Author Archive
I doubt a day does not go by that I’m not asked, “Rick, why so many products, why so many stores? (We have 9 stores). There are a number of answers to that question, but I will start with the obvious.
At the risk of sounding like the elderly professor in the Xerox commercial regarding publishing is not done much because it costs “MONEY”, that is the first answer that comes to mind. We like making moolah. But that is our cynical side. We also like making people happy. No, really.
Humor domination of the world wide web is a good start. Ok, a little joke, but that does not mean it cannot be a goal. I know it is arrogant but it is so, and why lie? I am told that in any given year there are approximately 10,000 cartoons on the Internet and out of those 10k cartoons only about 5 or so last longer than a year. This is our tenth year and to be honest, we didn’t even start to monetize the site with stores until 14 months ago; and even think about Google Adwords until a few years ago? Why? Because we really looked at the entire thing as a hobby and my creative team was entirely voluntary. Then we started selling. Then manufacturing came. Then we were suddenly a business. It all took a life of its own.
I wear many hats. For a long time I have been a cartoonist. In my mid-40’s I went back to college and studied business and Internet technology. Suddenly I was an IT Professional and a cartoonist. The conflict was deciding if I should just be an IT pro, or continue my cartoons. After all, I had spent a decade on the cartoons and built numerous gift stores, some megastores with inventories of 100,000 products. What to do? Now I had some new tools, a major one known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I decided to utilize that skill to work on my cartoon and cartoon gift sites. It was a good decision. I am learning new things about SEO every day. I am hardly a guru.
Nine times out of ten, the writer of that ebook has downloaded other ebooks, before writing his/or hers and simply copied the main points, thinking, “If I bought it on the Internet, and from a guru, it must be hot stuff. It is hot stuff. It is the road to Internet hell.
I do not write or sell Ebooks at this time. Why? Because I don’t consider myself a guru or an expert. A lot of people shouldn’t who do. I am very good at it, and I am one of the few who has SEO’d my own cartoon website into the Alexa Top 100,000 websites (as low as 65,000), but that still does not make me an expert. I am pursuing more education before I use that word to describe me. Let’s just say, for the most part, I believe I know what I’m doing, and people pay me to do it, generally before they pay “an expert”. And there is a reason. I research, I read, I double read, and I triple read, not just sites on the Internet, but scholarly books in our university library.
How many more articles are going to be written on “safe internet shopping”? Well, here’s one more. And its the basics. It’s the basics because the basics is what you need to know, just like a store in your local mall (but a little different). Things like shipping price, security, guarantees, quality, service. Common sense things. But how do you find out when the vendor may be across the country (if not the world?)
Knowledge. Of course knowledge is power and education is the key to knowledge. I don’t mean go out right now and sign up for a class on Internet shopping, though it’s never a bad idea if you have the time, and, like me, do most of your shopping on the Internet.
The only difference is that you can’t see your vendor or talk to him/her. But wait, yes you can. A good many stores have overcome that obstacle by offering a toll-free ordering and customer service number.
Many think cartoonists become wealthy from newspaper syndication. They don’t. Newspapers only pay a few dollars per cartoon and the cartoonist splits that with the syndication firm. Not only that, of the hundreds of thousands of cartoons that are out there trying to make their way to newspaper print, only about .000000001% make it. One has a better chance of winning the lottery.
So how does the cartoonist make his or her money? The most lucrative part of cartooning is a little-known but huge business called “image licensing”. Image licensing has been around a long time. It is known to be about an 80 billion dollar a year business, yet so few people know about it. That could be because, though the end user is the general retail buying public, this demographic of our population rarely sees or cares to see what goes on behind the scenes.
Art licensing can work in a variety of ways. It can be an individual artist approaching a manufacturer with an image that the artist feels will make the manufacturer’s products sell better. Sometimes a deal is made, more often not. When it is, the artist receives a negotiated royalty, a percentage of each sale. There are other types of licensing that work with sponsorships, such as an oil company sponsoring Nascar and they get to put their logo on an actual race car.
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