EVER SINCE THE explosion of the internet and the world wide web, small businesses and one-man-bands have been led to believe that world is their oyster and that unfathomable riches lie a mere mouse click away by using social media and social networking. And, of course, these one-man-bands include cartoonists and caricaturists.
Certainly, there is an awful lot of information and a continually growing smorgasbord of websites that promise fantastic results if you 'do it this way'.
I have done a fair bit of thrashing about the internet, trying 'this' for a couple of months and then 'that' for a few weeks and found that, to be honest, a lot of it doesn't really work. My motivation is te drive people to my cartooning and caricaturing website in the hope that they then make enquiries about carticatures and cartoons.
Most of the platforms available or the services on offer are thinly disguised revenue streams for their creators who have jumped onto the social media/social networking bandwagon. Many of them, of course, are also SMEs trying to manipulate the web to their best advantage as, indeed, we all are, no less the struggling cartoonist.
But some stuff does work. It's simply a question of finding what works for you.
After my several years investigations and trial and error experiences, I can report back on the systems which really and truly do help a one-man-band cartoonist/caricaturist such as myself. And these methods might be generally useful to freelancers from all disciplines.
1) WordPress
WordPress is the only way to build your own website these days. Although you can always have one built for you by an expert and then get used to using it through the entirely easy and intuitive content management system included. Gone are the days when this lonely caricaturist had to scour the land for a web designer and then end up with a site which, while good and certainly far better than anything he could have produced, never quite did everything he wanted. 
With WordPress' billions of available SEO'd themes and multitudinous plugins to add all the functions you would expect from a professional website, a cartoonist's site need no longer look like a static block of pictures with neither productive links nor Google juice.
Having a history of struggles with programmes like Freeway, DreamWeaver and others, the arrival of WordPress was like being a caricaturist released from a dark and fetid dungeon.
2) Facebook
So, you have your fantastic, sleek, easy-to-use WordPress site. You're a cartoonist or a caricaturist with a message of humour to spread to the world. That's it then, isn't it? You're done. Visitors will flood to your site.
Not quite. While every website, once Google-alerted, will gain a trickle of visitors, you will only start gaining business by actively promoting your site, for cartooning or otherwise, through the few social media channels that, in my opinion, actually work.
As a caricaturist, I have found Facebook invaluable for spreading the word about my activity. It has fantastic and easy-to-use graphic capabilities whcih are perfect for visual media such as cartoons and it offers a high speed word-of-mouth system of referral that leads to real work.
Once you have connected your WordPress blog to your Facebook account, your exposure is more than doubled. And there is additional interlinking that can be done between other social media sites which further enhances your visibility.
3) Twitter
At first glance,a tool for idle gossip and time wasting, Twitter has become my first port of call for self-promotion. But any cartoonist can have fun and idle conversation while doing so.
Only yesterday I swapped some banter with a 'Virtual Assistant' I had never heard of before and she put me in touch with another Twitterer who was looking for a cartoonist. This sort of thing happens all the time.
Not only that, you can, once again, link your blog posts, about cartooning or caricaturing, to Twitter and, perhaps, use third party programmes like TweetAdder to automate the process on an ongoing basis (whilst regularly changing the list to avoid an annoyance factor and not using it every day!)
4) paper.li
This is a brilliant Twitter add-on. paper.li allows you to aggregate information based on links posted to Twitter on any subject (eg: cartoons) you might think is relevant to you. What it means is that several hundred Twitter users are alerted to the fact that they have appeared in your 'newspaper' and they thank you for it and most of them follow you. As it is essential to have a large following in Twitter, paper.li is one of the most effective and considerate ways of amassing them.
I have about thirty 'newspapers' being generated all the time and I build a following and a good reputation whilst doing nothing! (Which is the ideal goal for any self-respecting caricaturist.)
5) Ecademy and other blogging platforms
Whenever you post a new blog on your site, you can see how powerful it can be when it is linked to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But don't stop there. I always re-post my new blogs onto Ecademy as well. From there it is often 'liked' and tweeted by others, thus gaining even more exposure.
6) Sharing Buttons
On your own blog and other platforms, make use of the 'sharing' buttons. Don't limit to blasting your latest cartoon or caricature to Twitter and Facebook, but also to StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit and the others. These will make sure that you double or even triple the number views of that particular post.
7) Real Life Interaction
In the end, though, all this computer based social media manipulatioin is rather mechanical. Even the tone of many blogs seem to have been machine-produced. With a subtle combinatoin of these tools and regular real life meetings, cartoonists such as myself have been able to keep going through the recession and look forward to a bright and rosy future!
