Getting Things Done and the Artist’s Struggle

I have to be honest with you guys; I’m a procrastinator. It is a mix of my ADD, obsessive compulsive tendencies, and what some call chaos addiction.

In other words, I am terrible at time management.

To get prepared for my goal of writing an article every weekday for this blog I’ve decided I need to work on a time management system that works for me.

This week I read:

Neither of these two books really resonated with me as perfect solutions.

While continuing to search online for the best system for myself, I stumbled upon:

Need your help! Comic creator to Comic Creator

I’m at a point with this blog where I have reached a cross roads.

As I see it, I have only 3 options for the future of the jasonloveslife.com website.

Option 1: I can quit posting regularly and specifically make this into a behind the scenes blog about my webcomic with the possibilities of losing you and the hundreds of other regular readers I have. This would allow me to pick up more freelance jobs.

Option 2: I can continue on with my current posting schedule and see what happens while keeping the same number of freelance clients.

Option 3: I can give up some of my freelance work and put more energy into posting more often, create some amazing resources, and provide some in-depth how-to articles (eventually adding audio and video).

It also needs to be said that I have a wife and a 3 month old son to provide for.

Goals

To find the best answer I need to really focus on my personal goals and the goals of this website.

 Personal Goals (in order of importance)

walk like a Webcomic creator

We all have our favorite comic creators (some of mine are Stephan Pastis, Norm Feuti, and Aaron Johnson). We see them and think, how cool would it be to be “insert name”. They have made it and I want to be there.

Comic creators are forged, not born!

You might envy your heroes of comics, but you shouldn’t want to be them. You can’t be them, so lets focus on you (what are we going to do with you?).

All those guys started off creating their first comic strips or comic book pages. They have been where you are right now and struggled with finding their way in making it a career.

What did they need to do?

Marketing using someone else’s Brand with 5 examples

Princes and the Beast

Looking for a quick way to promote your comic, blog, or other project?

An easy way to create a little buzz is to steal I mean borrow someone else’s brand.

If you look at huge franchises such as Star Wars, Disney, Marvel, DC, etc, etc you have people who are just crazy for these characters.  You have people that want to see everything and anything related to them even if it isn’t from the companies that own those properties.

If you create works of art that feature these characters, you have an opportunity to build up viewers and possibly convert some of them into fans.  Just creating copies of your favorite characters isn’t going to bring in a flood gate of people; your art has to have some distinct qualities.

Those are:

Niche Site Journal Format

I’ve come up with a new format for the journal updates for my different niche site. This way each post is the same and it makes it easier to follow week by week. Having this format will also make it easier to post because I can just fill in the information, create the updated graphs, and add a few pictures.

I tried to include all the data and information that you might find interesting in this format. If you can think of anything else or have ideas that could make these posts easier to read, please leave a message in the comment section with those suggestion.

Over time this format will evolve, but I have to start somewhere.

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Where my sites are now: how many blog views with analytics

I am still in the process of figuring out the best way to keep track of my niche site plans and their outcomes on this site.  I will be updating weekly; you can join the Facebook page at if you want to stay up-to-date:

https://www.facebook.com/NicheSiteJournal

Here is a quick look at my numbers for the last month.

jasonloveslife.com

This is my niche site dedicated to creating webcomics. It is also my most popular blog.

Numbers from Jan 20 – Feb 19:

Visits: 984

Unique Visitors: 616

Pageviews: 2,255

Pages/Visit: 2.29

Avg. Visit Duration: 00:02:55

madmanofmagic.com

This is my webcomic I launched on Jan 14, 2013

How to Start a webcomic

Of all the things I have covered in this blog about web comics, the one thing that seems to be asked the most is “how to start a webcomic“.

Since I have a blog about learning to be an independent comic book creator and starting a web comic is an important part of the independent comic world, I’ll go ahead give you a simple checklist to get started.

Read then ACT!

Before I jump into the list I want to give you a little heads up on most people reaction to this post.

Many of you will read this and never act on it.