAGE ALT TAGS ARE YOUR FRIEND

Something that IDW does well on their Dungeons & Dragons Comics page is using image alt-tags on their cover shot. What they’ve done is include a tiny bit of code that allows a line of text to be displayed when a visitor places their mouse over the image. They’ve got it reading “Dungeons & Dragons #1 cover.” Not bad, and they definitely get points for have that in their. A better way to do things is to make the alt-tag use a block of text and not just a quick keyword or image title. Toss in a paragraph worth of text, making sure your keywords pop up at least one. The benefit of using image alt-tags is that you’re tossing in additional keyword instances without adding that text to the look of the page itself. Since the search engines only actually see the source code of the page, those image alt-tags look like regular old content. The other thing I’d do a bit different on this page is to add in a few more pictures and a few more image alt-tags. The more multimedia content you can get on a page (images, video, etc), the better.

5. NAME YOUR DAMN IMAGES CORRECTLY!

Where the IDW Publishing image for the cover of Dungeons & Dragons Comics #1 falls short is in its name. What they’ve got is “DD_01_coverA,jpg,” which tells us nothing about the image itself. The better way to go is to use your keywords in the title of the image and let people know it is “dungeons-and-dragons-comic-01-covera.jpg.” This gives us yet another keyword instance and makes Google love us a little more. Do this with all of your images.

6. SEO YOUR CONTENT BLOCK

The main body of content on the page isn’t terrible. They’ve got “Dungeons & Dragons” appearing at least once in every paragraph, which is a great start. Unfortunately, they aren’t including the word “comics” in all of the paragraphs, so they may be missing out on some targeting. I’d take the usage a bit further, adding in the keyword phrase at least twice per paragraph. Even more important, I’d triple the size of the content block. I’d be going for at least 1000-1500 words on the page. The bigger the content block, the better your keyword density and the more you can get away with in terms of keyword usage.

Remember, not only are you using your content to give away basic information (such as a solicitation write-up), but you also need to write in with a mind towards what people are out on the internet searching for. If those terms do not appear in your content, no matter how relevant your work is, your pages will not show up in the search engine results.

7. HEADER TAGS

The Google spider is an incredibly smart thing. Not only does it recognize your site’s keywords, but it can also rank them by importance. One of the ways it does this is by looking at your header tags. For those who aren’t “in the know” like me, a “header tag” is something that increases the size and boldness of text. Look at my various numbered headings - those all use a header tag to make them stand out. Google sees the words in the header tags and places additional weight to their value as keywords. If those words are popping up elsewhere, then the header tags give the page a bit of a kick in terms of search engine results.

8. FREEBIE TIP BECAUSE I CAN’T COUNT – LINK ANCHOR TEXT

A final way to help Google recognize your site’s targeted keywords is to make sure to use them when linking to the page from other locations on your own site, or when asking for backlinks from other sites. Instead of doing the age-old favorite “click here” use “Dungeons & Dragons Comics” (or whatever) as the anchor text for your hyperlinks to the page itself. Using those keywords as anchor text, even on other sites (Believe it or not!), will help you improve your search engine listings!

Now, that is the end of my 7 tips for…well, I gave this article an incredibly long name, so let’s stick with “7 Tips for Comic SEO” for right now. These things are some of the very basic techniques you can use to help increase your page ranking. Following these tips (which really should be standard operating procedure for website building) should have IDW Publishing see an improvement of their rankings for “Dungeons & Dragons Comics” pretty quickly. I say that because their website has some age to it (versus being brand new), is already well indexed in Google and we’re dealing with a keyword phrase without a huge amount of competition (only 600,000 search engine results on “Dungeons & Dragons Comics” in Google gives us a great chance at dominating the results). Depending upon how often the Google spider indexes their site, IDW Publishing could see improvement as quickly as 24 to 48 hours!

When you pair these basic SEO techniques with more advanced stuff like keyword research, a company like IDW Publishing will be able to see their web traffic expand exponentially because customers looking for similar product will now be able to actually find them online! It’s like moving your commercial from Outdoor Network at 1am to Cartoon Network during a new episode of “The Clone Wars!” People will know you exist and will start to look at your product.

Will those additional eyes convert over to sales? Well, that’s the subject of another article!

CHAPTER 10: The Sad Tale of a Comic Book Publisher’s Failed Product Launch

I was speaking with an editor from one of the larger comic book publishers recently (no, I’m not going to name “Who” this time around) about issues they had been having with one of their licensed comic book properties. A quick break down of their situation, as I understood them:

The publisher has access to a huge property with a lot of history to it and a very large fanbase - a fanbase that includes movies, games, video games, previous comic series, novels and more. Absolutely huge property, fantastic built-in market and, more importantly, a market that intersects nicely with the medium of comic books.

To take advantage of the monstrous fanbase, the publisher’s plan was (is?) to put out at least three titles, based on various portions of the license. Definitely a good number to start with — enough material to reboot the property in comic book format and get some good sales, but not so much as to dilute or over-expose it.

Absolutely idea set-up for the publisher. I can’t stress that enough: all factors were in place for this to be a killer comic book in terms of sales.

And that is precisely what it looked like with the release of their initial issue of the first series. Big numbers. A definite hit for the publisher and a fantastic lead in for the premiere of the second series.

Unfortunately, that is where things went terribly wrong for the publisher. You see, in spite of a big launch for the property in the form of the first series, orders for the second series were…how shall we say…uninspiring. A better word for it might have been disheartening.

The question the editor asked me was, “How did it happen? What did we do wrong?”

To be honest, I’m sure the editor thought he was asking me a rhetorical questions — one not really asked for the purpose of me answering. What he didn’t know was, well…me. When I stumble across a mystery such as this, my inner Scooby Doo comes out (or is it my inner Velma?) and I need to get to the bottom of it.

Luckily, in this particular instance, it didn’t take the entire gang of Mystery Incorporated to figure out the answer. You see, it was all fairly obvious once I took a look at what the publisher was doing in terms of promotion and, more specifically, internet marketing.

After poking around online for a bit I discovered quite a bit of information and reference to the first series and its release. The publisher had done a decent job at building up hype for it in a number of ways:

1. Doing interviews and press releases aimed at the target market — not as much as I would have liked, but enough to get some word out and some interest in place.

2. Releasing a preview issue, which was available for free at a number of outlets and given away at convention appearances by the publisher. This was a fantastic, and surprisingly aggressive, move by the publisher.

3. Had references to the series on various company-related websites BEFORE the comic come out and, I believe, before it was available for pre-order in Previews.

In my mind, they could have done more, but at least there was something there for the built-in audience for the property to latch on to. They put information out in advance and gave the audience enough time to discover it. B+ job and nothing to scoff at.

Training my razor-sharp senses on the second series, fully expecting to find the same care and promotional force being exerted on it. The promotional force being exerted on that second title, I very quickly discovered, amounted to almost nothing.

Well, to be honest, it amounted to nothing without the almost.

Bupkis.

Nada.

That’s right. The company who had done so well with the release of the first issue was dropping the ball terribly.

During my searches on the Internet, using every variation I could think of for the new comic, up to and including making use of the publisher’s name, I found no references to the new title at all. A title that had just been in previews and had been around long enough for the publisher to have received its initial orders through Diamond. No reference at all on the entire Internet.

Zilch.

In the eyes of the Internet (and the entire world, really) this new series — based on one of the top licenses you can imagine and having more than 30 years worth of hardcore fans - did not exist.

Here is where the most interesting part comes in to play. When I mentioned this fact to the editor to whom I had been speaking, and asked what they were doing to promote the third series (which was due in Previews within the next month or two and would be getting orders - or not getting them - very soon thereafter) in order to avoid such an occurrence from happening again. What were they doing to make sure they didn’t kill this monster of a license in comics for the foreseeable future?

His non-nonchalant remark not only surprised and startled me, but also spurred me to write this article, was, “It’s still a couple of months away…we haven’t even started thinking about it yet.”

My jaw hit the floor. For anyone aware of putting together a product launch, “a couple of months away” means it is time to kick things in to high gear. It is time to get to work, to start building interest in the new product and time to do everything humanly possible to make sure you, as a publisher, are going to get as many sales as you can.

While I assume they had someone on staff who knew what a “product launch strategy was,” I came to one very sobering conclusion. They may have known the term but they didn’t understand what it meant.

What they didn’t seem to understand is that a successful product launch is as much about the countdown as it is about the take-off.

For a proper product launch, something I’ll go in to more detail in the next chapters, you need to connect with your target audience. You need to entice them, intrigue them and seduce them. You need to slowly give out tiny bits of information on your product, a little at a time and over a long period of time in order to catch as many of them as possible. You want to frame your information releases in a way that each and every member of that fanbase is convinced they are part of a secret club. That they are special and that the product is for THEM.

This publisher, one whom I have a huge amount of respect for (and whose product I tend to enjoy), make the mistake I’ve complained about in this space so many time before. They made the mistake of assuming “if you build it, they will come.” They assumed producing a comic based on a giant property was going to magically cause customers to appear and buy their product.

What was even worse, at least in my mind, was that they were completely unaware of their grievous mistake. A mistake that might cost them tens of thousands of potential sales AND kill of one of their anchor properties.

Hopefully someone in that publisher’s office will be paying attention this time!

CHAPTER 11: How to Launch a Comic Book Series - An Introduction

Before I get in to the meat of today’s post (a lead-in/introduction to a new series of articles on proper product launch techniques & tips), I’m going to make an incredibly clear, concise statement - one that will leave no room for interpretation and no room for me to wiggle out of down the road. It is also a statement that will annoy a large portion of my current readership because those readers at the people I’m specifically talking about.

Ready? Here we go.

If you are a comic book publisher with an Internet presence, then your current marketing people are one of two things, at least when it comes to Internet Marketing:

1. Sorely inept at or completely unknowledgeable about their jobs (I really wanted to say “are Internet Idiots,” but my wife suggested I tone it down); or

2. Are not doing their jobs to the fullest potential (originally I wanted to write “are slacking off and/or robbing you blind,” but, again, I deferred to my wife’s wisdom).

This statement is 100% true from the smallest of self-publishers up to the Big Boys of the industry, and it is ESPECIALLY true for the licensed publishers I’ve ragged on a bit in the past (IDW Publishing, Boom Studios, Dynamite Entertainment, Moonstone Books and Ape Entertainment being the ones who come most readily to mind). The only companies I excuse for this insanity are the smaller guys who are, essentially, hobby publishers with no real urge, plan or desire to make a profit. I also give the “movie pitch” companies like Top Cow and Radical Publishing a pass because, really, they aren’t in the business of selling comics for the most part. That being said, any and all comic book publishers could benefit from a marketing upgrade to help their sales and their bottom line.

That’s right, your employees, the people to whom you pay money, are not doing their jobs in any sort of an effective manner when it comes to growing your business online, or even exploiting a market you should already be selling to.

They are keeping you from growing your business and, in most cases, keeping you from profits you should be achieving. In other words, with their ignorance or incompetence, they’re forcing you to leave large amounts of money “on the table.”

Because I’ve watched so much “CSI” and “Law & Order” in my life, I like to call this “obstruction of profit.”

Normally, my advice to businesses in such a terrible mess would be: save yourself some money and just have interns do the work. However, that’s probably what got you into your current crisis in the first place. I’m also not sure my back-up advice would be much help either: “start requiring IQ and/or competency tests for all hires.”

My mother always said, “If you can’t be constructive, be silent.”

While, in the past, I’ve gone out of my way to point out and detail the incompetence (and/or ignorance) of various comic book publishers (as seen in “The Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers,” “7 Quick Tips for Creating Comic Book Content with SEO that Scores in Search Engines,” “The Curious Case of Moonstone Books - E-Commerce Mistakes to Avoid” and “The Sad Tale of a Comic Book Publisher’s Failed Product Launch”), I’m going to heed my mom’s advice and do something a bit different with this new batch of articles. What I’m going to do is detail in fairly precise steps, how to lay the ground work for a new series before the launch, all of the steps up to the product launch itself and then go over what to do after the launch in order to continue to build your brand awareness and sales.

Oh, and to better drive my examples home, I’m going to use an upcoming comic book series from my old rant target, IDW Publishing. They’ve got some great properties that are being sorely mismanaged by their marketing department - really, they need a “product manager,” although in comics I had thought that was supposed to be the editor (although, that may not be totally appropriate in this case). If they aren’t careful, I very much see them going the way of Devil’s Due Press, a company they share a lot of similarities with.

The property I’m going to use in my example is their previously announced “Forgotten Realms” series, written by RA & Geno Salvatore. It is a licensed property with a ton of potential, but also one that is completely absent from the Internet in terms of previews/information, in spite of having a release date in early 2011 - only a couple of months away!

Let’s see if we can help them turn around what may otherwise be a disastrous release!

CHAPTER 12: How to keep IDW Publishing from losing their shirt on the Forgotten Realms, Part 1: Building a Foundation for a Successful Comic Book Product Launch

IDW Publishing is currently publishing a lot of licensed properties I really enjoy. Things like GI Joe, Dungeons & Dragons, the work of George RR Martin, stuff with giant robots…wait a minute. It sounds like I’m describing Devil’s Due Publishing here.

Sadly, much like DDP, I really don’t think IDW knows how to handle the promotion and marketing of licensed properties and, in the long run, I truly think it could hurt their business. At some point, the cost of failed licensing efforts could force them down the road that DDP has “blazed.”

Because of my love of the work IDW puts out (including some of the most amazing “Art of” books around!), and in spite of the fact that they completely ignored my last round of fixes for their site, I’ve decided to put together this series of articles focusing on doing a proper Internet product launch for their upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: Forgotten Realms series. Written by fantasy legend, RA Salvatore, and his son, Geno, the new Forgotten Realms series from IDW has a tremendous amount of potential in terms of sales, both in the comic industry itself and outside of regular industry distribution channels.

Unfortunately, as history has shown, if left to their own devices IDW will most assuredly mess things up. Let’s see if we can help them out with their problem.

Before I start getting crazy emails about not being able to do this or that, calm down. None of what I’m going to describe here is anything crazy or, truthfully, anything beyond basic Internet marketing steps. This is what should generally be done for any product launch online and, truthful, if you’re a mid-sized company (Boom! Studios and Ape Entertainment, I’m talking to you guys) you should automatically be doing all of this stuff. You’re not. But you should be. If you’ve got someone working on your website already, then you can do all of this work in a very short time and with no additional costs to your company. All you have to do is convince your marketing people to get off their arses and do some work.

OK, that may be harder than I thought.

The 7 Pieces for a Kick-Ass Web Foundation

1. Build A Solid Web Presence: The very first thing IDW needs to do is develop a spot on their web page with more information about the new series. Currently, all they have for Dungeons & Dragons is a terrible single page with a couple of paragraphs talking about the proper and a single image of the core Dungeons & Dragons comic.

There is no information on when the comics are coming out.

No information on what has already been released.

No information on the individual series.

No previews or even cover galleries.

There isn’t even a link to purchase the comics in the company store beyond a small line of text that says “subscribe to D&D comics” that links to a bulk buy of issues 1-5. Individual issues are not listed and nothing comes up in their search bar when you look for “Dungeons & Dragons.” I guess they really don’t want you to purchase their product!

For a company trying to, I assume, sell or, at the very least, inform potential customers about a product, IDW fails miserably on all counts.

For their site to be successful, and for fans to learn about the new Forgotten Realms series, the new title needs its own set of web pages on the IDW Publishing website. In reality, they should have a group of pages dedicated to each of the Dungeons & Dragons series they produce, but that’s beyond the scope of what I’m talking about here.

Each page absolutely, 100% MUST HAVE calls to action for fans to purchase the product and a link to where it can be ordered/pre-ordered, preferably online. No arguments here, IDW executives. If you argue with me, I will have you murdered. Give links not just to a mass subscription page, but also to each and every issue of the series itself, even if that issue has not been released. Product pages in your store should contain a solicitation, release schedule, cover images, preview pages AND links back to the web page for the individual issue, the product/store entries for other issues and the series “hub” page itself.

(For clarity’s sake, store entries will be called “Product Pages” and pages on the website itself will be called “web pages” or just “pages.”)

All web pages MUST contain links to Twitter and Facebook accounts for either IDW Dungeons & Dragons in general or the Forgotten Realms in specific. I’d also include a direct link to and mention of the IDW D&D forum. Give visitors as many ways as possible to connect to the product on a personal level. Expecting them to find this information on their own is a bad idea.

I’ve just been talking about the web pages as a group, but what specifically should those pages be? Here is what I have in mind for the Forgotten Realms set of pages on the IDW Publishing website:

2. Forgotten Realms Hub Page: Information about the series itself, the world, the product line, whatever you want to call it. This should have a general info-dump (at minimum 1000 words targeting phrases like: Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms, Drizzt Do’Urden, Geno Salvatore and R.A. Salvatore at the very least. Other phrases to consider might be things like fantasy comic or fantasy series, but only if you’re going to build additional content to support those keywords). Include properly labeled images and even video if possible.

This page should also include release information for each issue of the miniseries. People buying “Forgotten Realms Issue 1” should know when to expect the rest of the series. Give them every reason to feel like the series is going to be reliable - an unusual feeling in the comic industry. Make sure to include links over to the Product Pages as often as possible. Make it disturbingly easy for a customer to buy the product - if they can’t figure out how to buy your product, or if they’re expected to go on a Dungeons & Dragons style quest to find it in your store, then they’re going to go somewhere else. Luckily, it’s easier to find a free pirate torrent of the old DC Comics Forgotten Realms comic than it is to find information on the new one from IDW. That was sarcasm.

This Forgotten Realms Hub page will need blurbs/info blocks on each issue in the series, along with links to individual issue pages. Very important for the search engines and visitors.

Don’t forget the call to action and ordering options. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a “call to action” is basically a sales phrase written in the most immediate form. The simplest of call to action terms is probably “BUY NOW!” Good marketing people can and should get much more creative with them.

3. Individual Forgotten Realms Issue Pages: Yes, you need an individual web page for each issue of the series. These pages should contain:

Information on the series itself.

Information on the authors.

Information on the specific issue.

A preview of some sort.

Development art would be fantastic (sketches or the like).

A release date.

A way to purchase or pre-order the book.

You need to give as much reason for a reader to get excited about the series as possible. Cover art alone is not enough, and neither is a basic solicitation blurb. I’d even go as far as to include a link to in-game information for characters, creatures, magic items or locations shown in the comic as a bit of added value content. People love free and giving away something can build an amazing connection with potential customers, giving them a need to return to your site/store.

4. Forgotten Realms Author Page: They need to build a rather significant authors’ page for Geno & RA Salvatore, and even the artist. These are major names in the fantasy/RPG space and they get a lot of Internet traffic based on their names alone. Target their names, target the names of previous work and make sure to target both Drizzt’s name and Dungeons & Dragons. I would include “words from the authors” if possible - give the fans a way to connect to the authors and this specific work. Have them tell us WHY this product is different, significant and worth spending money on.

If the authors have Twitter/Facebook accounts or their own forums, make sure to provide links to those. If possible, make sure to have a presence from IDW in those areas. Even if it is just a posting or comment once a week.

5. OPTIONAL Page - In-Game Material Page: If they don’t want to include in-game material on the individual issue pages, then put it all together here. I’d release new material on a schedule, so visitors have a reason to come back regularly. I also might be inclined to not give too much. Use the old “for more information” or “for the COMPLETE adventure,check out the new Forgotten Realms Comics.” Make sure to include a schedule and links back to the individual pages.

6. Inter-linking between pages is essential. Give visitors the impression that they really never need to leave the group of pages. Also, feel free to link out to other Dungeons & Dragons-related pages on the IDW site. My preference would be to link only to site that are linking back to the IDW pages, but it’s not 100% necessary.

7. Email Sign-Up, do it! Finally, and I’ve talked about this in other articles, make sure to have a highly placed “sign up” option on all of the pages. Make it enticing and contain solid calls to action. You want to give people a reason to sign up and give you their information. Once you have a mailing list, you’ll need to put together some automated emails to help support the release schedule of the Forgotten Realms comics. Build up emails discussing the future release of each issue, dealing with the time for pre-ordering and talking about the books when they are in stores. Some of these will overlap as more issues come out, which is cool. This needs to be an active part of your marketing/sales. Make sure to include links to the site and even buy/pre-order links for each issue. If back-orders are available, include that as well.

That is he end of the first part of the plan. I like to call this your foundation. This is the hub and where you’re going to be directing people to from the rest of the Internet marketing plan. Once you’ve built this foundation, which is your passive marketing effort, we’ll be ready to head out into the wilds of the Internet itself and start work on active marketing efforts. Actively funneling traffic back to the hub and building the community for the Forgotten Realms series itself.

CHAPTER 13: How to keep IDW from losing their shirt on the Forgotten Realms, Part 2: Connecting with your audience

If you’re here on the site for the first time and haven’t read the introduction or Part 1 of this series, you should stop here. Go back and read the first two posts, and even the “Sad tale of a failed comic launch” article that spawned all of this.

Go ahead.

Take your time.

This latest post will be here when you get back.

Everyone all caught up? Good. Now that we have the basic foundation of the Internet Marketing plan out of the way, what we need to do now is move on to actively driving people back to the website. I say “actively” because building the site itself, if done properly, will pull traffic in a passive way. Meaning, it’ll pop up in Internet searches without a company actively doing anything to it, aside from making periodic updates to keep Google happy. We may have to tweak the keywords and keyword density on a given page as we go along to make sure we are obtaining the results we want, but the heavy lifting on the site itself is done.

One quick aside before I move on. As you may have noticed, I didn’t really go in to the proper methods of building the website in Part I - didn’t talk about SEO, writing content, proper coding, etc. I’ve dealt with that stuff pretty extensively elsewhere on this website - and specifically with one of IDW’s own webpages - and feel no need to go in to it further here. This series is about how to put everything together and make it work for your new comic book product launch. If you want to learn more of the specifics then jump over to my other marketing articles and absorb the wisdom found therein!

That leads us in to the next steps of our marketing plan for the Forgotten Realms comic book miniseries product launch. In part 1 we built up our hub and foundation, now we are going to head out into the wilds of the Internet itself and start to drive traffic back to that hub.

6 Ways to Build an Internet Audience (and Web Traffic) for your Comic Book Launch

1. Adventures in Social Networking: I’ve mentioned before how Social Networking is one of the most misunderstood Internet tools out there today — especially by comic book publishers and their marketing teams. Social Networks, like Facebook and Twitter, are not there for you to efficiently build new traffic or readership with at all. If you think you’re going to use them for that purpose then you’re going to be sorely disappointed with your results. The sad thing is that is exactly what most “marketing people” at the various comic publishers think Internet marketing is.

Keeping that in mind, there are still three very important uses for Social Networking.

a. The biggest one is to help keep your current fan base informed about your product. Twitter and Facebook are both incredibly effective as a means of dispersing information out to large groups of people. Think of them as free email marketing services. Your Friends/Followers on those sites make up your email list and your Tweets/Status Updates are your quick and dirty email blasts.

b. A second benefit of Social Networking is that it allows your fan base to feel like they can connect with you on a personal, one-on-one basis. You give them a “face” and “voice” of your company for them to interact with. They can give you feedback in a real time manner. This is a benefit often mismanaged by comic book publishers.

c. Lastly, and this is a use generally completely ignored by most businesses, is the fact that Social Networking profiles often rank extraordinarily well in the search engines on keywords you want to target. Those profiles can, and should, be used to help mold your search engine results and direct traffic to sites that your company has “control” over. Making use of your Social Network profiles in this manner can help you with developing your brand message and also in the ability to get ranking on keywords you may otherwise be having difficulty in targeting.

For those three reasons, having well developed profiles for as many of the Social Networking sites as you can manage is essential. Social Networks to consider are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linked In. Obviously, there are numerous others and the more you can get set up with, the better. For IDW Publishing, I’d say set up those profiles for the general Dungeons & Dragons line of products AND for the Forgotten Realms series in specific. For the sake of this particular product launch conversation, focusing on the Forgotten Realms is required.

The key to making the Social Networks work for your company (instead of as just an outlet for bitter webcomic guys to rant about their failures and the cruelty of the comic industry that has spurned them) is in properly filling out your profiles and in loading them with the targeted keywords we discussed in Part 1 of this article series. Go as verbose as you can within the limits of each profile. Load in your keywords, put in a lot of text content and make sure to include links back to specific pages if possible (some profiles allow hyperlinking, while others do not). In other words, don’t just link back to the main IDW Publishing homepage. Link to the Forgotten Realms pages we’ve already built up - if you’re as anal as I am, you’ll link to the next issue coming out and then change your profile links to promote each issue as it is time for ordering. Always start off your Social Networking profiles with the most important backlink you have and then move on with your text content. Make it as easy as possible for someone interested in your product to click over to that hub and get more information (or make a purchase).

Beyond putting together solid profiles for each of the Social Networks, make use of galleries and photo albums to show off concept art, previews, covers and so on. Make sure to fill out the descriptions for each piece, including your keywords and a link back to the Forgotten Realms pages in each one. Very important. I even like to include “buy links” where I can. Make it as easy for your customers to buy as possible.

2. Personality Counts: The next thing to remember is to develop a personality for the Social Networks - that “something” for your customers to connect and bond with. You also need to keep the channels fairly active. By “fairly active” I mean 5+ times a day. Luckily, they all connect, so once you’ve set it up, you only have to post to one service for the information to aggregate out to all the other networks.

You want to keep the posts fairly light and casual - you’re a “friend” to your customers and are giving them inside information “for their eyes only.” You can still have those “light and casual” posts full of details and with strong calls to action, but you want that info to come from someone they “know” versus coming from a company that needs them to buy.

Update as often as possible and make sure to respond to those following you. This is a major entry point for your customers, so make them feel a part of the process. Include links and even “exclusive” content as often as possible (yes, we know it’s not really “exclusive,” but you make it seem that way to build interest to followers). The connection you’re creating with your audience is going to be one of your most valuable pre-sales tools. Blowing this relationship can and will make converting a web visitor into a sale much more difficult.

3.Building Your Street Cred with Forums, Message Boards & Online Communities: Once you’ve got your Social Network profiles in place, you’re going to need to head out in to the untamed Internet to build your following. The first, easiest way to start is with online communities already set up to service your market space. In other words, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D Online, RA Salvatore and Fantasy Book/series forums, fan sites and so on.

These places are going to be some of the absolute best places to build brand and product awareness. The communities are already set up to talk about your product and are primed to purchase. Get on their good sides and maintain an active presence on as many of the larger ones as is realistic for the staff. I’d say find the main message boards and fan community sites for each of the keywords I mentioned - one each to start - and connect with them.

You “connect” by creating a profile and persona to interact with the groups. It is best if it is the same persona as your Social Network profiles in order to gain a bit of synergy and better brand awareness. Talk on the boards, post comments, write articles and give “exclusive” material to the sites. Have this come from your persona and NOT from IDW itself. These are not press releases. You’re building a rapport with the community, something much more important than press releases.

Take the time to talk about some topics other than just the comics themselves. It may sound like a waste of time, but you are building your “street cred” and expert status with your potential audience. If they don’t believe in you, they aren’t going to believe in your product.

Obviously, the Official D&D forums at Wizards of the Coast online are absolutely essential to build a solid presence on for the IDW Forgotten Realms comic book miniseries. You should already have someone on there, but if you don’t, then that is a NUMBER ONE priority. Go do it now. I’ll wait.

When selling in a web 2.0 world, this stuff - building your presence in the community and giving that community someone to identify with - is required for success. Convince your potential customers they are supporting a “Friend” instead of buying a corporate comic.

4. Posting on Other Blogs/Sites: During this time, you want to be surfing the Internet, looking for any blog or site that is talking about your target keywords/phrases (again, the ones I mentioned back in the previous chapter). On those sites, you’re going to be going comment crazy. Find the sites, find an appropriate post, page or article and start leaving comments. Make sure to sign the name of your persona and make sure to include a link back to the Forgotten Realms specific pages (feel free to change up the links - to the main Forgotten Realms page, to the individual issue pages, to the author pages - use the links that seem most appropriate for where you are posting).

If you’re advanced enough, and the site allows it, make sure to use keywords in your anchor text versus just using a generic website link. Some sites will allow you to use HTML type coding and some won’t. Use keyworded anchor text as often as possible.

You’re looking to build as many backlinks as you can.

5. Video Killed the Comic Book Star: Anyone doing business online knows how incredibly powerful video can be for your company. Video can help with what we’ve talking about in amazing ways. There is no better want to connect with your audience, or to give your company/product a “Face,” than with a video. Period. For the Forgotten Realms, let’s get some video up of the creators involved, the artist, the editor…anyone who can help the audience connect with the series on a more personal level. Use videos to build excitement all along the way - from the initial series announcement, to its solicitation in Previews to the weeks and days up to release.

Taking a step beyond the rapport-building nature of video, we’ve also got the often-ignored description box that goes along with it. If you have videos that can be posted, make sure to use the same techniques for writing descriptions as mentioned up in the “Social Network” section. Including backlinks at the beginning of the description and then write content targeting your keywords. Don’t be afraid to write a lot of material for each description. The more the better. As I’ve already stated, YouTube can rank incredibly well for your keywords if you build the keyword-focused content into your video’s description box.

While we’re at it, on those video sites, make sure to comment on other videos in the same market space, and include backlinks and keywords where you can.

6. The Yahoo Answers to Life: This really goes up in one of the above pieces, but it is important enough for its own listing. Yahoo Answers is an incredibly powerful site when it comes to traffic and, more important, sales conversions. People go on Yahoo Answers looking for…well, answers, and it is your chance to give them the ones that best suit you. Look for questions related to our keyword choices — in this case: RPGs, D&D, Forgotten Realms, RA or Geno Salvatore, fantasy novels and so on. Applicable questions will pop up constantly. Go in, give good answers filled with your keywords, and make sure to link back to the appropriate pages over on the IDW Forgotten Realms website.

People on Yahoo Answers are already in a pre-sold frame of mind and can be very easy conversions to actual sales. They’re looking for advice from a “friend” and you can be that person.

I’m going to close Part II off with this statement:

The key to sales conversions is bonding with your potential customers in a way your competitors do not. Give them a face to respond to and a friend to connect with and you’ll see your sales go through the roof.

Internet sales and Web 2.0 can be as much about WHO people are buying from as WHAT they are buying.

CHAPTER 14: The Curious Case of Moonstone Books: E-Commerce Mistakes to Avoid

Back in October 2010, I put up what turned out to be one of my most popular articles, The Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers. The article was so popular, in fact, I received word that a number of publishers had taken some of the comments to heart and are busily updating and reworking their websites (publishers I’ve heard from/about having been influenced by the article: Top Cow, Boom Studios, Ape Entertainment and Th3rd World).

If you haven’t read it, the point of the article was lamenting over the incredibly poor job comic publishers in general, and licensed publishers in specific, are doing with their internet marketing and presence. The job being done is so poor that none of the publishers are currently ranking anywhere in the top 5 pages of Google on something as simple as the names of the properties they license for comic book publication. Truthfully, the Internet marketing and branding of comic book publishers is terrible and, I’d venture to say, probably best described as non-existent. Comic publishers either don’t know how to do it or, in a number of cases, really don’t care about it.

Anyway, after publication of the Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers article, I was asked by a number of readers “What about Moonstone Books? Their line of titles is almost completely made up of either licensed properties or public domain ones…how are they doing with their SEO and Internet marketing? Why didn’t you mention them?”

That’s actually a GREAT question and their absence on the list was a conscious decision on my part. You see, during my research for the “Failure” article, Moonstone Books was one of the companies I looked in to fairly extensively and what that research turned up was interesting enough that I decided to hold back on talking about their website until I had a chance to dedicate a bit more attention to it.

Before I get in to what I found, I’d like to make a couple of quick comments. To begin with, I’m a big fan of the stuff Moonstone Books puts out. I absolutely love most of the properties they are publishing — Kolchak, The Phantom (well, up until Dynamite took the license and decided to publish crap on paper), Green Hornet, Airboy, The Spider, Buckaroo Banzai, Vampire the Masquerade, and so on. They have a lot of cool “toys” that I’d love to play with as a creator.

As a fan, I have to admit, up until a couple of months back, I didn’t realize they were even still publishing. I never see them pop up online. Their Twitter feed has been dead for months (a year?). None of my local comic shops carry their titles. TO be honest, I thought the company had broken up and their various creators were off publishing the work independently.

I found out they were still around a few months ago when uber-talented Ron Fortier mentioned them on Facebook (you can find more of Ron’s fantastic work on his great AirShip 27 site). Needless to say, their Internet marketing needs a bit of work.

Enough of that.

Back to what I found.

During my research, I started by making a list of some of the titles/properties Moonstone Books puts out and began popping those names in to Google to see how the company was ranking in search engine results. I have to say, at first, I was absolutely amazed by what I had found.

That amazement came from that fact that, with a number of property names (including Captain Action, The Phantom and Buckaroo Banzai), Moonstone was appearing on Google page 1 of the search results! Having seen the Moonstone Books website, which is a decent PDShop e-commerce site set up in the most basic and non-SEO/web friendly manner (I’ll get to that done below), I knew there was almost no way the site should be ranking well. It suffers from almost all of the same problems that IDW Publishing’s Dungeons & Dragons comics product page suffered from AND a few more!

So, seeing those properties pop up, knowing in the back of my head that the site’s product page were dynamically generated ASPX pages using product ID numbers instead of SEO friend HTML pages or names, completely baffled me.

Baffled me, that is, until I finally clicked on one of the links that were appearing in the Google Search engine results. Where I had expected to find the current Moonstone Books product page for, say, Buckaroo Banzai, I was instead finding an outdated page from a previous incarnation of the website. You can check out that earlier version of the Buckaroo Banzai product page yourself to see

It turns out all of the high ranking Moonstone Books pages in Google were from an earlier version of the website — pages that were fairly “jacked up” because of missing images, bad links and the like, but which featured an OK amount of content AND had more SEO friendly URLs.

If this had been a single occurrence, I would have dismissed it, but it happened with a bunch of their properties. As an Internet marketer, it absolutely baffled me to think Moonstone Books had tossed away a bunch of first page Google rankings on major keywords like this. I mean, when it comes to licensed properties like they base their business on (along with IDW Publishing, Boom and the other terribly performing licensed comic book publishers), ranking well on the name of your licensed properties should be one of the top priorities. The majority of fans interested in your properties will be searching for new merchandise to spend their money on by typing its name into Google and clicking on what appears there.

Not showing up in those results like IDW Publishing, Boom Studios and Ape Entertainment (for example) is terrible marketing strategy (something that would get marketing people fired in other industries), but having possessed a top ranked result and throwing it away is gross mismanagement. This is equivalent to being given a prime time TV commercial and having the wrong 800 number listed on the screen. You’ve got people’s attention but aren’t giving them a place to buy your product.

What I’m assuming happened with Moonstone Books is this: they were sold on using an e-commerce back-end for their site — in their case, the PDShop Shopping cart. To be honest, this can be a great move for an e-commerce company. Any sort of back-end software, be it PDShop, OSCOmmerce, Drupal, Joomla, ZenCart or even WordPress, is going to give you a lot more power and capability with your site. You’re no long stuck in the 90s with hand-coding a website. I recommend it to anyone who wants to run an e-commerce website.

The problem is, they either set it up themselves or had it set-up by someone with no real knowledge of how the Internet or Search Engines work. They’re using as close to a “base installation” as you can and it is doing them more harm than good. What’s even worse is that they’ve failed to see their former search engine rankings and have thrown away their page 1 results. This again, comes back to the lack of Internet marketing knowledge so often found in comic book publishers. For some reason, their marketing/sales person (or owner, or whoever is in charge of the website) didn’t take that first step of Googling their product before and after the website change over.

If they had, Moonstone could have done a number of things to protect that listing. The best idea would have been to keep the old pages active and updated, and make sure they link over to either the new product pages or, even better, have a “buy now” button of some kind that links directly to the shopping cart. The reason I call that an “even better” option is because it limits the number of clicks between a customer viewing the site and being able to purchase a book. The more clicks you have, the more customers you’re going to lose.

At the very least, they could have set up a 301 redirect of the old page to the new one. This works out OK in the short run because it gets your potential customers to the new product pages, but kills you in the long run by getting rid of the content that ranked so well. Still, doing something is better than doing nothing at all!

My advice for Moonstone Books, and anyone using an e-commerce back-end of any sort, is to move beyond the basic installation. Alias your URLs to be something a bit more SEO/Internet friendly — use keywords in your URLs instead of those terrible, dynamic system-generated IDs. From there, take a look at my article on what was wrong with IDW Publishing’s Dungeons & Dragons Comics product page because your pages have all of the same problems theirs do. Generate more SEO’d content. And, finally, for the love of GOD, make use of those old pages that are already ranking so well in Google. Don’t continue to leave money on the table because of ignorance or laziness!

Again, if you’re working with an e-commerce shopping cart or back-end, keep all of this stuff in mind because it can and will help you in your search engine rankings.

CHAPTER 15: The 3 Steps to Getting Retailers to BUY Your Comic Book

A lot of crap is laid at the feet of comic book retailers by publishers and creators. If you have spent any time at all talking to comic book makers, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. Complaints about retailers not “taking a chance” on indie comics or not ordering enough copies of an issue or not supporting a series…I could go on and on with the list of complaints.

The annoying thing for me is that absolutely none of these things are the “fault” of retailers. A retailer is going to pick up a new title (from a big publisher or a little one) for one of two reasons.

Reason the First: The retailer has an emotional reaction to your book or to its creators. In other words, the retailer happens to like it. In this case, whether or not there is an active interest in the book, a retailer is going to hand sell the title and do whatever they can to “share the love.” This is fantastic when it happens. Unfortunately, these sorts of sales are few and far between, and it will never be a universal thing. It’s tough to get one person to fall “in love” with you, it’s impossible to have everyone do it.

Reason the Second: The more common reason a retailer orders a comic is because they think there will be a demand for the book and they’re going to make some money from it. This is what business is all about. If you’ve got a product that fills a need in the market, or one that is receiving a ton of media attention, then a retailer is going to take a risk on your book.

Notice the word I use there: risk. When a retailer pre-orders your comic, that is exactly what they are doing - risking capital on your product that might otherwise be spent elsewhere. Retailers do not have unlimited resources and you are very much in a contest to convince them to spend a portion of their cash on you.

So, what can a comic book publisher (and this goes for a publisher of any size, from the smallest of one-man indie operations up to the bigger companies who tend to forget they are as vulnerable to the process as anyone else — Boom! Studios and IDW Publishing, I’m talking to you!) do to have a better chance at getting retailers to order their product?

Well, I’m glad you asked, because that is exactly what I am going to talk about today!

Before I get to my list of tips, I’m going to assume you have done your due diligence in terms of product development. I won’t go over what needs to be done specifically because I’ve gone over it in other articles. However, I will give you a quick list of the chapters in this book to make sure you’ve got everything in place BEFORE you approach a comic book retailer to spend money on your new comic book series.

Make sure your product fills a need in the marketing:

What is your Niche Market

Do Market Research/Analysis:

Market Analysis – Why aren’t you doing it?

The 4 simplified steps of Market Research

Put together a Marketing Plan:

The 4 Parts of a Comic Book Marketing Plan

Make sure to support your product online and on your website:

How to Launch a Comic book Series, Introduction

Building a Foundation for a Successful Comic Book Product Launch – Part 1

Connecting with your audience – Part 2

OK…have you done all of that stuff to make sure you have a product that is pro-quality, fills a need in the market, understand who you are selling to, have a plan for selling the product AND have support in place for the product? Good. Now we get on to the work of convincing your retail partners to order your comic book series.

The 3 Steps to Getting Retailers to BUY Your Comic Book

1. Give Retailers a Reason WHY they should buy your product.

Do you have a well-known writer or artist on the comic? Is your comic based on a popular cartoon license? This is where you let your comic book retailer partners know what sets you apart from the crowd of five-thousand other products clamoring for their attention and, more importantly, their buying dollars.

2. Show retailers WHO is going to be buying your product.

You want a retailer to absolutely love you? Give them your research sales demographic on your target audience. Let them know specifically who you are aiming the comic book at, along with as much information as you can on how to sell to that group.

Remember, retailers have a lot of product to sell - and a lot of product that sells well for them already. Make it as easy as possible for them to sell your books and you’ll find them much more willing to support you.

3. Give retailers a plan on HOW you are going to give them sales.

This is the dreaded marketing/sales plan that most comic book publishers and creators hate to think about. This is also one of the most neglected pieces in the comic book industry itself. What you want to do is put together a very specific plan and schedule of what you are going to be doing to get the word out on your comic and how you’ll be driving sales to your retail partners.

This is going to be similar to, and use pieces from, the marketing/business plan you developed earlier in the game. It will include your product launch strategy as it relates specifically to retailers. It will give them specific dates on when to expect promotion efforts and include any additional tools you’ll be supplying them with.

Putting together a marketing/sales/promotion plan and giving it to retailers as part of your product pitch is absolutely essential. Not on does it help you make sure you’re on track to marketing/selling your product to its potential audience, but it will give retailers more confidence in spending money on a product they know is going to be getting support from its publisher.

I mean, there’s nothing worse than shelling out money for 500 variant covers only to find out the publisher isn’t helping you to sell that product, or even mentioning it on their website! Gah…I promised myself I wouldn’t bring up the travesty that is the Godzilla #1 promotion - I plan to go over that and a couple of other recent misguided and poorly implemented marketing/sales plans in another article. For now, IDW Publishing just gets a “tsk, tsk” in their general direction.

All three of these items go back to a single purpose: making sure your retailers have enough “bullets” in their “gun” to sell your product. If they make money you make money, and that makes everyone happy.

The retailers are the front-line of the comic book industry and the portion most vulnerable to falling a victim to its whims. Comic book publishers and creators need to do a better job in working with comic retailers to make sure no one is losing money from poor product choices.

Respect your comic retail partners.

Give them properly developed and researched product.

Give them a well thought out marketing plan of attack.

Make sure they have all of the tools they need to help sell your book and make sure that it continues to sell well for everyone.

The most important, and painful thing to remember is this: if your comic book doesn’t sell enough copies, it isn’t the fault of comic book fans or retailers. It is YOUR fault and, more than likely, you haven’t done YOUR job properly.

CHAPTER 16: 5 Steps to Going Viral

In the over-saturated market of today, having a marketing campaign (or product) “go viral” can mean the difference between success and obscurity for a comic book (series, publisher, creator). But what exactly does “going viral” mean and how does one go about accomplishing it.

Well, a “viral” campaign is really just a successful “word of mouth” or grassroots campaign. However, in a world where buzzwords and coined terms rule, compounded with the speed of the Internet, the phrase “going viral” was pulled from the mid-90s when computer viruses became known and could reach across the country in a matter of days.

Nowadays, a “viral campaign” is almost exclusively considered to be one that has taken off on the Internet, in spite of where it may have originally started (TV, for example).

So, how does a publisher go about setting up a viral marketing campaign? That’s the hard part. You see, no one can really predict what will catch the public’s fancy and take off like a rocket - there are no hard and fast rules to guarantee a campaign will take off.

Luckily, though, there are a few things you can keep in mind to help with your chances of success and I, the Super Genius, am going to give them to you in this chapter!

5 Tips to Going Viral

1. Make a Statement and Cause a Strong Reactions

The single most important tip I can give you is to make a definite statement or to give your audience a strong reaction to what you’re doing. You need to jump in with commitment and absolutely cannot be wishy washy about it.

If you can get an “OoOOOH!” or genuine laugh out loud, then you’re on the right track. If you say something that a lot of people agree or disagree with, and have that unrelenting conviction, then you’ve got potential.

Love / Hate

Happiness / Anger

Coziness / Repulsion

Get your audience’s blood pumping, one way or the other. Negative response can be just as effective as positive. Don’t worry about trying to please everyone with your statement and forget neutrality. This bores people - “going viral” is all about emotion.

A recent example of someone that was on the right track but wound up turning into a coward is Eric Powell. His creator-owned video had potential to be huge. It’s too bad he didn’t stand behind his convictions and let it take off. There is nothing worse in marketing than someone who won’t stand behind his or her statement

2. Don’t Sell in Your Campaign – Forget Your Product & Tell a Story

One of the things most companies don’t seem to understand is that people don’t like being sold to. While standard (or traditional) marketing campaigns are about selling your product or service, a viral campaign is about entertaining your audience.

So, entertain them. The best viral campaigns tell a story. And don’t be afraid to make follow-ups or sequels to that story.

3. Surprise Your Audience

To become viral, your campaign needs to do something different and unexpected. Your audience has “seen it all” and you need to do something to cut through the clutter of content that is competing for their attention and, more importantly, their support.

The best stories show us the situation - the status quo - and then turn that on its head by the end. The best viral campaigns follow this format.

4. Make it Easy to Share

The worst thing a comic book marketing campaign can do is requiring registration for viewing or limit sharing or downloading. For you to go viral, your campaign needs to be easy to view, free to share and available to download or embed. Make it as easy as possible for your audience to spread the word by:

Allowing the content to be downloaded (MP3, MPG, JPG, etc)

Allowing the content to be embedded on your audience’s own sites

Allowing it to be easily shared EVERYWHERE – Twitter, Facebook, Digg, YouTube. Everywhere.

Never, EVER, require registration of any kind for viewing.

Don’t do anything to limit or stop your word from being spread.

5. Encourage Comments and Community Building

You not only have to connect with your audience, but you have to give them the feeling that your viral campaign is “theirs.” If you don’t connect with that audience, then your campaign is dead in the water. Leave comments open, even if you’re getting negative ones. Comments and audience feedback, good or bad, are just one part of a successful viral campaign. Let people talk — hell, ENCOURAGE them to talk.

I can’t think of any instances of a comic book publisher “going viral” with a marketing campaign, but that may just be that comic publishers are terrible at marketing outside of their comfort zone. The closest thing that I’ve seen to someone trying is Boom Studios’ “Mark Waid is Evil” campaign. It was a nice attempt, but I don’t think there was enough thought behind or substance to it. It was good to see them at least trying something different.

With that being said, I think there is a lot of potential for comic publishers and creators to create viral campaigns. The biggest, most obvious one right now is the new Robert Kirkman - Rob Liefeld series “The Infinite.” The high concept behind the series is “a buddy movie with yourself” and if we don’t see some videos with a young Liefeld or Kirkman interacting with an old one, then those guys are no where near as smart as I thought they were. Huge potential there if done correctly.

CHAPTER 17: 4 Tips for Social Networking Your Way to More Sales

In the past I’ve talked a bit about social networking, posting on blogs, using forums and the like for your Comic Book Launch, if you are interested in seeing some of what I’ve said). Building and maintaining the Internet community for any product is a must - for a creative product like a comic book series (or a film), then it can mean the difference between success and obscurity.

While most comic publishers do play around with some social networking, none of them are using the Internet to its fullest potential. My recent discussion of Boom Studio’s Hellraiser Prelude and Product launch goes in to more detail about some of the missed opportunities by publishers due to a lack of knowledge (or experience) in Internet marketing techniques.

The key to social networking in general is to build a relationship with your fans/customers/audience. Keeping that in mind will allow you to grow. If all you do is focus on “hard” selling your product (say, by blitzing Twitter with propaganda on the day a new comic releases), then you’re missing out on its true potential. You want to grow and nurture the social networking relationships because of three very important things those relationships can give you: higher sales conversions, a higher percentage of return customers and easier access for new customers.

That’s right – more sales within your current market, more of those customers coming back AND more new customers willing to take a chance on a new (or even unseen) product.

What I’m going to give you today is 4 techniques to build up some of those online relationships and, in return, make more sales.

4 Tips for Social Networking Your Way to More Sales

Before I get to the tips, I do want to comment on a couple of things I’m not talking about in this post: Twitter/Facebook and Company message boards. My article is assuming you are already active with both of those things. They are essential to any company (or creator) doing business online. I will be talking about techniques for maximizing your uses of those social networks (and a couple of others) down the road. However, for this post, I’m focusing on some of the less utilized techniques you can use to help increase your sales conversions.

OK, on to the list!

1. User Generated Content & Reviews

Amazon is an absolute master of this, having realized it about 6 years ago and then spending tens of millions of dollars to achieve. One of the most tedious (and often expensive) components of succeeding online is content product. Your website needs a constant influx of new content to continue to rank well with search engines, as well as to capture every longtail term your potential customers are using to shop. There is no better method of generating copious amounts of content than by having your own customers/fans do it for you.

This is one of the main factors behind why a properly maintained forum/message board/community is essential to online success. Not only does it allow you to monitor and “herd” those interested in your products all in one spot (giving you great insight and even some “focus group” like testing ability), but it also gives you a whole lot of content, written by those very people you are trying to target.

Taking that community one step further, one often-overlooked form of user generator content is the consumer review. For some reason, a lot of companies are scared of consumer reviews, especially on their own sites…generally from fear of negative reviews. To those people I say, “You are wusses.”

In the modern world of Internet shopping, there is nothing more powerful than a consumer review. Potential customers will be more easily convinced by reviews from other buyers who have already purchased a product than by almost any thing you can do as a company. Period. Consumers are just regular people and nothing stimulates a person more than the sort of confirmation reading another consumer’s review of a product they may be “on the fence” about.

In fact, over 3/4 of all online shoppers read customer reviews before making a purchase. I know I read reviews of almost everything I buy on Amazon and take them to heart on any item I haven’t physically held in my hand. For me, like most Internet shoppers, reading customer reviews is what gives me the confidence to finally pull the trigger and make a purchase.

Be you publisher, creator or retailer, get a system in place where customers can leave reviews about your product. Make those reviews easy to leave, easy to find and easy to share with others.

What about negative reviews you ask? Well, make sure the reviews require an administrator’s approval. That way you can weed out any Internet “trolls” looking for a reaction. We all get those people and it is one of the costs of being online…live with it. Beyond that, if a product is getting consistently bad reviews from the people you are attempting to sell to, then it is probably an indication you have a problem on your hand. Don’t think of negative feedback as a problem with your customers, think of it as a way to improve your product and your service.

Finally, and this comes from a ton of experience, a few negative reviews help to give your site a bit more believability and a great feeling of trust for your customers. People like a little bit of sour to make the sweet more acceptable.

2. The Interactive FAQ

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) pages have been around for as long as I’ve been online (going back to the mid-80s message boards and forums I spent way too much time on in High School). We’re all familiar with them and we all have them on our websites. The tendency is to toss them up and forget them. For a business operating in the 21st century (which may leave out most comic book publishers, unfortunately!), you need to take this one or two steps further and make your FAQ interactive.

Allow visitors on your website to leave new questions and address problems or quandaries they may have about your site, your product or your services. Then, answer those questions! Not only will this give you a nice stream of new, user-generated content filled with the keywords real people are using to search for and find product, but it builds a connection with your past, present and potential customers. They know they are talking to a real person and not just a company looking for their cash.

As I’ve rambled on about fairly incessantly, building that rapport with your customers is one of the main keys to doing business online. It will set you apart from the ten million other websites online and give you a fighting chance at keeping the attention of your target audience.

There are a few ways to build an interactive FAQ system, but the easiest to manage is the message board thread. Put up a FAQ folder on your site’s message board (which we assume you already have because you’d be an idiot not to) and leave it open for questions and answers. Make sure to “sticky” any and all important posts and you’re a go.

For those who are a bit more ambitious, or who want to go that extra mile, you can set up a video response FAQ. This work amazingly well for the Old Spice people and resulted in a dramatic upswing in sales and product awareness for that company. The reason being? People love video. It gives them a sense of intimacy and connection with a company/product/person that no other form of communication can produce. Have your visitors send in questions (even video posts of their own!) and answer them, by name/username, as often as possible.

3. Blog Properly

There is nothing that annoys me on a website more than a misused blog (well, perhaps a company blog being hosted on Blogspot…but that’s a story for another day!). A blog that just runs short blurbs, product solicitations or Twitter feeds is a complete waste of time, effort and space. Yes, a blog can be about giving out official company info or “selling” the company line, but it absolutely must be done in a more personal matter. A blog’s job, first and fore most, is to build a personal connection with your audience. Your blog is where a visitor (or customer or fan or whatever) gains an insight about the personal side of your business. For all intents and purposes it is YOU talking to THEM as a person.

If done properly, a blog will also give you reams of content that can, at the same time, be SEO’d out the “wahzoo” and targeting your market with scalpel-like precision.

Oh, and for the love of God, make sure to allow comments on your blog postings. Yes, they can be moderated, but your readers need to feel like they are a part of the conversation. Otherwise, you’re missing the POINT and the POWER of a blog.

4. Know Your Customers and Email Them Appropriately

You might not immediately think of “email marketing” as part of “social networking,” but it is one of the most powerful forms. Really, Twitter and Facebook are both just third party maintained email lists that you’re accessing. Tweets, status updates and even Facebook pages are just new format “email blasts” when done correctly, and everything I talk about below can be (and should) be kept in mind when using any of the large Social Networks.

Keep your email list up to date and notated. Personalize offerings to that list as much as possible - include birthday offers, new product offers based on personal knowledge of your customers (be it from previous purchases or from things those customers have talked about online), anniversary offers (from time of first purchase) and so on can be great ways to gain additional sales from past or present customers. The more personalized the offers, the higher your sales conversion rate will be.

There are a lot of email software options for monitoring and building sales for your customers, many of them will work with whatever ordering system you are already using and almost all of them have automated features. Take advantage of the email list you’re building, even if it is just from your Internet customers (although, you really should already be capturing as many customer names/emails as you possibly can). Remember, it is cheaper to sell to a past/present customer than it is to gain a new one.

Know your audience and your customers, because that knowledge is worth its weight in sales. I call this type of marketing my “Hey, Buddy” sales and find they give me the highest conversion rate of any technique by far.

CHAPTER 18: 4 Ways to Use Your Email List to Increase Your Comic Book Sales

I really hate to admit this. In spite of getting my master’s degree in marketing, in spite of running numerous successful affiliate marketing websites, in spite of having run nearly 100 product launches and developing Internet marketing campaigns for tons of companies, I still fall victim to a number of really bad habits.

One of the worst of my habits is how I often times (far too often) neglect my email lists and e-newsletter mailings.

What’s even worse is that I am intimately aware of how valuable a commodity an email list (especially targeted ones like I put together) are to a company. In fact, a well-managed email list can be one of the most valuable sales and marketing tools in a company’s arsenal.

“How can that be?” you ask.

The reason an email list is so important comes down to a single fact: it is far easier and cheaper to sell to a current customer than it is to sell to a new one. That is one of the truest and most important facts for a business owner — be he a comic book publisher or multi-billion dollar Internet corporation.

Online or offline, your customer list or your email list, is worth its weight in gold when it comes to developing long-term sales. You see, that list has already been presold on your ideas or products AND has had enough faith and interest to give you their personal information to be used to sell even more!

A business owner can wish for nothing better than a customer who is willing and ready to spend money.

With all that being said, like many of you, I still find myself a bit delinquent when it comes to cultivating, maintaining and utilizing my email lists. There’s something about sitting down to draft yet another e-newsletter that just sucks the energy out of me.

Unfortunately, unless you keep an email list healthy by staying active (and regular) with it, it will die very quickly. One of the ways I keep my email lists healthy in between newsletters is with a set of automated responses that go out to all previous customers. There are a number of email/newsletter programs out there that can automate this process for you.

What I give you now is my:

4 Ways to Use Your Email List to Increase Your Comic Book Sales

1. Be consistent!

E-mail blasts need to be a regular and reoccurring thing. If you are a publisher who only produces newsletters “now and then” or “whenever I feel like it,” allowing months or quarters to pass between emailings, then you are guaranteed a very poor response from your list. In fact, infrequent emailings are considered more annoying than regularly scheduled, expected ones.

The trust and confidence a member of your email list has shown you by signing up for your newsletter needs to be given back to them with consistency and reliability.

2. Make them feel Special!

The key to a good relationship with your email list is to make its members feel like they are getting something not available anywhere else. One way to do this is by providing sneak peaks or exclusive content to your recipients. Give them hints and previews that can’t be found elsewhere. Use this as added value for your list and you’ll see it thrive and return high sales conversions.

3. An Extra Special Episode of “Family Ties”

With your email blasts on a regular schedule (bi-weekly, monthly, etc), you can still throw in special event emailings to garnering additional excitement. Launching a new comic book? Send out a special event, solo mailing featuring the new title, its release date and even its Diamond order codes or discounts for e-newsletter subscribers.

These solo mailings, when paired with the reliability of your normal email blasts, can be amazingly effective and attention generating.

4. You may already be a winner!

In addition to special event mailings, the use of contests in your regular mailings (or even special promotions) can be excellent ways to generate a connection with your readers, generate short-term sales and even be used as a technique for gaining additional information on your subscribers.

What do I mean by “additional information” and how do you get it? Use contests or special promotions to offer something to your subscribers in exchange for them filling out a marketing or product survey. This is an absolutely spectacular way to gain market research on your current customers - research you can use to develop new comic book titles for future release. Companies of all shapes and sizes use this strategy to expand their sales.

“Be consistent.”

“Make them feel special.”

“Special events.”

Hmmm…almost sounds like I’m talking about how to keep your girlfriend happy! Well, to be honest, your email list is a relationship that needs to be nurtured and maintained, just like the one with your girlfriend. The only difference is, your email list can make money instead of spending it!

CHAPTER 19: Getting Your Work On TV, Google TV Ads That Is

One of the laments I constantly hear from comic book publishers and creators alike is, “If only comic books were advertised on TV things would be better.” Or, one of my favorites, “Marvel sold millions of GI Joe comics back in the 80s because of those really awesome TV commercials. I wish we could do that.”

Well, my young Padawan, now you can through the wonder that is Google TV Ads. In fact, for the first time ever, you can do it while sitting in front of your computer!

OK, so that last bit about “first time ever” is a bit of an exaggeration. You see, Google TV Ads have been around for a couple of years now, but have really only started to take off recently with the addition of Verizon, Dish Network and Direct TV to the available cable/satellite providers (with an estimated reach of approximately 95 million households). And, to be even more honest, prior to that a small business had (and still has) the option to purchase geographically targeted advertising space from local-area cable providers for some astonishingly low prices.

That being said, Google TV Ads is a fantastic service that is empowering businesses of all sizes to take advantage of television advertising, at low costs. Oh, and that bit about “while sitting in front of your computer” is icing on a pretty delicious cake.

So what exactly is “Google TV Ads” and how can comic book publishers use it to help their marketing, sales and branding efforts? In short, the Google TV Ads program is an extension of Google AdWords, Google’s pay-for-advertising arm. With it, you can upload a 30-second commercial and bid on air-time based on a number of factors including viewer demographics, channels, times, even specific programs. If you want your comic book commercial to run during an episode of “Batman: Brave & the Bold” at 8pm on Friday nights, for 6 straight weeks, you can get that set up with a few clicks.

The system is similar to that of AdWords, where an advertiser is bidding for placement. Bidding starts at 50 cents and is for blocks of a thousand viewers. What I mean there is, if you place a bid for 50 cents, you’re saying you’ll pay a maximum of 50 cents per 1000 viewers of a program. Your daily and campaign limits will set the total amount you’re willing to spend — set it for $150/day and your reach will max out at about 300,000 viewers that day.

It is a surprisingly simple and very effective manner of ad buying, and it gives advertisers an amazing level of control of their ad campaigns. Where, in the past, you’d have to buy ads for a block of time (a 2 week or 4 week period, for example) and then be locked in to paying for that time whether it was effective or not; now, you can monitor your campaigns in nearly real time, starting and stopping them based on performance. If a commercial isn’t generating the traffic you need (say to a website or an 800 number), then you can pause or stop it. If a spot turns out to be a goldmine for sales conversion, you have the ability to increase your ad buys right there without having to wait.

What all of this means to you, the modern comic book publisher, is that your product now has easy and relatively cheap access to television viewers and the increased brand awareness that comes with them. For as low as $50 you can have your 30-second comic book commercial shown to 100,000 people on your favorite cable network and even during your favorite program.

As with any marketing/advertising tool or outlet you use, there is going to be a bit of thought, planning and research needed to make running television commercials effective. Choosing where your ads run is going to be one of the most important pieces of research and analysis you need to do. Some things will be obvious. For example:

If you’re Boom Studios and have a failing zombie property like “28 Days Later.” Put together a commercial ad campaign to run during episodes of “The Walking Dead.”

Sticking with Boom Studios, running ads for things like “Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories” or “Uncle Scrooge” on the Disney Channel or Disney XD…or even running “Darkwing Duck” commercials during episodes of “S.W.A.T.Cats” might be an excellent choice.

IDW Publishing may decide having a commercial for the new “Doctor Who” comic running during the “Doctor Who Christmas Special” or new episodes of the show itself on BBC America is a no-brainer. That’s not even mentioning the glaringly obvious properties like GI Joe, Transformers (also from IDW) or Penguins of Madagascar (from APE Entertainment). If you have an active program based on the work you’re publishing, then it is almost criminally neglectful to no exploit it.

For the licensed publishers, the connections are obvious and will probably have an ROI much higher than wasting thousands of dollars on something like full page Previews or Wizard Magazine ads. Why limit your exposure to the 30,000 or so people who read those when you can have millions of eyes on your work for similar or even lower cost?

For a non-licensed publisher putting out creator-owned work, the due-diligence is going to require a bit more work. Without an obvious choice, you’ll need to make sure you are able to match your work’s readership with a show, network or timeslot’s demographic. A mismatch can very easily result in a wasted ad campaign and, even worse, wasted money. If you’re going to start playing around with paid advertising campaigns of any time (TV commercials, AdWords, banner ads, etc), then make sure not to rush in to things and give yourself time to do your research beforehand. Taking that extra time is going to save you money and give you much better ROI from your advertising efforts.

Now, in spite of Google TV Ads being a potentially great resource and tool for expanding your comic book markets and brand, there are still some downsides to think about. As with any tool or technique, or even with comic creation itself, you can’t just toss an ad together without much thought and hope for the best. There is work to this.

4 Warnings about running your Google TV Ads

1. You need to have an effective ad/commercial for your product. I hate to say this, but just being on TV isn’t going to grab people’s attention for your “awesome” new comic book. You need to put together an effective ad that tells enough about your product and makes the viewer want to take the time to find out more. Think about all of the commercials on TV right now. Now, think about how many of them you just tune out. Your ad is going to be fighting viewer ennui, so make it exciting, make it interesting and make it so amazing that people sitting at home, all comfortable on the couch, are motivated to get up and find out more about your product. If you can’t do that, then don’t waste your time or money on TV ads — or any other kind of marketing/PR/advertising — because no one will care.

2. As I’ve said over and over again, be familiar with your product and your target market. You need to know enough about what you’re selling, who will buy it and where they spend time watching television. You’re also going to need to be familiar with the viewer demographics of whatever network/show/time-slot your ads will be running on. If you don’t take those things in to consideration, your ads may wind up being shown to an audience with no possibility of interest. So, know about your product, know about your target customers and know about where your ads are going to be running.

3. One-shots may work in comics, but they are ineffective in marketing/advertising (unless we’re talking about a Super Bowl commercial where everyone in the world is interested in what is playing). Sure, you may be able to toss up a single commercial for a few bucks, but it won’t do much for you beyond a quick ego-boost. Be prepared for the need to run your commercial multiple times over a long time period to be most effective. Not only will this result in more chances at viewers turning in to buyers, but it also helps reinforce your branding with the world at large. That branding can be incredibly valuable in the lifetime of your product.

4. It can be difficult to recoup your expenses if you’re working with a single product. The companies who will find the best return on investment from Google TV Ads are those with larger product lines or multiple titles being addressed by the commercial. The reason for this is simple math: it’s easier to take, for example, a hit of $1000 in advertising if you can spread that cost over 10 comic titles. That way, the advertising cost is only $100 per title, which is manageable.

Before I wrap things up here, I’m going to go over a few things to keep in mind when putting together your new commercial for Google TV Ads…although, this is going to be similar thinking to what should be used for any advertising campaign.

4 Things to remember when creating your TV Ad

1. What is your target audience/who are you talking to? This is one of the most important pieces of information. Make sure you have a crystal clear picture of whom your target audience is. If you try to create a message for everyone, you’ll wind up being irrelevant.

2. Who are you/What is your product? Boil this down to its elevator pitch or high concept. Make sure you know what your product is — if you don’t, then I can guarantee your target audience won’t either. Make sure you are sending this message to your audience clearly.

3. How do you want your audience to feel about or respond to your brand/product? You know what your product is and what you want to say about it? Good. Now you need to figure out HOW to say it. How you want people to respond to your audience is almost as important as what your product is.

4. Don’t forget your call to action! Now that you have your target audience’s attention and they know who/what you are, what do you want them to do? Create your call to action in a way that is irresistible to your target audience. Make it clear and memorable.

That’s it from Super Genius HQ this today. Before I sign off, I want to include this link to a Seth Stevenson video over on SlateV.Com, which has him talking about his own experience playing around with Google TV Ads. Brian Crowley of the Hamster Rage Webcomic sent it to me and I’m passing it along to you: http://www.slatev.com/video/how-i-ran-ad-fox-news/. It’s good stuff and worth taking a look at.

UPDATE: Oh, I forgot to mention running co-op ads with retailers. If you’ve got a retailer you’re doing a variant cover with, or who is supporting your comic above-and-beyond, putting together a co-op TV ad with them is a great way to give that support back. Put together a commercial targeted at their area and geo-targeted at them. Don’t forget the brick-and-mortar retailers during all of your Internet-based work…they are the foundation of any good company!

CHAPTER 20: 5 Tips for Successful Comic Book Blogging

One of the questions I’m most often asked is “Do we need a Blog?” This is usually asked by the same people making uninformed statements like “We need to have Social Networking” for our site. Marketing people, who have heard the buzzwords, but have no idea what they mean or how to deal with them. To be fair to comic book marketing people, I’m asked that a lot by business executives outside of the comic industry. In other words, comic book marketing guys, you aren’t the only ignorant ones out there.

My general response to people asking the really stupid questions (and, yes, in spite of what you’ve heard, there are stupid questions) is this: A blog is a fantastic weapon to have in your company’s Internet Marketing arsenal. It is an easy way to add more content to your website — that content can be used for everything from generating traffic to informing current customers about news or the latest information on your products.

Every site can benefit from having a properly maintained and updated blog. However, the thing to remember is this: If you have the manpower and/or time to keep a blog updated, then 100% do it. If you don’t, then it can be a waste of time, resources and manpower.

If you do decide to run a properly managed blog, then here are some very important tips to keep things running smoothly. I call them:

The 5 Tips for Successful Comic Book Blogging

1. Dedicating and Consistency: For a blog to be most effective in terms of aiding in your search engine rankings, it needs to be fed a constant and consistent stream of new content. What I mean by that is: you need to post regularly to your blog, multiple times per week and at about the same time each day. This needs to be done for a couple of essential reasons:

It shows readers that your blog is a regular source of new content (information) and should be returned to often.

In the same vein, regularly updated content will help “train” search engines spiders to regularly return to your site for indexing. This will help get your web pages into search engine indexes more quickly and can also help your site obtain better search engine rankings.

There is nothing that turns a visitor (or the search engines) off more than stale content. Keep things new and fresh. Obviously, the more times you post per day, the better. However, I’ve found that consistently posting once per business day is an acceptable minimum amount of new content to keep search engines and visitors happy.

2. Keep Keywords in Mind: Every piece of content you produce should be written with keywords and phrases in the front of your mind. Once you’ve figured out what your main topic is going to be, do a quick bit of research and put together a list of your target keywords. These are going to be the main concepts you are trying to generate traffic for and those keywords need to appear at least 1-2 times per paragraph. Try not to focus on more than 2-3 keyword phrases per article.

Remain focused on your keywords and you’ll see your traffic grow exponentially.

3. Size Really Does Matter: Don’t believe what the ladies have been telling you for years, fellas, longer is better. At least when it comes to your blog content. Quick, short messages are best left to the Social Networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. You need to keep your Blog content meaningful and substantial if you want to generate return visitors or RSS subscribers. Light and fluffy is OK from time to time, but you want to keep your Blog posts substantial and filled with juicy meat in order to keep your readers happy.

There’s no real “magic number” when it comes to how long your articles should be. It really depends on readership, your topic and your writing style. From my experience, I have found that articles running at least 1000 words in length are long enough, and contain enough instances of keywords, to keep both search engines and readers happy. For longer posts, consider breaking them up in to multiple pages or posts to benefit from the additional content.

4. Personality Counts, don’t forget your “Hook”: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my 5+ years of creating blogs as an affiliate marketer is how to engage my readers, get them excited about my site, connect with them on a level beyond what 99.9% of all blogs do and then convince them to make a purchase.

The way I’ve done this is by ignoring standard, journalistic writing practices and write like a real person. On all of my blogs, even going back to my original Treadmill Sensei site, I have developed a character that is speaking to my audience - most of the time that character is an enhanced version of myself. What I found is that a site written by a “person” instead of just a disembodied blog writer allows you to connect to readers on levels far beyond what you’d imagine. Developing that personal connection is going to result in more return visitors and more sale conversions.

My technique is to spend them first 2-3 paragraphs of any posting (keeping in mind my posts run a minimum of 1000 words and averaged 1500+ per post) using that personality to talk about normal person things - family, holidays, vacations, etc. Sometimes that discussion would be specifically related to the keywords or topic of the article and sometimes it wouldn’t. Usually I’d tie the theme of what my personal section was about to the theme or keyword selection of the rest of the article.

Developing a personality hook is one of the biggest needs for the current blog writers. The blogs now read like a technical manual or textbook entry. That sort of writing is going to turn off more potential visitors than anything else.

5. Host Yourself: If you’re running a blog for your business, or any sort of blog you want to develop into a business, then you need to make sure to have it hosted on a server you pay for and not on a place like BlogSpot or WordPress.com. If you have it “free hosted,” then you’re losing control of the site and the traffic you generate. In other words, you’re giving the results of your hard blogging work to someone else. Chris Ryall and Denton Tipton from IDW Publishing, I’m talking to you guys. Never ever host a blog on a domain owned and controlled by someone else, unless it is a hobby/fun/throwaway blog.

Remember, a properly developed blog entry may be a customer’s first experience with your website and is a fantastic pre-sales tool. If the blog posts do their job correctly, a customer will convert much easier and faster to a sale.

CHAPTER 21: The Failure of Licensed Comic Book Publishers Redux

One of my most popular posts here on MatNastos.net, and one that got a few comic book publishers annoyed with me, was my original The Failure of Licensed Comic Publishers article (ok, so it’s a “Chapter” here in this book, but it was originally an article!). It went in to some detail on how absolutely horrible various comic book publishers were at marketing their licensed products online.

The funniest thing that came out of that article was one publisher’s rep demanding I reveal to them how I came by their Google rankings. That made me smile.

The reason this is such an outrage is because the Internet is the largest sales/marketing channel that currently exists AND because the whole purpose of paying lots of money for the rights to a licensed property is to take advantage of that property’s built in audience. When you fail to market to that audience, then you are just throwing money away. It’s also the sign of really lazy (or really crappy) marketing teams, I’ll let you, my loyal readers, decide which it is.

What I thought I’d do today, nearly 4 months after that initial article, was go back and take a look to see if there has been any improvement on any of the licensed publisher’s websites. For sake of consistency, I checked out the same terms and publishers (IDW Publishing, Boom Studios and Ape Entertainment) that I had researched before.

Let’s see what I found out.

IDW Publishing: IDW has become one of my favorite whipping boys recently because of their size (the only new premiere publisher at Diamond since the system was created and the #4 publisher in the industry - or #5, depending on when you check/who you ask). They put out tons of comics every week and have a business very much reliant on licensed comic book properties. One would think that reliance would cause them to be more sensitive to the need of properly marketing those properties. In this case, one would be wrong.

As before, the properties and search terms True Blood, Transformers, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters (also checked “Ghostbuster Comic”), GI Joe, Dungeons & Dragons/D&D all fail to rank in the top 6 pages of Google search results. I have no clue if they’ve had any moved down in the abyss beyond page six, but no one is searching beyond page six.

With Star Trek, they still rank in the same “middle of page 53 position and have seen no movement at all. Same for 30 Days of Night with a poor ranking on page 2 for the comic/property they originated. Steve Niles, you need to raise some hell at IDW!

I went ahead and added a couple of additional search results, just to appease my own curiosity. These terms weren’t part of my initial, October 2010, research, so I can’t comment on whether they’ve made any progress on these them or not.

“True Blood Comic” has IDW showing up on page 4. With their current Internet lack of presence, I’m surprised they showed up with even this poor result.

“Transformers Comic” is interesting in that a link to the IDW comics on iTunes does show up, but that isn’t an IDW-controlled, maintained or updated site. With only 292,000 search results coming up for that term, it is a very weak situation for IDW not to be showing up at all for this term.

Overall, no improvement or movement for IDW. The only spot I could see any change at all in their website was on the “Dungeons & Dragons” product page I had discussed in the chapter, 7 Quick Tips for Creating Comic Book Content with SEO that Scores in Search Engines. Back in November, IDW still using default system page IDs, in this case the link was http://idwpublishing.com/catalog/series/1451. They have since renamed that page to http://www.idwpublishing.com/d&d. Since that change over, they now rank on page 1 for the terms “D&D Comic” and “Dungeons & Dragons Comic.”

Seeing the staff of IDW Publishing on my website multiple times each week, along with having gone down to San Diego to meet with their marketing and web leads a few months ago, makes me fairly certain they took at least that much of my advice. It’s good to see them no longer being out-ranked by pirate sites offering torrents of the old DC D&D comics. Good work, guys…now,if you could just get the rest of your marketing efforts in line!!

Boom Stuios: Boom is a smaller publisher, but one who puts out a lot of quality books. The base for their business seems to be split between licensed comics and in Mark Waid written material. Either of which is fine by me.

Last time, I search for Farscape, Muppets/Muppet Show, Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Disney Cars/Pixar Cars, Incredibles/Disney Incredibles/Pixar Incredibles, Toy Story, Mickey Mouse, Finding Nemo and 28 days Later. This time around, they are all still completely absent from Google search results.

Darkwing Duck is still on page 5.

The only improvement I actually saw was for “Walt Disney Comics.” Before, Boom ranked at the bottom of page two and had a link going to a blog posting about the comic. Now, however, they rank in the middle of Page 2 and it goes to a store/catalog listing. Yay!

Ape Entertainment: I want to be upfront here and say that I’ve been a fan of Ape Entertainment, and its publisher Brent Erwin, for 10 years or so. We’ve exchanged a lot of emails since that time and I consider myself on friendly terms with him. With that being said, their Google results make me very sad and, if I were Brent’s parent, I would ground him until he fixed things.

Black Dynamite, Shrek, Penguins of Madagascar, Megamind, Richie Rich and Strawberry Shortcake all are nowhere to be found on Google.

On the brightside, though, they do now rank on Page 3 for “Shrek Comic,” which would be good except for the fact that Dark Horse’s 2003 Shrek series ranks higher on page 3. But, to be fair, that’s a 2-page jump in 4 months. Not good, but not bad! Brent, you get a cookie!

Just for fun, I went ahead and checked on newcomers, Viper Comics, and their licensed books, Inspector Gadget and Johnny Test. Neither one ranked in the first 6 pages of Google, but that wasn’t a big surprise. I don’t think Viper has even launched those books yet, so I’ll give them a bit of leeway. Although, I will say that with a summer launch, now is the time to begin to get your Internet presence established — BEFORE the books are available for pre-order.

Overall, there has been very little to no improvement by any of the licensed publishers in terms of their Internet marketing efforts. For having some of the most popular properties and characters around, none of these companies are doing very well in trying to actively market their comics outside of the direct market. They are continuing to completely waste their money on licenses and are failing to support that product for their retailers.

About the Author:

Mat Nastos writes, draws and publishes comic books, writes and directs for film and television, and fiddles around on the Internet. What does it all mean? That he’s never had a real job in his entire life. He’s much too delicate for that sort of thing.

Connect with Mat Nastos Online:

Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/niftymat>

Facebook: <http://www.facebook.com/matnastos>

On the Web: <http://www.matnastos.net/>

Smashwords: <http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/matnastos>

Amazon: <http://www.amazon.com/Mat-Nastos/e/B005FNCMAI/>