Best of Webcomics.com: Sept. 2014

If you’re not a member of Webcomics.com, you might wonder about what goes on behind the “paywall.” Here’s a list of topics from last month — both from the site and from the private forum — to give you an idea of what Webcomics.com is like every day.

If you’re curious about joining, we’ve just made it easier than ever with a $5 trial membership. You’ll get full access to the site for thirty days so you can see what you’ve been missing. At the end of the trial, you can choose to re-subscribe ($30 for 12 months of access) or walk away with no strings attached. You will not be re-billed unless you choose to subscribe.

Please note: The links below will lead you to content that is “subscription-only” content, but I like to link to it for the people that see something intriguing, join, and then want to delve into what they missed using this and other Best Of posts.

Best of the site

Book Cover Hot Seat: The Hot Seat critiques are opportunities to discuss the craft of cartooning in a meaningful, real-world way. In September, we wrapped up a critique series that focused on book-cover design, and then we launched a new series called “Hitch It / Ditch It”.

“Weighting” line items in DFP: Google DoubleClick for Publishers is free software that helps you manage several different ad networks — to get the optimum performance out of each. To complement the many tutorials we have to guide you in its implementation, this installment teaches you to control the number of times a certain ad is displayed.

Using PayPal to collect sales tax: If you don’t have this set up properly, you could be losing money. This tutorial walks you through it setp-by-step.

Amazon Affiliate Ads: I’ve been traditionally cool on the idea of affiliate ads, but they do have a role to play in an ad chain that includes a healthy number of CPM-sources to generate a ground-level income. If you’d like to experiment with affiliate ads, here’s how you can implement them easily — without losing ad revenue.

Speed up your Mac: A lagging hard drive can be maddening. What’s worse, is that your computer often slows down little-by-little over a long time — so you barely notice that you’re down to a crawl. Break out of the lag using these tried-and-true fixes.

Podcasting tips: It’s a great way to build community and reach readers, but what if you don’t know a thing about podcasting? Here’s a down-and-dirty guide to get you on the air in no time.

Are comic cons dying — or changing: While the Twittersphere took great delight in ridiculing Denise Dorman’s essay on the changing nature of comic conventions, we at Webcomics.com discussed the real issues at play as comic conventions evolve. And more importantly, we discuss strategies to evolve our approaches as well.

Yoast WordPress SEO tips: Yoast makes a killer SEO plug-in for WordPress. This post shares some thoughts on using it to bring more traffic to your site.

Semalt: Have you seen a bunch of junk traffic from Semalt? It turns out that it’s some kind of keyword research program (a bot, more or less) and it erroneously drives up your stats. It effects new visitor counts, bounce rate, pageviews, etc, and makes everything look higher than it really is. We tell you how to counter its effects.