My first suggestion for a topic was advertising. Advertising is one of the most important things you can do for your webcomic. Without it, how will people know about it? They won't, that's the bottom line. Getting your webcomic's name out there is a lot of work, and it can cost money, but if you're smart about it you'll do well.

Before you even begin to advertise, though, ask yourself - Do I have enough interesting content to advertise? If you only have one, two, or three strips up, or if your story hasn't quite picked up it's pace yet, or if you just have the site up with nothing on it, the answer to this is no. If you direct people to your webcomic and it has nothing interesting on it, or not enough to hold a reader's interest, they will leave and not bother coming back. So make sure before you really start advertising that you have enough to hook a potential reader.

The first thing to remember is to take baby steps. Worry about the big ad campaigns later on down the road. Right now you're just rolling the snowball down the hill. Once you get that started, it'll grow and pick up speed.

What do I mean by that? Well, the easiest and cheapest way of advertising is word-of-mouth. Tell your friends and family to spread the word. Place a link in your signature on forums (but remember your manners and don't annoy people about visiting your site). The intended purpose of this is that the people you reach will see your webcomic, like it, and spread the word to other people. Those other people will do the same, and so on and so on.

When you've exhausted that avenue, move on to the free webcomic resource sites. This includes listing sites like Onlinecomics.net, The Webcomic List, and Webcomicz, and top lists like buzzComix and TopWebcomics. These will put you in touch with a large number of webcomic readers. You can even branch out to non-webcomic-related networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and even LiveJournal. As of right now I only know of one webcomic-related networking site, ComicSpace, but there may be more I'm unaware of.

Once you've done all that, and once you feel confident that you have a webcomic worth investing money in, it's time to move onto paid advertisements. Many webcomic sites will offer spots on their page in the form of buttons or banners. Usually you need to contact the creator to get a price and sometimes to get on a waiting list. Check some of your favorite webcomics for advertising opportunities.

Another increasingly popular option is Project Wonderful. Project Wonderful is a bit complicated to sort out at first if you aren't familiar with bid-based advertising, but once you get it figured out it's a very useful tool. You basically set up an account with money in it, and you bid on ad space. It's a pay-per-day model, so you can find advertising as cheap as a few cents a day (although you may not get a lot of visits from these ads). PW offers all sorts of options and tools for you to make the best decisions on places to advertise.

You do need to be smart about your advertising, though. Keep in mind the demographics of the sites you look at - are the people visiting that site likely to enjoy your comic? When I look for sites to advertise on I usually look for webcomics that are fantasy-related or that have a feel that my comic shares. However, if you have the money are willing to try gambling on a long shot, you may just capture some people on a non-related site. I know the webcomics I read range from one end of the spectrum to the other, and there are many others like me out there. But for the most part you want to try for the demographic that is the safest bet for you and your webcomic.

And while advertising is important, let me stress again that what you are advertising needs to be the best that you can provide. If you don't have a good webcomic, all your advertising will be worth naught.

You can’t build a house without a foundation. Well, you can, but eventually it’s going fall over or sink into the ground. The same goes for webcomics – you need to be building your webcomic on a solid foundation. What do I mean by this? You need to go into this knowing how you want to do it.

Do you want to do gag-a-day strips or a serial story? Do you want to be a single panel comic, a traditional newspaper strip, or a graphic novel page comic? Color or black and white? Original recipe or extra tasty crispy?

Okay, okay, let’s slow down a bit. I’m guessing that if you’ve decided to do a webcomic, you probably at least have an inkling of what you want to do. Now it’s a matter of what you’re capable of doing. So how do you figure that out? Do some practice runs. Can you write thirty four-panel strips, each with a punch line? Can you create thirty one-panel gag comics? Can you keep continuity going – and interesting – for thirty pages? Thirty isn’t an official benchmark or anything, but it’s a good test of your abilities.

If punch lines aren’t your bag, you might want to stick with telling a story. If you can’t keep a story going, you’ll probably want to stick with gag-a-day comics. If you can do both, try shaking both into the mix. There’s no set formula here; it all boils down to what you’re comfortable with.

There are also some technical issues to consider that will affect you in the long run. First is being able to put together a strip or page in a timely manner. I understand that there are a good number of successful comics that update on a sporadic and even unpredictable basis, but my personal conviction is that you should have a set schedule. Even if it’s only one page a month, you should be able to guarantee your readers something. However, if you say you’re going to do three days a week, make sure that the format you choose can be done three days a week. Can you come up with three punch lines per week on time? Can you color your full-page layouts and stick to your schedule? This is where doing practice runs comes in handy again. Set yourself a test schedule and act is if you’re officially updating a webcomic. If you can’t do it, you can at least find out where the problem is and fix it before you go live.

Another technical issue to think about is putting your strips into a print collection someday. Yes, you’re a long way off, but it’s happening more and more so you may as well prepare ahead of time. Some readers like to have a hard copy of the comic on their bookshelves, and you may even be able to make some decent cash off of the venture. However, if you have an unwieldy or unconventional strip format, a print collection may be difficult or even impossible to put together. So try to keep your format simple and, above all, consistent.

Make sure that the format you choose will be good for you and for your readers. One of the easiest ways to lose your readership is frequent hiatuses and missed updates. You want to keep your readers happy. But on the same token, you don’t want to make yourself go insane trying to keep up with a schedule that doesn’t work with the format you chose.

You didn’t think this much preparation went into a webcomic, did you? And we haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet!

This journal has been sitting idle for too long. I've been using the time to decide what I wanted to do with it, and I've decided that I am going to start posting articles on how to do a webcomic. These articles will appear in some form or another elsewhere eventually (more on that as it develops), but I will be using this journal as a testing grounds for the articles themselves. So below you can read the first of (hopefully) many more to come.

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You’ve got a great idea for a story that’s just bursting to get out of you. The problem is that you’re not very good at writing prose. You like to draw, though, and you’ve got a scanner.

Welcome to the start of your webcomic.

My name is Pete Tarkulich, and not only am I the creator of the webcomic Bardsworth (www.bardsworth.com), but I’ve been a rabid webcomic reader since about 2002. And while I don’t view myself as part of the “webcomic community”, I do pay close attention to what goes on within it. These credits may not make me a webcomics expert, but I’m confident that I know enough to guide you through the answer to the question “How do I make a webcomic?”

So why do people choose to do webcomics over print comics? Well, there are a lot of advantages to doing a webcomic. The simplest answer is that anyone can do it. You can. Your sister can. Your grandmother can. Your dog may have a bit of trouble, but I’m sure if he really wanted to he could. In the most bare-bones setting you can do a webcomic with a sketch pad, a pencil, a scanner, and a bit of internet know-how. I wouldn’t suggest it, but you can.

Another answer is that it’s a cheap way to be published and distributed. You draw your comic and put it up on the web, and boom, you’re published. The internet stretches over the entire planet and is accessible by anyone with a computer and a connection. Your distribution is built in.

Yet another answer is the general nature of the internet. You can get immediate feedback on your work, you can chat with your readers, and you collaborate and converse with other creators. Not to mention that with the internet you have the advantage of things you can’t do in print, like animation or interactive functions.

There are probably a handful of other reasons to do webcomic, but to me these are the most important.

However, just because you can do a webcomic, does that mean you should? Can you keep up with an update schedule? Do you have the time and the money to market yourself and draw in readers? Do you have the skills necessary to produce not only good artwork but a good story as well? If you’re unsure about your abilities in regards to any of these questions, you may want to reconsider your decision to do a webcomic. However, if you have a confident answer to each of these questions, then hop aboard.

Many people jump into the webcomic world unprepared. I’m hoping that this column will help prepare you and guide you along. I don’t claim to have all the answers, and you might even find that doing things differently works better, but I’m pretty sure I can steer you in the right direction.

You might want to bring a compass just in case, though.