I’ve recently embarked on a 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge (31DBBB) with a group of women bloggers on SITS, and starting the process got me thinking about whether this challenge would benefit webcomics. 31DBBB is a eBook by Darren Rowse, the owner of the wildly successful Problogger and all the various products that go with it. The book itself takes you through a series of tasks that force you to think critically about why you blog, how you write, and what you do to build a community. Hey! All these are things you need to focus on with webcomics too.
As I see it, there are two ways you could use this book to build your webcomic and/or webcomic blog. First, simply apply the challenge to your blog. Go through each task one a day until you reach the end and then keep on trucking. You’ll be able to write yourself a pitch, learn about a few different types of posts, and branch into related communities for marketing and to communicate with readers.
Alternative, you can focus the challenges on both your comic & comic blog at the same time, which might help you create a more complete whole. When a task is broad enough to encompass your webcomic as the main focus, use that. When a task is narrower (writing a list post for example), you can focus that on your blog. Here’s a few of the challenges that can easily be applied to your webcomic:
- Day 1: Write an elevator pitch. When someone asks you want you’re comic is about, you want a short, intriguing answer for them. You might consider writing a separate pitch for your webcomic blog to give it some focus too (for example, blogging about occult on a dark fantasy webcomic site).
- Day 8: Interlink your old blog posts. If you have a big archive, you might want to provide links back to the first time we met that bit character, or give consider giving us a jump to the first seeds of the current story arc.
- Day 12: Develop an editorial calendar. Re-commit to your update schedule and plan out when and how often to update other aspects of your site.
- Day 24: Use a Magazine to Improve your blog. Try using a print comic book, anthology, or entertainment magazine in your niche to see if there is anything you can apply to your website (or get ideas for your comic).
Naturally there’s no guarantee that the 31DBBB challenge is going to make you rich, but it can help make you a better content creator and give you some great ideas on how to keep the momentum of your website going. If you’re curious, you can learn more about (and buy) the ProBlogger 31DBBB book here. Or if you’re a lady blogger, feel free to join me at the SITS community as we work through these challenges.
