What's the Holdup?

Well this certainly hasn’t been going the way I wanted it to. If you’re just tuning in, I’ve been working on getting the online shop for Coffee & Comics launched. However there have been setbacks at every step of the way.

I filed with the state of Texas back towards the end of JUNE but because of the Fourth of July coming up, my documents were delayed. A week or two later I received my packet of documents that said Coffee & Comics is now a company. Next was to sign the documents and mail them in. 

Hell yeah! Right? Wrong. 

I received that packet on a Friday, mailed out the needed signatures the very next day on Saturday. Then on Tuesday I RECEIVED ANOTHER PACKET OF DOCUMENTS. The same one I just received the week before. 

So what’s going on? Was this a mistake? Was there something wrong with the first one? But the second packet had a misspelling so if the second packet is the correct one then I have a problem with that now. 

I reached out to the firm who filed for me again and asked what set of documents I should use? The main point for this all is to get an EIN number, plus tax exempt and a resellers license. Since they’re two different numbers associated with the packets I didn’t want to choose the one that is wrong. Well I didn’t hear from them for about a week. Turns out the entire office got COVID. 

That’s where the mixup occurred. With some employees working from home and some in the office, there was miscommunication and my documents were filed twice. 

I am currently waiting to hear back on what my next steps should be. In the meantime I’m working on more products to add to the shop, setting up my email campaigns, plus doing some freelancing. Hoping with that I can make a big apparel purchase and screenprint it all to have ready for the fall

Why Free Downloads?

A couple months ago I started sharing my work on Threads. Surprisingly it’s been getting a lot of engagement compared to its forefather, Instagram. At the moment there are countless creators  voicing their concerns about engagement being really low. Not to mention Instagram saying that they’re going to support their smaller content creators has really irked some of those who have spent time building their large followings.

Though honestly for me, my accounts have sucked for the past year since I was posting heavily about cannabis, whether it would be educational or not. It was always to talk about our app Chronicle in some way. However a lot of my posts were against their policy. I kept getting notifications from Instagram to take down content or risk being in violation and having my account no longer be shown to non-followers. Countless times I would be wondering why my engagement falls off only to see there are recommendations from Instagram on taking down content that has cannabis in it.

If you want to view the full branding profile check it out here

So with all of that happening and getting burnt out from trying new ways to create canna and Chronicle content and failing. I made the conscious decision of removing cannabis from my content strategy. With that came Coffee and Comics. Coffee and comics is an evolution of the original logo I created over a year ago; coffee, cannabis, and comics. Funny thing is, as I worked on this I realized I liked it so much more. A lot of things were fixed that I didn’t like in the original; for instance like the negative spacing in between the words. Then I was able to keep it to two “brand” marks within the whole logo, which is the coffee cup in the C and then the superhero in the O.

Which leads me to the free downloads on my website. While on Threads I started to engage with the comic community while at the same time X-Men ‘97 was premiering on Disney+. Over the course of a couple weeks I noticed that a lot of people were getting upset because other accounts were posting spoilers and they hadn’t watched the episode yet. So I thought I could jump in on this and help out with providing a variety of spoiler images that people could use in their posts as alerts to their audience.

The community responded positively by engaging with it, thus making it the post with the highest engagement on my account. People were thankful, others were joining in on the discussion if you should be posting spoilers in the first place. I wanted to point out though that there are accounts that are monetizing and trying to be the first one out there; so I get it and you’re not gonna be able to stop those people but maybe we can educate them with some best practices so those who don’t want to be spoiled can scroll right past.

You can download this Cable inspired wallpaper here

Analyzing all the engagement on my Threads posts, I started to think OK how can I start converting all of these engagements into leads on my website. What I decided on was wallpapers for mobile phones customized with an X-Men theme. The response to this was the same as the spoiler images: people loved them, shared them over and over. Once again, it became one of my highest engaged posts. 

What I would do is post an image of a mock up of one of the wallpapers. Let that kind of make its way around with people liking it and sharing it, then I would follow up by posting a link to my website. The other point of this was from and SEO perspective. Now I’m not an expert in SEO,  I’m just a designer, but I wanted to see how I can start getting more leads to my website. So by making things free, anyone that is searching for free X-Men related items will hopefully see my posts and I can begging to capture that audience.

Now you might say, “OK so what’s the point? Why? What are you doing with all this traffic?”

Well there’s a couple reasons for that one. I eventually want to start a coffee & comic shop here in my town outside of Denver. So by tackling and taking over all the coffee and comic content in my area, I can start gathering traffic to the website for when we do open.

Hopefully coming to fruition in the next year or so.

By directing people to the free downloads, I’m hoping to encourage them to make purchase. I want to provide just a few items that people can purchase like stickers, a tote bag, maybe even some coffee mugs. These are all things that I’m experimenting with as I am creating them by hand to save on costs.

Then the third reason is just to try to get subscribers to my blog. The blog is going to be another way to capture an audience and try to bring them along on the journey for starting up this coffee and comic shop. Sharing my experience of what’s going on, how I’m doing it all and honestly just being a sort of journal in which I can hold myself accountable on certain things. Plus serve as a place to air out some ideas or frustrations that I’m having and try to brainstorm with my community solutions.

Storm is my current background, which one is your favorite?

At the moment, my free downloads is the highest viewed page on my website and traffic has grown over 3000% in the past month alone. So now you’re probably thinking, “How can you keep this going?” Well it’s pretty simple, make more wallpapers, share more free downloads and just keep the momentum going, it’s not about getting burnt out. It’s about fun and not some immediate deadline. A part of that has to be the comic community I have encountered on Threads, being engaged with such a passionate group really helps keep me going.