Last month I wrote an article for Webcomic Planet, so to ease back in from my much deserved and needed break, I thought I would repost it here.
Raise your hand if you use Twitter to announce when you have posted a new comic/cartoon. Raise you hand if you also like to submit your new post to sites such as Reddit, Digg, or StumbleUpon.
If you are a user of Twitter and a registered user of StumbleUpon there is a great but little known tool at your disposal that you can submit a link to both sites at the same time. When posting your comic’s URL to twitter you either have to use a URL shortener like bit.ly or allow Twitter to shorten it for you. Instead, I recommend using http://su.pr to shorten your URLs.
Make sure you are signed into both Twitter and StumbleUpon. Once you have posted your latest cartoon, go to su.pr and type in your tweet along with the full URL of the post. Then hit submit. Your post will be submitted to both sites.
Here is what really makes it impactful. Now when someone clicks on your link in twitter they will go to your post on StumbleUpon where they can not only view your cartoon but also give it a “Thumbs Up”. The more “Thumbs Up” you get, drives potentially more visitors.
Even better is that Su.pr has analytics of who retweeted your post. If you are like me it can be difficult to determine if someone retweeted your post especially if they don’t use your twitter name. With Su.pr, anytime they use the shortened URL in a tweet, it will show up on su.pr analytics who sent out the message.
Hopefully this is a tool that is useful to you and please if you see the SU header in a post and you like it, take the second and give it a thumbs up. Your fellow cartoonists will appreciate it. And as always you can find me on twitter at @bearmancartoons.
