ShortMinds Webcomic

Two thirds of a year into this little comic and where am I?

Eight Months of Updates?

Well not quite. I took a couple month-and-a-half breaks around November and March, so really only up to 5 to 6 months of comics, technically. One break I rushed to buy a house before the lending rules changed and the other was primarily a result of me just being swamped at work and loosing interest

The March break that also took up most of April, I almost didn’t come back from. It took a crazy realization that I never finish anything brought on by one piss poor performance playing softball one night. Helpful hint, don’t run into the guy playing first base, whoops.

Re-design

In the short life of this webcomic the site has already undergone two major re-designs. Initially I wrote my own blog code and that worked fine for a while. All up until I submitted my first story to digg.com and my blog comments and forums came under spam attack. The forums have been disabled until a time I feel the community grows to a point that they are needed again. To fix the comments spam I switched over to Wordpress. You know, I used to look down on Wordpress, but there is definitely something to be said about having a community of developers dealing with all your problems for you. I’m using the ComicPress theme to serve up the comics. So, when I started using Wordpress and ComicPress I did some basic customazation. And a few months ago I did another overhaul of the look and feel of the site into what you see today. There are still some more changes to be made, but nothing too drastic, mainly the nav buttons and the broke search page.

Traffic Growth?

Well, in short yes, but not much.

Previously I had been using AwStats to view my traffic. After the last re-design I threw in Google Analytics to get a real idea of my traffic. I also started using feedburner to find out how many rss feed subscribers I have. So, turns out there are slightly more visitors then I thought. Roughly 10 unique users per day and 4 feed readers per day, with a huge drop off on the weekends.

I’ve read all the “how to increase your blog traffic” articles that I can find. I have tried a few things here and there. Mostly submitting articles to digg, reddit, etc. And yes, it will increase your traffic for a day or two, but user retention has been very low. I’ve never hit the front page of any of these sites, so maybe that is the trick, but I have to imagine that the results would be mostly the same, high bounce rate with low retention percentage, just a lot more traffic ultimately resulting in more readers.

Recently I did some behind the scenes SEO and that has actually brought in a couple of unique users per day, but very low retention, if any.

But why all this talk about traffic? Sounds like I’m in it for the wrong reasons. Well I don’t think anyone ever starts a public website offering some sort of service, and hopes to keep it quite and under wraps. My numbers may be laughably low, but if I have learned anything from Gary Vaynerchuk it is that even if you have one visitor, you have a community. That and no matter how many visitors you have, 99% of them will be lurkers.

Changing Comic Styles

I created the original characters for this comic strip back in 4th grade. Coming up with comics for the past few months has been somewhat hard at times. Turns out, I don’t think like a 4th grader any more.

So I had the idea of introducing older versions of the same characters that I could relate to a bit more. For a while I was unsure exactly how to do this. Recently, due to some reflection brought about by some hater mail, the idea finally hit me. What if the old cartoons were just comic strips drawn by some poor sap strugeling to start a successful webcomic? I can relate to that eh? Honestly I hope everyone likes the new characters and thinks that they provide for much more hilariousness then my previous characters.

Speaking of Hater Mail

I finally got some hate mail last week. I suppose everyone has to deal with hate mail in their own way. Luckily I have dealt with online surveys before and I know that most people willing to take time out of their day to send you feedback are not happy with something. But, on the other hand, it sucks. But, you have to take it with a light heart, especially when the schlemiel who sends it to you doesn’t supply a real name or real email address for you to respond to.

If you put yourself and your work out on the internet, people are going to critique and ridicule you eventually. Especially if you leave it up long enough or grow super popular. Uhh, in this case I’m referring to the first item there.

Looking Forward

Clearly I am far from a successful webcomic artist, but I hope my trials and tribulations can help future webcomic artists hit the ground running. Read my three months in reflections if you are interested

I probably won’t stop submitting to digg, reddit, etc. It’s nice to see the spike in traffic now and then. Hell, I’ll probably submit this article to various sites. I’m not really sure how else to get the site out there, for free that is, rather than putting a link to the site in the profile of various forums that I frequent. Maybe I’ll ask mmorpg.com if I could get added to their comic lists. That is how I found ExtraLife after all, the comic that finally convinced me to start my own.

I will keep developing my new characters and hope that these characters suit me a lot better. I hope to get 20-30 jokes ahead. Not necessarily comics completed, just the jokes, seeing as that was one of my major problems with the old characters.

I want to get back to making various interesting forum posts a couple times a day, not too much because I don’t want to flood any RSS subscribers, but enough to keep the content flowing on comic off days.

Heck, maybe I’ll even start a podcast if I could find a good enough reason and someone to do it with. Who knows.

Take care everyone.

-Nathan