Lately, I’ve been re-doubling my efforts towards blogging. There are two reasons. First, with two updates a week, it’s not only more important to take that opportunity to try to get my messages across, but it’s much easier than when I was doing a daily strip. Secondly, now that my business has shifted from a ad-supported to a subscriber-supported model, it’s crucial that I try to make that blog a bigger part of my outreach.

What I have found is that I have been able to use my beefed-up blog as part of a greater social-media strategy as well. And it’s all thanks to a very simple HTML tag.

ID tags

ID tags work like this. You add an ID tag to any element — an image, a headline, a paragraph, etc. — and then, with a slight modification to your URL, you can make your user’s browser scroll down to that section of your website automatically when they use that URL to visit your site.

To add an ID tag to an element, merely add

id="xxxxxxx"

to the element.

For example if I use the following headline in my blog…

<h2 id="ads">Get rid of those ads!</h2>

I can make my readers’ browsers scroll right to that section of the blog by adding # and then the ID tag to the end of the URL.

So, if the URL is http://evil-inc.com/comic/intermission-arch-bros/

…I can make the browser scroll down to the tagged section of the blog if I use http://evil-inc.com/comic/intermission-arch-bros/#ads

I can also apply an ID tag to an image:

<img class="aligncenter wp-image-16411" src="http://evil-inc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/CiLy261U4AA9egX.jpg" alt="Alex" id="alexatTCAF" width="410" height="420" />

Now, if I add that ID to the end of the URL like this: http://evil-inc.com/comic/intermission-arch-bros/#alexatTCAF

…the browser auto-scrolls to that image element.

Social media

The ability to use ID tags to point readers to a specific place in my blog has been an important tool in my social-media strategy. And that’s doubly important in a subscription-based business. Think about it. No one wants to follow my social-media feed is it’s nothing but subscription pitches. But if I’m including those messages along with a steady stream of non-solicitation blasts, it’s much less offensive.

And, if I’m challenging myself to have about three or four topics per blog, I have three or four good social-media messages to share. I simply talk about the topic and then link to that ID-tagged URL and send the people directly to my site to read more.

This makes that 140-character limit on Twitter a little more bearable. Now, I’m tweeting a tease and letting my blog do the rest.

Using a social-media manager such as Hootsuite, I can start my day by scheduling an entire cadre of tweets and Facebook posts — each pointing to a unique ID-tagged URL — and space my subscription messages between them.

Between that and the strategy I discuss here, my social-media outreach can be turbo-charged to distribute my messages.

Ripple effect

So, better blogging gives me…

• More opportunities to connect with my readers
• More promotional opportunities
• More social-medial topics
• More words on the page — and that means better SEO

It’s pretty simple to see that this is a small change to make to your routine that’s going to have a ripple effect across your entire webcomic business.