Chewing Pencils

I began this series with a post which talked about establishing yourself tax-wise to give yourself the best possible chance at landing some of the larger clients. In part 2, I will talk about some important ways of getting yourself out in the market and competing with some of the big guns in the cartoon business.

Before I do though, I should say that for this entire series, I will be focussing only on the business aspects of cartooning. I won’t be talking about drawing technique, the tools you should use, computer software and the like. These things are all important, but are largely personal choice and don’t have a huge impact on your business dealings. Afterall, a client will not care if you use a Mac or a PC - the finished product will be her main concern.

I will also be assuming that you have you have both a folio and website. Without these you stand little chance of making it in the current cartooning climate.

So, with your work ready to be displayed and all your tax obligations fulfilled, you’re ready to start drawing for money. You sit back at your drawing table and wait for the emails and phone calls to start flowing in. Oprah becomes your best friend, and pretty soon you’re scanning the employment section looking for any sort of job that will put some food on your table.

The cold, harsh reality of cartooning is that it is hard, really hard, to make a full time living from it. Very few do, and even less of do it by freelancing. And to have any chance at making it, your name needs to be the one that clients see or think of when the need for some cartoon work arises. If you’re not promoting yourself and advertising widely, then there is little point picking up your pencil.

Marketing yourself isn’t much fun. But you have to do it.

At the very least, every email you send should have you listed as a cartoonist in the signature, with your contact details and a link to your website. This way, a potential client will sub-consciously link your name with cartooning. Everything you send through the post and all the stationery you use (envelopes etc) should also list your details. There is little additional cost for this sort of marketing, but in the long term it is quite effective.

Potential clients should also be approached directly. If you think you could improve a particular publication, then get the details of the editor, give them a call and make your pitch. They’ll probably say no, but at least they now know you. And if you follow up every so often asking if there is any cartooning work coming up, you become the dripping tap that only a paying job will turn off!

The phone book and artist registers are also worth thinking about, though in my experience these are of limited use. Most of them have so many people already listed that you get swamped amongst a list of hundreds, perhaps thousands of names. I’ve never bothered with the phone book, though some of my friends swear by it. I’ve been listed in one register, but only got phone calls from people wanting lessons rather than any drawing jobs.

It’s no surprise that the internet has changed much of the way people find what they want. I have no data to back this up, but my guess is that 80-90% of people who are looking for somebody to do some drawing go directly to Google and type in ‘cartoonist’. If you have no website, they will never find you.

But the problems are still the same. At the time of writing this, a search for the word ‘cartoonist’ yielded 6 240 000 pages. My website, www.mattglover.com doesn’t appear at all on the first five pages - I gave up looking after that and I’m sure a client would too!

However, I’ve found that there are some handy things you can do to increase the amount of people that can find you through the internet. As I type this, 100% of my clients find me through the web so I think at least some of it must work!

1. Your site has to be optimised for selected key words. Early on, I decided to go for a smaller section of the market and optimised my site for the term ‘Australian Cartoonist’ instead of just ‘cartoonist.  Typing that into Google this afternoon saw me come in at number three. Nice.

2. It’s also worth getting listed on the sites that appear above you in Google. For instance, number two on the ‘Australian Cartoonist’ search is the Australian Cartoonists’ Association - I’m a member of this group and have a listing on their site.

3. Each of my cartoons are loaded onto my site with selected key words, making the individual cartoons appear in the Google image search as well as on the standard search pages. For instance, a few years ago I did a cartoon on the Christian practice of tithing (ie giving money to the church). If you type ‘tithing cartoon’ into Google, you’ll see my site come up as number 1 (today at least) and if you click on the ‘image’ tab the cartoon itself is the first one that appears. Clients can then contact me to either buy that cartoon or make an enquiry about something similar.

What all this means is that not everybody who goes looking for a cartoonist on Google will find my site directly. They might if they type in a search that my site is optimised for or a title I’ve given one of my cartoons, but they also might find me through the links I’ve established on sites that get listed far higher than mine. I don’t waste my time trying to optimise my site for terms that I know will have little impact on whether people will find me or not.

Optimising your site is a constant thing. Google often changes the algorithms that it uses to sort it’s search results, so while you might be listed quite highly one week, you can find yourself in Google oblivion the next. That’s why it is important to keep updating your pages, tweaking things here and there, and occassionally trying optimising your site for a different set of key words to attract some different clients.

It might seem like something just for the nerdy, tech types, but an efficient website should be an essential part of your strategy to win new clients. If you want to make any money from your drawing, I don’t think you can afford not to.