Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part Three — Promoting the Website (cont.)

Social Media Marketing

Back on the internet, Facebook is potentially a good place to promote oneself and one’s website. As mentioned in the last paragraph of Part Two, I have a Facebook page and my cartoon character Viagri has a Facebook page. For my profile picture on my page, instead of my face — which I would show if I were just using Facebook for social purposes — I instead show a provocative full figure picture of Viagri. I use Facebook to post announcements of new entries on Viagri’s website, as do other people who are promoting their own issues. Of course my posts are seen only by my Facebook “friends”, who are already familiar with my website, and I only see their posts. But I figured out a way to get Viagri’s picture seen by thousands of people who do not already know of her. When my Facebook friends post things, I make a comment on their posts, which will be seen by their friends, along with my profile picture, which is of Viagri. Each of my Facebook friends have hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of friends — who are all different. When those people see Viagri’s picture on some random comment by me, some of them will be intrigued enough to click on the picture, which will take them to my Facebook page, where I have prominently positioned, at the top of my page, a big mention of who Viagri is and how to click onto her website. I know for certain that a lot of people have done that.

A few other suggestions:

* You could cross-promote with links to and from other cartoon websites that appeal to the same audience as yours. That way everybody wins from the increased exposure on the internet.

* Or you could share your website with some other cartoonists, to ease the deadline pressure but still have new product available on a regular schedule to keep fans returning.

* You could perhaps cross-promote with an entirely different entity that likes your character, such as a rock band that might like to adopt your character as a sort of mascot. Or you could connect with a commercial product with its own advertising budget that your character could be a spokesperson for.

I think my most general word of advice would be to promote often. If people see a mention of your cartoon once, they are likely to forget, considering how everyone today is bombarded with media overload. But if they see a mention of your cartoon several times, chances are they will begin to remember, and possibly become at least curious about it. Humans have a strong herd instinct, and are far more likely to do the things that they think their friends are likely to do. The more often they are reminded about your cartoon, the more they will think that their friends are probably aware of it too, which causes them to talk about it and want to take the time to look at it. That’s why Hollywood spends millions of dollars on media blitzes to promote each movie they release. And it works — millions of people all go to movie theaters on the same opening weekend and pay big bucks to see a movie that they know practically nothing about — mainly because they expect that their friends will probably be doing the same thing.

A very excellent book on the subject of promotion and marketing by creative people on the internet — cartoonists, animators, artists, writers and musicians, all of whom began on the internet as unknowns and achieved varying degrees of commercial success — is “Fans, Friends and Followers, Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age”, by Scott Kirsner (2009), paperback $15.95. I bought my copy on Amazon. This book is full of excellent advice that goes beyond what I have written here. The book assumes that the reader knows his way around the internet though, and so most of the information I have written here is not in that book, but comes instead from my own hard experience. But this book is excellent for continuing beyond what I have written here. I highly recommend it.