Ten things you can do to improve your webcomic today

Ten things you can do to improve your webcomic today from Brad Guigar on Vimeo.

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Comic Easel: Adding Jetpack's Share Buttons directly under the comic.

As much as I like the social media buttons that came installed with Comic Easel, I didn't like that they were pointing to my social-media places on the Web.

It's perfectly good to know that I have a Twitter feed (and to link to that feed). But that's not what social media is about. Social media is about sharing content. And I have to make sure my readers can share my content (within reason).

So I approached Philip Hofer for a solution, and he came up with the following. You'll first need to download the Jetpack plug-in.

Jetpack plug-in for WordPress - Now, with Photon

I'm a big fan of using the Jetpack plug-in on my WordPress site. It has tons of useful features -- not the least of which is their social-media sharing buttons (which we're going to discuss modifying in a later post)...

Advertising: Investing in yourself

This piece was kindly contributed by Joseph Stillwell of theHiveworks.com.

The goal of marketing something is either brand recognition or conversion (like selling an item). Most webcomics will fall into brand marketing. Other things that run off subscriptions or items will run off conversion marketing. 

First, you have to be realistic about your budget. Marketing can be cheap (handing out pamphlets at a college) or it can get very expensive (like the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to run a U.S. presidential campaign). For most people running webcomics, budgets fall between $1 and $3,000 — pretty small.

For this example, let’s say you have a budget of $1,500 to promote a comic with 1,000 daily users...

Friday Archive Dive: Marketing an All- Ages Comic to Teachers and Homeschoolers

Today's Archive Dive comes from Aug. 21, 2012, when we discussed an interesting angle on marketing all-ages comics.

Last week, while we were discussing the marketing of all-ages comics, I mentioned that I had done some research on marketing comics to teachers and parents (particularly parents who home-school).

As my boys started advancing grades in school, I started to notice that some of their teachers were assigning books based on different Readability Indexes. Readability Indexes are measurements that educators use to gauge the appropriateness of a given piece of reading material to a person at a certain level of reading. Educators use these scales to make sure the books that their students aren't too difficult for them -- and to gradually increase the difficulty level as the students' skills increase.

 Read the entire post and comment there.