Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part Three — Promoting the Website

Cross-Promotion

The first step in promoting a website is within the website itself, taking care of the business mentioned in the previous paragraph (the last paragraph of Part Two). You definitely want to make it easy for people to find your site who are actively seeking, as through a Google search, what you are offering.

Encouraging visitors to return is also crucial, which is typically accomplished by posting a schedule to expect new material (such as once a week) and adhering to that schedule so that visitors feel rewarded for returning. If they are disappointed and start to drift away, it is extremely difficult to lure them back.

Engaging fans in back and forth dialog in the comments sections of the website is very important on the internet. It makes them feel involved, and more likely to tell their friends. So if they ask questions on your site, be sure to reply. These people will most likely become your most enthusiastic supporters.

Obviously if you have friends who already have popular websites that attract people who would likely be interested in what you are presenting, ask those friends to announce your website, and to review it, and to include a direct one-click link to your website.

Always remember that people today are into instant gratification, especially while on the internet. They are far more likely to give your site a look if they only have to make one click on a direct link. If they have to type in several letters to spell out your site’s name (its URL), they are far less likely to do so — especially if they mistype one letter and miss your site altogether.

Look for websites that promote the things you are doing. For example, if you are presenting a web comic strip, forward information about it to www.belfrycomics.net, which is a website that lists all the comic strips being posted on the internet. They will mention your website prominently for a while as a “new addition to the internet” before it becomes lost in an alphabetical list, and that will generate a lot of new visitors to your website.

Depending on the subject of your cartoons, do a Google search for blogs and websites that focus on your subject. For example, a while back a documentary filmmaker wanted to promote a movie he had made about the manufacture of high quality pianos. There is as much art as craft and science to making a piano that sounds great, and so to see the factory process, as well as interviews with the craftspeople involved about how they approach their individual tasks, is a compelling subject. So who would be primarily interested in this subject? Over 20 categories of people were listed. I can’t remember them all, but they included piano manufacturers, stores that sell pianos, people who buy pianos, piano tuners and repair people, music teachers, music students, students of classical music, frequent concert goers, etc.