Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Marketing Funny Cartoons

You might have noticed that we allow people to display BifSniff cartoons on their own sites.

We felt, that it made perfect sense, as discussed in my previous post about online syndication.

As predicted by Bif, mostly it is the small version of the cartoon that people use - Bif spotted someone else providing mini toons small enough to fit in the sidebars of peoples blogs and websites and identified it as an excellent idea. So we cogged it off 'em ;).

If you display our funny cartoons on your site, the cartoon itself is a link back to our site, but we don't signpost that fact and so we don't get that many click throughs from them - despite the fact that the uptake has been pretty good.

I wonder if we should somehow signpost the fact that the cartoon is clickable... we don't want the cartoon to turn into too much of an 'ad' either though. We want people to want to have them on their sites. Without feeling we are encroaching too much on their space.

We recently increased the size of our branding on the small cartoons to clearly identify them as BifSniff cartoons. Which Bif had been at me for ages to do. I resisted it out of pure laziness, but I had to admit in the end it was absolutely essential.

But there's no way to measure the success or impact of that yet.

It has to be good for us though... Fear Factor Couple put our small cartoon on their Blog and then they got some great exposure - which means we get a part of that action too.

Bif noticed a spike in our traffic the other day, and he suspected it might be the Fear Factor exposure. Sure enough, when I took a look at their blog, they had just got some serious traffic to their site.

Now, not everyone who visits their site will notice the little cartoon in the sidebar, but a certain amount must. This can only be good for us. And at least now those that spot the cartoons can actually read the branding.

Hopefully the url BifSniff.com will even stick in some peoples minds!

Anyway, I'm just rambling now because it's past my bedtime, but I would like to say a BIG thank you to everyone who has liked our cartoons enough to put them on their own site.