In the far-fetched ideas lane: Animated specials?

Good web animations can get well-known: one even ended up birthing a TV sandwich ad. I'm thinking that a few good-quality animations from suitable strips might get some attention to them and webcomics in general, if you pushed them in the right places. I might never have become interested in comics at all if it hadn't been for the old Peanuts TV specials. (For a really classy example of what I've in mind, see Gloria Pike's Untitled! 5th anniversary special. It's beautiful in itself, and you don't need to know Untitled! to enjoy it. But it shows glimses of the comic, and it makes you feel for the characters enough for you to get interested in them.)

I usually try to post on messageboards that don't deal about webcomics, but have a similar point of interest as my webcomic(for example, my webcomic is about ghosts etc, so every now and then I'll post on a few messageboards where people talk about that sort of thing).

Find a target for your webcomic that won't be someone who already reads webcomics, then play to that audience when advertising, it's the point.

This is something that intrigues me as well. All of the comic on our site aim towards the college-crowd (to varying degrees), especially since all of our comics used to be college strips quite recently. It seems like there would be a wide audience that would enjoy our stuff, but wouldn't have heard of ctraltdel or those kinds of things. We've attacked this in two ways so far, really.

One technique we've tried is creating sample booklets, you could call them mini-comics, and then passing them out to crowds leaving small, local concert venues. We specifically targeted the indie-music crowd that our work has the best chance of resonating with (basically because we all like indie music), which is also a group that spends time online pursuing their interests (due to the word-of-mouth nature of the independent music scene).

We've also worked, like previous posters mentioned, to give samples of our stuff in livejournals by finding communities associated with a topic that is similar to the strip for the day (Evan had a David Lynch comic, found a David Lynch fangroup). Being a daily strip, this means an Indiana Jones refernce one day can hit an Indiana Jones group, while a Bright Eyes group can get hit the next day, if that's how the strip goes. This provides a fairly wide variety of possible readers who may not regularly read webcomics.

I don't really know what else to try, but I'm open to suggestion. There is a large audience out there that needs to be tapped. Recycling the same people can only get you so far.

I did a quick search, and there's quite a bit of advice around on promoting websites offline. This is a reasonable article:
http://www.akamarketing.com/offline-promotion-tutorial-guide.html

I think there is a need for exposure beyond our incestuous community and out into the public (TV, radio, newspaper?). This could be a topic that goes on forever, but the short of it is that members of the comic community pool together for a common message, via a site like Comixpedia.

We all share campaigns to promote comixpedia on our sites (banners, links), and we can all donate funds for comixpedia to purchace the ads.

This is different than collectives like moderntales and blank label, as the marketing centers around "webcomics" in general, not a specific genre or group of artists.

This is a huge can of worms, but any of it all can be sorted through if its really what the community wants.

I think this thread might have one of the best ideas: letting your comic run on other websites, either for a fee or just free to bring in audiences. It seems to be working for some comics at least. TylerMartin's icecream analogy rings true for me. Or think of it as putting your shop window on a busy street where it gets seen by passers-by, rather than up a quiet alley.