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Market Your Site with a Smile by: Dessy Oundian If you have a business, you know that the most important thing, yet the hardest, is to get your product out to your clients. It does not matter if it is a T-shirt, a baby crib or the latest toilet seat. Getting your product to you clients is called MARKETTING and it costs MONEY. Of course, it makes money too, otherwise why would the big boys spend billions of dollars to advertise and market? Right'¦ But if your budget is limited, how can you find the way to your customers' wallets? Two words: Be Creative! Put your imagination at work, combine it with technology and come up with an Internet Marketing Strategy. You will be amazed how cheap, yet highly effective a properly designed Marketing Campaign can be. The best way I know to bring more traffic to your site without spending too much money is the word of mouth. If you have 'sticky content'¯ your visitors will come back for more, and they will share your URL with their friends. A good idea is to use appropriate humor content on a special section on your web site, because as any good marketing specialist will tell you, humor is one of the two things that sell most. Humor is wonderful for getting attention. It can be extraordinarily effective when it is used correctly. People will actually look for your site, talk about it and email links if it's good. Why? Because people like funny things. They relax and pay attention when they know you have a sense of humor. It puts them in a good mood, and it creates a more comfortable atmosphere and a more positive image for your company. It makes you easy to approach, and easy to remember. And that's a fact. But where do you start your quest? Here are a few links for: 1. Daily cartoons '“ a very good/cheaper than you think idea. A funny cartoon will bring you more repeated visitors than anything else. You can get a license to use a daily feature from a cartoonist, or if you have a budget you can even commission some custom work for your site. Prices vary. Check out http://www.evlad.com 2. Humorous column '“ another winning idea. Finding a good writer that will fit your web site can be a bit tricky, though. Here is a link to one that I personally like: http://www.barrylank.com 3. Ecards -- a great example of viral marketing. All the big sites have a special ecards marketing budget. Some of them are spending millions per year only for quality content. You can have an ecards section on your site easily and for a lot less with the services of http://www.cardsup.com 4. Free screensavers '“ it's a good idea to offer free humorous screensavers to your visitors. Each screensaver is a reminder of your web site and carries a link that the user can click and come back to you. http://www.humordrive.com Another way to obtain quality content is to contact any of the syndicates that distribute comics and columns. Here is a short list: http://www.creators.com Creators syndicates a bunch of cartoons: Agnes, Flight Deck, BC, Wizard of Id, Miss Peach, Rugrats and Ballard, just to name a few. http://www.kingfeatures.com/subg.htm King Features hosts several dozen cartoons including: Hagar the Horrible, Curtis, Dennis the Menace, The Better Half, The Amazing Spiderman, Baby Blues, Zits, and many more http://www.latsi.com/ The L.A. Times Syndicate has fewer cartoons in syndication. It features the cartoons of Single Slices, 9 to '5
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