P.O. Box 2363, Bellingham, WA 98227-2363 - (360) 223-2486 - Jonathan W. Sodt
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PhilosophyBe warned, I'm going to shoot my mouth off here (or my keyboard as it may). I generally try to put useful thoughts in this space, and things other people might be interested in, with topics ranging from business to religion. Most people don't think I'm very offensive, but I might be, you never know. A Philosophy of Comics (23 Jan 2008)
I was going through the Memories of my LiveJournal when I found this old entry: Posted by Fenmere Cute observation (13 Apr 2007)
I'm a little behind the curve on this subject, but what the hell. It's all about cracking the joke, anyway. Posted by Fenmere The End of Advertising (29 Mar 2007)
Or rather the whole point of it... ... And it shows once more that marketing should be built into your product from the start, rather than slapped on afterwards in the from of advertising. The same can be said for design. And branding. These things should not be an afterthought, but built into your product right from its birth. I have this to ad(d): This may be obvious to those writing these columns, but... Building your marketting, design and branding into your product may preclude traditional advertising, but it doesn't eliminate the act of purchasing ad space in a medium to let people know your product exists. The ad you place simply ends up being an extension of your product, a snapshot of the brand or design, and your contact information. No serious effort need go into the ad design, because that's already been done. You just crop out the extranious information. To wit, my example:  It's still working... Mind you, if I had placed that ad in the Whatcom Independent, it would have looked a bit different. Assuming I thought the readers of the Indy would have reacted the same as the readers of webcomics, it would have been larger, and it would have had my URL printed nicely at the bottom. Posted by Fenmere Where I'm Going with This Advertising Schtuff (26 Mar 2007)
In my day job, I work for an independent weekly newspaper. I design the front page, the inside pages, the house ads, and any ads our advertisers would rather have us design for them. I have an assistant who does smashing center spreads, the events section and half the ads. The Philosophy EndI've been reading a lot of Hugh McCleod in the past year. His huge message seems to be that blogging is the death of traditional advertising. I don't think he's necessarily entirely right. He may have already written to this effect and I just missed it, but I see a number of levels at which each form of getting-the-word-out is important and useful. For instance, my webcomic is a form of blog, really. It's updated on a regular basis (three days a week right now), and it's primary purpose is to express an idea. To help get more people reading it, I syndicated it on LiveJournal, a particularly useful tool for spreading the word. The LiveJournal friends page acts as a sort of automatic word of mouth mechanism. In LJ, if you subscribe to a feed, unless you tell it otherwise that feed gets placed in a public "Friends Page" with a bunch of other feeds. Then, anyone visiting your LiveJournal can read what you read, and they often do. Furthermore, I created a mechanism by which a person can easily copy my comic to post to their own webpage or journal. And for the past seven years, this presence, along with a strong and quirky printed presence in my local town of Bellingham, has garnered me a base readership of about 350 people online. Really, actually, most of the work was done in the early stages by the printed copy and word of mouth. But that number of 350 people hasn't really changed. I've seen it fluctuate depending on how much comic I produce, along with the quality of the feed I pump to LiveJournal. But it pretty much has hovered around 350 for several years. So, I could produce a better comic. Actually, I already am. The quality of my work has vastly improved over the years. And as it has improved, I've heard fewer and fewer people saying "I don't get it." But the number of people reading it online has not increased. And I doubt that I'll be able to bump it up more than one more notch in a short time. Improvement takes time and experience. This leaves me with traditional advertising (which includes guerrilla advertising, actually). Which means spending time or money placing the message that my comic exists in front of the right people. It boils down to this.A blog is all well and good, but when you're just starting you need to get people to see your blog in the first place. A blog, after all, is really just an extension of your storefront. It's like a couple of sofas and a coffee pot near your front door, and a considerable amount of your time sitting and chatting with the costumers to find out what they really want and what you actually have to offer them. You have to get your customers to walk in your front door first, though. An ad is like your shop sign. It let's people know that there is a door to walk through in the first place. So I placed ads on a couple websites and got what is now 100 people walking in my door in four days for less than $10. Actually, looking at the numbers, it was about 1 in every 1,000 people who saw my ads. The next thing to find out is how many of those people are interested in what I produce. That's the next stage of my experiment. Posted by Fenmere Work Ethic (26 Feb 2007)
I used to think that I'd be the kind of designer that would need a lot of time to work on something, that the two variables I'd haggle over were the money or the quality. Or something like that. Posted by Fenmere Coming Soon - More Philosophy of Design (05 Dec 2006) When I have a thought, I'll put it here. For now, though, this is just a place holder to see if my new system is working. Posted by Fenmere Content Management Powered by CuteNews |