Wanna get warmed up for another week of cartooning? Then join us for a Motivational Sketch. This week’s phrase is “Bed Head.”The content you are trying to access is only available to members.
Today’s dive into the Webcomics.com archive takes us to a discussion from last year centered on improving your SEO.
If you want to improve your ad revenue, fix your broken links.
Broken links bring your Google PageRank down, and advertisers prefer sites with high PageRank scores. (And so do search engines.)
So it happened to me last week. I got trolled on Twitter and I lost my temper.
Here’s how it went down. I was promoting my Patreon, like so:
Another bonus cartoon for my Patreon backers! http://t.co/kzTZJDIOL5 pic.twitter.com/h592M0wncL
— guigar (@guigar) August 9, 2014
And I received a message that said:
“What about us? We’re your backers too, before you needed backers…“
Now, the smart money is on “ignore,” but instead I fired back. This wasn’t the first time this particular reader was calling me out on something like this. When it wasn’t Patreon, it was a subscription fee. So I saw red.
“What about you? You get a free comic strip every day. For the last fourteen years. Want more? It’s one. dollar. a. month.”
“One of these days,” came the reply, “I’m going to stop poking you with a stick on Twitter.”
He didn’t know it, but that day had already come.
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(I’m experimenting with a new way of presenting the Webcomics.com poll. If the “Vote” button doesn’t work, please use the poll that can be found in the sidebar to the right.)
Before I retire this poll and launch the new one, I wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to participate. If you haven’t responded yet, please consider doing so. The results are always incredibly useful!
I’ll be preparing a post on the results, and launching a new poll soon.
I’ve endorsed Gumroad in the past as an excellent tool for delivering digital goods to customers.
Yesterday they announced a new functionality in their system that I find intriguing: Streaming Books.
They’re calling it “Library Card,” which I think is going to lead to confusion (more on that later), but the idea itself is pretty cool.
It works like this:
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I love Square. They single-handedly revolutionized the way small businesses handled credit-card transactions — for the better. Want proof? Read this archive post about how merchant services used to be handled before Square. Huge percentages off the top for the merchant-service provider, expensive equipment, disuse fees, multi-year commitments and monthly fees.
It was horrible.
Square came along with a free dongle, reasonable per-transaction rates, no monthly fees, no commitments and no disuse fees.
And suddenly, folks like us were swiping credit cards at conventions and seeing increased sales as a result.
So it pains me — real pain — to give one of their initiatives a negative review. But I must.
If you’re a Square user, you probably got an e-mail a few days ago announcing Square’s new push to enter the online storefront arena.
I checked it out, and for me, it’s a non-starter. Here’s why.
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Unless someone wants to sneak into the Convention Flier Hot Seat in the next 24 hours or so, this will be the last in the series. I will announce another Hot Seat series in a couple days. As usual, the standard Hot Seat procedure applies. I’ll start out by discussing the subject in depth, and then open the subject up to the membership at large. Please feel free to offer constructive criticism, advise, new perspectives, etc.
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The Philadelphia Daily News runs a weekly feature by my friend, Amy Raudenbush, called Art Thief. It’s targeted to youngsters, but some of her advice often makes me scratch my head and wonder “Why didn’t I think of that!?”
This week’s entry is exactly that. It’s some solid advice on creating an infinite pattern. And it has tons of comics- and merchandise-related uses — especially now that some sites (like Redbubble) are offering to do POD* duvet covers.
She’s posted it publicly on her Facebook page, and it will appear in the upcoming weekend edition of the Philadelphia Daily News, for those of you in the region.
Definitely worth stealing.
If you do, give Amy a little thumbs-up, will ya?
*POD: Print On Demand
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.
Read the rest of this post and comment under the original thread!
*These instructions work the same for ComicsPress.
Setting up shipping preferences is a crucial part of running your eStore. Although I use MarketPress by WPMU, I’m going to talk about Paypal in this post because I think it applies to the widest range of members. Needless to say, I think you should take these basic concepts and apply them to whatever you’re using to process online orders.
First, let’s identify the problem. For years I didn’t have my shipping set up properly. I used a flat shipping surcharge. And it cost me plenty — in one of two ways.
• In the case of multiple orders, my customers got charged far too much for the purchase and those high-value sales get discouraged. That’s because the flat shipping surcharge was applied per item (instead of assuming that I would package these items in the same box).
• In some cases (such as international orders), my customers got charged too little, and I end up eating the difference. If my surcharge wasn’t enough to cover delivery to the country that I was shipping to, I ate the difference. And it often wiped out my profit.
The better solution assigns each item a *weight* and then totals that weight of the final order. It totals that weight up, gives the customer several shipping options, and then charges shipping based on those variables — plus the final destination of the package.
Take it from someone who spent years getting burned both ways on flat shipping pricing — undercharging for international orders and missing sales from overcharging — this is a must-have option for any Web storefront solution.
To that end, here are some step-by-step instructions on setting your shipping preferences in Paypal.
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