This blog post is based off of David Garland's interview with Matthew Inman on his HubSpot sponsored web series "The Rise to the Top." You can watch the full interview below.
Matthew Inman, commonly recognized as The Oatmeal, has experienced a wide range of success in the online world. Previously, Inman was a web designer, developer and co-founder of popular Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software company SEOmoz. After he left SEOmoz he built a full-featured online dating website Mingle2 in 66.5 hours.
Now, Inman is devoting his time to his true passion, creating comics. His site TheOatmeal.com has over a quarter of a billion visitors a year, and he is undoubtedly responsible for thousands of wasted work hours every day. How does he do it? Well once again, the simple answer is he creates incredible comics time and time again, but here are a couple other lessons marketers can learn from Inman about internet marketing in the modern era.
Provide Utility
Inman provides most of his content for free. Aside from the few comics he's reserved for his upcoming book, 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (And Other Useful Guides), all of his creations can be viewed on his website.
Inman makes most of his money (80%) from merchandise. On his site, you can purchase novelty mugs, posters, t-shirts, etc. There are a wide variety of his comics available in poster format, but the ones that seem to sell the best are what he's labeled "the Grammar Pack." The Grammar Pack consists of posters such as "When to use i.e. in a sentence," "How to use a semicolon," and "10 words you need to stop misspelling." Although my personal favorite is "6 reasons bacon is better than true love," Inman says that the reason his Grammar Pack does so well is because people can actually learn from them.
Creating interesting content is going to attract fans, but creating content that is both interesting and educational is going to do even better!
Be Patient
Success as a comic creator has come quickly to the Oatmeal. He's already getting over a quarter billion views a year on his website. Obviously not all of these views are going to be huge revenue generators for Inman, and he realizes that usually it's the loyal fans who've visited the site 10-20 times that are most likely to purchase his merchandise.
Attracting new visitors is hard but keeping them coming back is even harder. It's important not to get frustrated if you don't see traffic increasing as quickly as you'd like. Make sure that you maintain a high level of quality with your content to keep visitors coming back in order to start turning visitors into evangelists for your business.
Focus
Inman has been creating comics for a long time, but it wasn't until he really decided to focus on comics full time that his hard work started to pay off. Don't let content creation take a back seat to your other marketing activities. Creating content is easy to put off until tomorrow, but content is an asset that will grow in value over time. The sooner you focus on a strategy and begin to execute the sooner your going to start seeing results from that investment.
The Oatmeal's success can be attributed to many things, but once again the common theme of creating incredible content has unfolded once again. What do you think about the Oatmeal's comics? Let me know in the comments below.