Monday, July 18, 2005
OK, we are trying to build up traffic to our
Funny Cartoons by various means, and the latest thing we are about to attempt is banner ads.
We are not going to spend a fortune on this little venture though - we are going to hand pick sites that offer banner programs to web-comic or funny cartoon sites and dip our toe in the water. Some even offer free banner ad space!
We are currently thinking:
Blank Label and
webcomicslist's free one.
Which means I have to get busy and design a banner ad for funny cartoons... more when their done!
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Blogs are pretty trendy at the moment. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's adding a blog to their site. Well our site IS a blog, and always has been. Over a year ago we decided that a blog would act as a simple CMS (content management system) for a simple funny cartoon site.
We chose
Blogger because of it's simplicity, both to set up and to use. The downside of Blogger is a certain lack of control. When the Blogger team make changes to the software, they get rolled out and bam, that's it you're stuck with it. Or when Blogger goes down (rarely I admit), you don't have access to add/edit posts.
Wordpress is hosted on your own server, and we like the idea of changing over to wordpress, however I don't think it will happen anytime soon.
Why? Well, we now have not one but
three seperate blogs on BifSniff.com.
Why? You see, shortly after we started we realised that
search engines play an important part in building traffic to a small site like ours with no PR or marketting budget. And search engines rely mainly on text content to index sites. And there we were adding image after image and no text content to be seen for a mile. So we added a new blog for Bif's musings, to keep the cartoons and text seperate, but allow quick and easy addition of text content. Which turned out to be a great idea, because Bif keeps a good eye on what's going on in the funny cartoons and web comics space and posts about it regularly. It's a nice easy way for lazy old me to find out what's new.
Then we have my corner here (I'm the artist by the way, Bif the writer), where I talk mainly about what we do and why we do it and the technical implications!
With Wordpress I think it might be awkward to replicate the format we have here - we would probably have to set up three instances of Wordpress. If anyone has any suggestions please send them on... I wondered for example could we take advantage of the categories in Wordpress. Have different categories 'cartoon', 'musings' and 'frank's crap' or something. But I don't know how to control the display of categories. We would probably have to program some kind of hack... and that's not really our strong point!
Anyway, my point really was just that while all the
business magazines are finally getting around to writing about 'Blogging for Business' and all the rest of it, myself and Bif were ahead of the game driving up our traffic with a blog and all the benefits it entails.
As well as the handy functionality for adding the cartoons, Bif's musings help people find the site through search engines and also give an idea of the personality behind the site - and, if anyone was bothered, a place to discuss/argue with Bif through the comments.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Tidying Up and Tweaking
Well, we've been slowly but surely implementing changes on the site, in case you didn't notice. A lot of tidying up went on to reduce the clutter a little bit, but also a couple of attempts to improve our google rankings. Now, I have written a lot about optimising for 'funny cartoons' over at
9mmfilm.com, so you can read about a lot of the
initial efforts over there.
More recently it has been more tweaking than anything else. For a start, I wanted to make it easier to add content myself, so I set up my own blog. This means that
BifSniff.com now actually consists of three blogs. One for the cartoons themselves, one for Bif's musings and another for my more general and less frequent posts.
Shamelessly flogging Funny Cartoons
My own Blog is shamelessly called 'Funny Cartoons'. This is a blatant attempt to help boost our google rankings for Funny Cartoons, because all my posts titles will be prefaced by 'Funny Cartoons'. Also the blog is in a directory called funny-cartoons and that should help a little also. However it is relevant because most of my posts are about the actual job of keeping a funny cartoon site - whether it be the drawing of funny cartoons, how to make money from them, or the navel-gazing subject of how to improve traffic through findability exercises etc.
Things we've dropped
Other changes we made included dropping some rather unsuccessful bits and pieces, for example
Blogsnob just didn't really work for us, so we dropped it. Also we dropped
LinkBuddies in favour of more prominent Google ads - however LinkBuddies is still a valuable resource. It may not have driven huge traffic our way but I found it extremely useful in experimenting with banner ads to see what got clicks.
We also dropped a lot of the sidebar text from the musings section in order to try to increase the visibility of the musings on Google (the higher up the page your content starts the better). And for a while now we have displayed the latest musing on the homepage (using
Magpie) to get fresh content on the homepage too, and to increase visibility of Bif's musings.
Navigation
We also tried to make the navigation on the site a little clearer, and yet people still seem to have trouble finding our archives! People who are used to blogs have no trouble, but less techy people seem to struggle. If you have any ideas, please let us know!
Funny Cartoons Syndication
The idea Bif had for providing
small versions of our funny cartoons that people could display on their own Blogs has proven quite successful. We have a fair few people displaying BifSniff cartoons on their own sites now. This increases our exposure, generates some new traffic our way, gives us extra inward linkage and makes our stats look very healthy indeed as we host the cartoons on BifSniff.com.
Shopping
We still haven't sold a single thing in
our shop. We are obviously doing something wrong. I know the shop thing needs more attention, but as Bif has been telling me for ages,
our funny cartoons probably aren't all that suitable for t-shirts. Which is why we have changed the focus to
our mug - and rather than try to pretend it's what everybody needs in their life, we are simply begging people to buy them to send a few dollars our way. Also, we ask people to let us know if they have any ideas how we could make money out of our cartoons...
email us if you have any ideas.
Rambling
Ok, I think I'm just rambling now, but I just wanted to run through some of what we've been up to... I'll do it from time to time just in case anyone is interested. The next thing we plan to do for our funny cartoons is pay for some banner ads on other comic sites and try to drum up some new traffic to the site and see if any of it sticks. This means shelling out more money on something that we still haven't figured out how to make any money out of, but hey - it's all in the name of fun!
