Make Money Online with Your Webcomic or Art Blog

The list of ways to make money online is literally endless. Paid to read surveys, paid reviews, so forth and so on. But this might be a concept you haven't heard of. Millions of people have an artistic ability of some kind and art actually sells itself on the web. Even casual surfers like having custom art and avatars to display on their sites, and it's a simple matter of scanning in an existing piece of art. If you have a Wacom tablet, even better, as you can draw directly on the tablet, no paper required and then upload it to your website or blog. Making money online with your webcomic or artwork blog is not as outlandish as you might think.

While it may seem daunting at first to put your craft up for sale, there are many simple steps that can ease the learning curve. Starting with free blogging pages, or free comic hosting services, no doubt you are already familiar with blogs. Simply create a blog with the relevant keywords that you need in the title. You can use Google's AdWords Tool to retrieve a list of all that variations of the terms online art, or webcomic online, or any variation of this theme.

It's a good idea to base your keywords on the name or description of the webcomic, so as to facilitate the search engines. Once you have your blog set up, simply set the posts per page to one and begin submitting your pages. You will have to manually include links to the next comic in the series, but that isn't difficult, once you have the hang of using the blog interface.

Once you manage to generate and upload about fifteen to twenty pages of content, you can start to promote your site. Look for art communities, people who have similar interests and sites that you do. Try to emulate what they do, to some extent. Join forums that discuss comics and art, post some of your pinups, or a page that you think is particularly good. Without spamming, repeat this step with all the social networking sites, making sure that you have a link to the webcomic in your signature. Don't be shy about letting everyone know you are trying to sell commissioned art, but do not be a jerk about it, either. Just interact with the forums and social networking sites as normal and try to be active in as many communities as possible.

The purpose for all the networking is to get your backlinks established. Search engines such as Google give more weight to sites with more links leading to the content. Any chance you get to link back to your art page should be seized immediately. The sooner you get your message out, the better, and social sites and forums are an ideal way to spread the word that you are trying to make money on your artwork.

Once you complete these basic steps, continue to research the webcomics that make money and find out what they do and how they do it. It will take quite a while to build up enough traffic to actually make any money. During this time, you should be fine tuning your site and optimizing it for the search engines, as well as establishing your back links.

Remember that you will not get anywhere fast, as it will take several months of hard work to get content on the site, get it promoted and get all the infrastructure set up. Once, you begin to get a lot of traffic, you will find buyers for even your most offbeat artwork. Don't be scared to be original, it is the single best quality for standing out in a sea of clones.