Marketing a Webcomic 2.0

This August, a comic that I wrote was featured in the monthly competition at Zuda Comics. Zuda is DC Comic's web operation, and DC is the publisher of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the like. So it was a semi big deal.

At Zuda, each month ten comics are voted on by the readers and the most popular one wins a contract for a year. We were in the contest.

We lost.

Specifically, we came in fifth out of ten, which I was fairly pleased with. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to win (for one thing, that contract is worth about eleven grand) but our comic was a nasty piece of work with a grim tone and idiosyncratic art. That it made in the competition and did as well as it did was a surprise to me.

The winner, though, clearly knew something I don't. They had somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times as many views as my comic, and where two or three times more viewed than the number two, and I'm reasonably sure a lot of that was down to a good marketing plan.

Actually, the marketing aspect is interesting, because you can actually see the evolution. The contest generally comes down to who the best marketer is, and you can see the evolution of techniques from month to month.

So I'm curious as to what you folks would do to get eyes and votes? This pretty much the best place for marketing on the internet, so I think you'd be the folks to ask.

What I did:

Advertised on Project Wonderful - Effective. PW is an ad system that targets this sort of thing specifically.

Press Releases - Seemed to help. I'm sure I didn't utilize them as effectively as might have.

Myspace, Facebook etc - created groups, added friends. Helpful, but again, I don't think I made the most of it.

So, if you had 500.00 to promote something like this, what would you do?