Internet Business Optimization Tips and Ideas | How Internet Cartoonist Rick London Made It To The Top

How Internet Cartoonist Rick London Made It To The Top

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by Alexa Ferotina

I have worked in many large corporations. I have yet to see anyone with the business instincts of cartoonist Rick London. He started with nothing, he knew nothing of the world of cartooning, and within ten years in it, he was and is at the top. This is how he did it.

Rick focused his cartoons into themes, usually different business themes from law to science to medicine. He also utilized society such as relationships, sports, war, philosophy, religion, etc. Anything that was a topic of interest in which journals were published, Rick wrote cartoons in that arena. He made call after call. He knew it was a numbers game. After a hundred calls a day, he usually made a sale or two. He was building his portfolio and bringing in a few shekels for beans and rice.

Rick was a master of barter. Where he learned it, I will never know. Since a lot of his clients had little or no budget, Rick bartered with them. I cannot think of a product he did not have. All he did was pick up the phone and if they said no, regarding paying for a cartoon, Rick would give them the cartoon at full value for half a barter back. Rick was “out nothing”; the cartoon would have sat on the Internet and still did. The publisher or webmaster simply got nonexclusive rights to it, and Rick got real retail goods, food, vitamins, and even a wardrobe. He almost made a deal for a car once. Though he had no formal education, his marketing skills were magic.

It was a cold winter in 1997. Rick was living and working from an abandoned Mississippi warehouse. He was not eating well but had made some good trades with fishing tackle companies to put his fishing-related cartoons on their sites. He took the tackle and lures (sometimes live bait he dug up from the woods) and would fish after working in the late afternoon, sometimes into the night until he had enough fish to make a meal. This man knew how to survive. It was like living and working on Walden Pond.

He no longer has to beg for barters though he occasionally does them just for fun, especially with other businesses just getting started and needing help. He has not forgotten his roots. But more often he is approached by newspapers and magazines, and even college textbook authors to buy his cartoons outright. This has been happening for several years now.


The Internet had not yet evolved into what it is today when Rick started. Yahoo! was about the only “goodie” on the web. There were blogs but they were known as bulletin boards and rarely used for any marketing purposes. Rick had to use the phone most the time to make his deals and get his name known. He couldn’t google anything because there was no Google. All he had at the start was a free domain website (he couldn’t afford a www) and about fifty cartoons. I knew this hard-working man would make it; I had no idea he would be at the top in ten years. He is.

I am hard-pressed to find someone who is so committed to a project. A day does not go by that he does not do some article marketing, blogging, revamping his ppc campaign, and even finds time to write new cartoons. At age fifty-three, his mind is sharper than a teenager, and that is not an embellishment. It is almost a phenomena.

Though he is from Mississippi originally (where I met him), he is not from that part of Mississippi that is known to produce such genius; the delta which brought us William Faulkner, Elvis, Grisham, Willie Morris, Morgan Freeman, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and so many others.

I don’t see Rick anymore as we have both moved on and are on other sides of the country. He was like a dad to me. He was trustworthy and kind. And he was very very smart. I still stay in touch via email and he always answers as soon as he can. I order products from his stores which have hundreds of thousands of cartoon collectibles, funny tshirts, things for the office, and all kinds of gifts. I love that man and the work that he has done. And the fact that he started it all with just a thought, virtually not a penny to his name. An amazing story, it truly is.

About the Author:
Rick London has the largest offbeat Internet’s funniest cartoon website on the Internet and several cartoon gift shops Rick London’s Marketing Secret: From Nothing To Internet’s Top Cartoonist And E-Tailer, and