Discussion
Hey!
I'm looking for advice from other independent creative people who produce things and sell them, either physically or digitally, as to how you advertise and market your wares.
I make toys and video games, and help people release music, and make video and podcast stuff.
I have done lots of marketing things in the past, but I am in the mood to completely rebuild and recreate our marketing channels, and entirely overhaul everything about how I try to tell people about what we do.
So!
@aethernaut So far this has been the gist of the majority of my responses, so I'm going to do a write up about the things I've done and how they've worked.
If you do art, or write, or make things, in what ways do you tell people about what you're doing?
@ajroach42
I write. A lot. At least once a fortnight. Apparently I'm good at it, so people pay attention
@iris_meredith For many years, that was also my primary marketing method. I had a fairly successful blog and newsletter and I grew to have a somewhat substantial following on some Word Heavy socials.
But I don't do that as much anymore.
Not sure I'm a good example to follow, but I'm pretty heavy on Fedi:
PeerTube: reports, timelapses, etc.
Wordpress: monthly summary articles
Patreon: links to the above
Pixelfed: occasional promo images, stills, tests, etc.
Misskey: professional/process posts, industry commentary, free culture, etc.
I used to have a Facebook Page and a Twitter account, but they never had much engagement, and I dropped them. I have a YouTube account that I've basically neglected and a free Vimeo (I downgraded from "Plus").
There's a Gumroad store, still, but I'm not really making sales. I do have a few patrons on Patreon. Not paying any bills, but it's nice to have the encouragement.
And I do in-person table events now and then.
@TerryHancock I suppose when I ask on the niche social network how people market their products, I shouldn't be surprised when most answers are "using niche social networking".
And I shouldn't be surprised that, when I ask a bunch of independent creative people I found through personal connections how they reach an audience, their answer is personal connections.
Fair points. 😅
My best experiences so far have been with in-person events.
But currently, I only have some posters and stuff with original characters no one knows. And a little pitch about "free culture film".
And venue-tuning can be an issue:
Zine Fairs: printing process?!
Anime & SF Cons: where's the fan art?!
FOSS Events: software process -- why not the latest/greatest whiz-bang Blender release?!
Anarchist Book Fair: "Oh, so this is a deconstruction of colonialism, then..?"
Everyone: WHY SO SLO-OW...!!?
When I have an episode to show, there will be film festivals (assuming I make the cut), and then more tuning issues.
It touched my heart though, when a grade-school kid watched my 2015 preview 3X before his parents pulled him away at an anime con. Kid got it! 👍 🚀 
@ajroach42 do you (or anyone) try much in-person promotion?
when I consider how crowded and sloppy the web is, it makes me want to spend more time offline.
street fairs?
handing out free samples in public areas?
wherever your target demographic goes?
@travisfw Of course, I can't speak for "anyone" but as for me:
Yeah, we do somewhere between 6 and 12 in person events a year, historically including a hand made toy show in Asheville NC, the hand made toy region at Momocon in Atlanta, and a handmade toy show in Philly, in addition to more traditional toy shows in Atlanta twice a year, and some more traditional art shows. This year we've also done Designer Con in Pasadena and will shortly be leaving for Dcon in Vegas, and we do some occasional sidewalk swaps and things of that nature.
We also sell out of 5 retail locations across two states, with that number set to increase in the coming months, and we do a little bit of additional promotion in those.
But our primary hand made toy shows (the Asheville and Philly shows) were cancelled. The Philly show is coming back, the Asheville show probably isn't. And the organizer at the Atlanta toy shows has beef, so I didn't do either of the Atlanta toy shows this year. So 4 of our planned 10 shows didn't happen/won't happen in the future, and that means I need to replace them (and while I'm replacing them, I'm exploring other options.)
Going to in person events requires ... well, finding and vetting in person events, being physically well enough to vend at the event, paying event fees and transport costs (and hotels, as applicable), travel time, lots of lifting and twisting and being on your feet and inevitably getting sick at the convention and time away from production and ...
And usually it's worthwhile enough to do it, but sometimes after all that you get a show like the last two traditional toy shows I've been to with attendance numbers at a quarter or less of what was expected (I wrote about that on my blog, which is why I'm not invited to the Atlanta toy shows anymore https://ajroach42.com/joelanta-2025-retrospective/ )
@ajroach42 I use comicad.net, while sighing and missing Project Wonderful. If I've got a lot of energy that day I'll use comicad.net while sighing and thinking about making my own advertising network.
@TerryHancock
Wasn't Project Wonderful using tracking by the end though?
@ifixcoinops @ajroach42
@ddlyh @TerryHancock @ajroach42 nah, not like the shit today. You could target people by one of four geographic areas (Canada, USA, Europe and Everywhere Else) (which was a bad idea 'cause it suddenly quadrupled the number of ad boxes on the site and ad rates tanked and never recovered), and you could also specify hey these ads should lead to something like mysite.com/index.php?projectwonderfulbidid=18371, but you couldn't target people more specifically than "Reads this webcomic," which is precisely as targeted as an ad needs to be when said webcomic is also available for you to read and imagine the sort of people who might read it
@ifixcoinops @ddlyh @ajroach42
Yeah. Content-based, essentially. Which is the way to go, really.
I don't think targeting people really works as well as advertisers imagine. The mood the person is in would seem to matter just as much, IMHO. What they are currently reading seems like a better metric to me.
(Not even mentioning the ethical issues, which are large).
Comicad does basically the same thing, today, though, right? I looked them over, though I haven't advertised there (yet).
@ajroach42 I'm painfully and unrelentingly awful at this side of creating stuff but commenting to remind myself to look back at this thread to find out what people who are competent at it are doing.
@JubalBarca It's been a few years since I asked, but this was the most common answer I received last time.
@ajroach42 I mean, basically to tell people about stuff I mostly sporadically post about it on social media, which nowadays is probably less effective than finding actual 3D people and bugging them even if they're much less the target audience for whatever the thing is. But finding people anywhere is hard, and getting them to engage with anything is harder when they're mostly just being hit with an exhausting firehose of information overload all the time.
@JubalBarca Later, I'll probably do a thread of the things I do and have done and how they work. That might be useful for other folks.
@resonancewright does that work out well for you?
@ajroach42 Kinda! I don't do it for a living. It really is art for art's sake.
A lot of people spend the first bit of their life wanting to make an impression on people and the next bit of it deciding that all those people are far too much work and too many forced smiles and none of them quite ever get exactly what you were trying to do anyway. So you stop worrying about how to get the goose out of the bottle and just do what you love.
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@ajroach42 hi, I’m another one whose terrible at the marketing side but excited about the conversation.
I have a plan to to plant some sticker sheets with flyers in all the little free libraries in the neighborhood, but haven’t done it yet