Money For Your Comics

Filed Under DIY (Do It Yourself), Business, Comics

Notice I said money FOR your comic. Everyone in webcomics wants to make money with their comics. This is putting the cart before the horse though. I'll describe a process to make money FOR your comic, which you can use to promote it. Hopefully, this leads to making money WITH your comic.

What is most important to your comic, is regular readership and traffic. Readers come from website traffic, or "hits". The big names in comics, get many thousands of hits per day. The catch-22 is, getting those many thousands of readers takes time and money.

Let's take a worst case scenario. Your comic is one month old, and getting 10 visitors a day is about all your "Pimping" efforts can accomplish. Maybe you need an ego boost when you look at your stats. I know I do. That being said, you've considered purchasing advertising space on one of those bigger sites for $10.

The reason spending $10 is kind of painful: You're new, so there is no archive of completed comics, nothing to sell, nothing for people to talk about. At this early stage, any out of pocket expense for advertising, could not possibly return anything back to you. Even if you spent $100.

There is an easy (although boring) way to make money FOR your comic, which will take away that painful buyers remorse. This article I'm writing isn't an advertisement, but I must quote a typical one.

"…Fill out online surveys and get paid.."

We've all get 100's of emails encouraging us to sign up for stuff. They call these "Offers". It entails a simple task, such as providing an email address, or taking an online survey.

The problems with these emails are, you get bullshit credits to redeem instead of real money, more spam email, and wading through your mailbox to find the good offers makes the whole process not worth it. Besides, clicking on surveys and shit is boring. Stick with me, because I can address all those concerns.

Treasure Trooper
What is really needed, is a place were all these money making offer things have been collected. This takes away having to search out paying offers, and keeps track of what you're going to get paid on.

Once you complete the offers, they drop off the list as complete, and real money (not credits or points) gets sent to you by PayPal or check automatically. You then put that money into small advertising campaigns for your comic.

As of this writing, I've made $34. I've purposely done the lower paying offers first, because they approve quickly. I wanted to write this article from experience. Also, I don't have to give up confidential information, and I verify the system does in fact work.

I do 3-4 offers a day, so I don't spend all day filling out forms. With a $10 weekly advertising budget for my comic, this ratio works out nicely. I've thrown in the link to sign up lots of times. I make back all the money I've spent on advertising, do more offers, and keep the promotion machine for my comic costs me nothing.

Tricks of the Trade

Email: Sign up for the "iWon" email account first!!! I really can't stress that enough. There's 200 offers on the site, and iWon will be close to the top. You get fifty cents for it. I know, big deal, and you probably don't need another email account. But, by signing up for all these offers, the companies flood your email with junk. With this new email account, you can send all the junk there, instead of your primary email accounts.
Shell Game: To combat some of the boredom of clicking "NO" fifty times on a survey, Treasure Trooper has a little game used as an incentive. When you finish one of the offers, you play a shell game to find a pearls and coins. Collect enough, and trade them in for pieces of a treasure map. The point of this is to have special "Treasure Hunts" to win money, on top of what you've already made. It sounds stupid, but you've already been paid for the offer, so you've got nothing to loose collecting treasure. It also makes you part of the community feeling.
Forum: Honestly, this was what prompted me to not only join the site, but write this article and tell others about it. It's just like the comic community itself, and it goes a long way to building up your confidence to know that you're not alone, or being scammed.
Affiliates: Yeah, they have an affiliate program, and the link I've provided, is my affiliate link. However, the commission isn't going to make much difference. Unless you're one of those people who just love to go around gathering people to join. For me, affilates might make me a whole dollar. I don't care if you sign up or not. In comics, we're lucky though. Even $1 can buy you an advertisement for a week. See the results of my $1 ad campaign.

Caveats

Residence: It helps to be a resident of the USA due to legal reasons no-one cares about. There are some that can be done internationally, but it's beyond the scope of this article to point them out.
Credit Card: A card is not required. The offers where you can make serious money, like $15-150 will require you to verify with a credit card, and probably pay for whatever they're selling. You get paid back for it when you CANCEL the service before the trial date expires. (For example, you sign up for $10 internet service, and cancel it before the trial period runs out. It doesn't matter if you need the service or not. Sign up, they pay you $20 just for checking out the service).
Trial Offers: The quick money is offers for $1. They will approve within 1-48hrs. The big money offers may take days->weeks (until the trial period runs out). For this reason, I recommend not signing up for lots of these at once. You may forget about canceling and get charged, rather than paid.
Payout: Is every 15th of the month, and you must have made $10 before they issue a payment. So, plan your budget accordingly. They can pay by check or automatically through PayPal.

Conclusion
You'll find that not only are people making money, but they're actually happy about doing these offers! That was the thing that most surprised me. The typical reaction is to be aggravated by having your email account filled with these junk mails. But this community regularly posts their payout checks for all too see. That also blew me away, because most keep that a secret.

Remember, you're goal is to not make a mint. $50 a month is all you need to throw into advertising your comics to get the ball rolling. This is a golden opportunity to make money FOR your comic, at no cost other than time. If you haven't clicked here to sign up already, why did you read this far?

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