One of the glaring drawbacks to using Instagram for social-media outreach is the inability to post a hyperlink in a post. It makes generating any kind of valuable engagement on the site nearly impossible. For this reason, the one link you’re allowed in your profile has to do some heavy lifting. That’s why Linktree was developed. It uses one link to produce a table of links that the user could use to navigate to one of several options. But Linktree, itself, has some problems.

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Let’s face it. One of the biggest hurdles in growing a webcomic is reader retention. That’s why I want to encourage you to set aside time this month to develop (or improve) three different ways to introduce your comic to a newcomer. Here are some ideas:

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Today we’re going to talk about a sentence that every last one of us have uttered:

I really feel like if I could get more people to see the comic they would actually like it…

There’s not a webcartoonist alive who doesn’t feel that way. Heck, I would imagine it applies to any creative profession. It’s one of our very few Universal Sentiments.

But it’s a mindset that misses an important point, and until you understand it, I think it’s going to hold you back.

What I think you’re missing is this: You’re already getting new readers. Every day. The question you should be asking yourself is whether you’re keeping the new readers you do get. And if that answer is no, you have to take a long, hard, objective look at why that is. If you think your comic is good — and if you’re not keeping new readers — then maybe it’s not as good as you think it is.

Quality is #1

Think about it. Every day you’re getting new readers. If they like your comic, they’ll become regular readers. If they don’t like your comic, they won’t.

Let’s do a thought experiment.

Let’s say I gave you a magic wand. With one wave of the wand, you could get a million people to view your site on one given day. On that day — poof! — a million potential readers. If that comic’s not good enough, how many of them are going to stay? How many of them will come back tomorrow? Conventional Wisdom tells us that you’ll get a decent percentage — but for how long? If that next update isn’t very good, you’re going to lose some of those. And unless you’re able to Bring It — with frequency, consistency and significant — on a regular basis, you will have lost most (if not all) of those million in the span of a few months.

Now, what would you say if I told you that you already have that magic wand?

It’s called your Web site. And although it’s not going to deliver that million new readers on one single day, it will deliver them over the course of the next year or two. If you’ve been publishing for a while, it probably already has delivered that many. Maybe more.

Have you kept them? If not… is it the wand’s fault?

I can’t tell you if your comic is good or not… but your traffic will give you some clues. Look at your update days. A high ratio of new visitors coupled with a high bounce rate tells you that you brought new people in the door, and they didn’t find anything there to encourage them to read any further.

And you have to compare both stats. For example, if you have a high ratio of return visitors — coupled with a high bounce rate — that’s an indication that those readers aren’t diving into the archive because they’ve already read that content.

Everything after the quality of the comic itself is secondary. But the two top secondary concerns are Web-site retention and social media.

Web-site retention

Take a moment and look at your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor. Now ask yourself:

Does your Web site retain readers?

Does your site load quickly?

Are you encouraging financial support in the form of sales, Patreon, and so forth?

Do you promote archive storylines?

Do you make it easy to navigate into the archive?

Can new readers find archived material based on their own interests?

Can a new reader easily figure out the concept behind your comic in an About page?

Does your site make it clear that there’s more going on than just that one comic they see?

Does your site make it clear that there are other ways to enjoy your content — books, eBooks, etc.?

In other words, what are you doing to make sure your new readers will come back tomorrow — or at least stick around for a little while longer and become increasingly interested in what you’re doing.

Social media

Now more than ever, reading habits are changing on the Web. That makes social-media outreach on the Web super-important. Readers rely less on bookmarks and RSS feeds — and more on social-media alerts. It’s just something we can’t ignore. I offer tons and tons and tons of tutorials and advice on this site to help members do their social media outreach better.

But as important as it is to have a healthy social-media presence, it’s absolutely crucial to make it easy for people to use social media to tell their friends about your comic. That’s why I always advocate having “share” buttons under the comic. Having buttons on your site that lead to your social-media pages isn’t nearly as important as having buttons on your site that enable readers to share your work.

If you’re not doing this, I think you’re making a very big mistake.

The rest?

Message boards are becoming less and less important (from a promotions standpoint) and paid advertising…? You have to put an awful lot of time and energy into making this a worthwhile investment of time and energy. Otherwise, it’s a gamble. Now that we’ve passed the tipping point in the use of ad blockers, it’s a complete waste of time and energy.

No easy answers

And that’s just the problem. It’s not a question of installing one simple plug-in on your site. And it’s not a question of improving a single punchline or story beat. It’s doing all of that — plus social media, plus a whole lot more — and doing it tomorrow, too, and the day after that… It’s an ongoing struggle. Next chance you get, ask a creative pro who you think has “made it,” and ask him or her what they did to get to that point.

Nine-chances-out-of-ten, they’ll tell you that they’ll let you know as soon as they get there.

It’s one of the most-often-heard complaints in webcomics today: How do I get my comic seen in a market that’s oversaturated with comics?

You’re… not gonna like the answer.

The market isn’t oversaturated

It’s a false premise.

The webcomics market isn’t oversaturated. Are there more webcomics in 2020 than there were in 2001? Unquestionably. But on the other end of that equation, webcartoonists working in the early 2000s didn’t have social media. So although there were fewer competitors, it was incredibly difficult to direct people to one’s site. Moreover, the vast majority of the potential readers didn’t even understand the concept of reading a comic on the Web.

Enter social media and viral promotion. Now, exposing new readers to a comic is vastly more efficient (and effective) than it was in those early days. And, predictably, there are also exponentially more people publishing comics on the Web than ever before.

So, the market is oversaturated, right?

Wrong.

Because we’re forgetting to factor in the most important variable of all: Quality.

Do a good comic

It is undeniable that there are more comics, but — let’s face it — most of them are pretty horrible. In fact, I’d argue that the ratio of good comics to low-quality ones is about the same as it was in those early days before social media.

However, since the main conduit for consuming web content is social media, the system itself eliminates most of the low-quality content.

When a low-quality comic is published on social media, the outcome is fairly consistent: Nothing happens. The creator might get a couple of favorites — perhaps from other webcartoonists expecting a quid pro quo relationship. Very few people are going to share it or comment on it. Overall, the net effect is that the post’s engagement will be negligible. And posts with little-or-no engagement get filtered out rather quickly by social-media algorithms.

If a webcomic is posted on social media and nobody sees it, is it even there? I’m going to argue that it’s not. And since the vast majority of content consumption on the Web happens through social media, these low-quality comics are certainly not having a significant affect on the saturation of the webcomics market.

On the other hand, posting a good comic — along with making adequate use of social-media best practices — will get engagement. Even if you’re starting from an audience of zero, eventually someone is going to see your comic. And if it’s a high-quality comic — a comic that connects with its audience — they’re going to engage the post. And as that happens, more and more people will be exposed to your (good) work. And their engagement will help you to steadily build a larger and larger readership for your work.

Those other low-quality comics are a non-issue. In a social-media sense, they’re not even there. And if they’re not there, they can’t saturate the market.

In short, you’re going to be better served by spending less time worrying about the saturation of the webcomics market and more time improving your skills (and your understanding of social media). In the end the former is nothing more than a weak excuse for failing to do the latter.