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How Internet Cartoonist Rick London Made It To The Top

The way that Rick London crafted and organized Londons Times Cartoons and it's peripheral shops was a brilliant move in my mind, as a marketing major. Though Rick was not formally educated at the time of launching the venture, he had an instinctive sixth sense of knowing what was missing in the cartoon world.

Rick focused his cartoons into themes, usually different business themes from law to science to medicine. He also utilized society such as relationships, sports, war, philosophy, religion, etc. Anything that was a topic of interest in which journals were published, Rick wrote cartoons in that arena. He made call after call. He knew it was a numbers game. After a hundred calls a day, he usually made a sale or two. He was building his portfolio and bringing in a few shekels for beans and rice.

Since Rick was living hand-to-mouth at the time, if the answer was "no, we don't have the budget" which it often was, Rick would offer the cartoon as a barter for a product or service to run the cartoon in their catalogs, websites, or other publications. This worked at least 50% of the time, and Rick was able to barter the cartoon images for everything from fishing tackle to food. Food was his main goal at the start because at times, he was not eating, simply working day and night. Until this day, he has a four year running barter with one natural food company where he receives a huge box of natural food and vitamins in trade for a single black and white cartoon that is published on their hard copy mail-out catalog

It was a cold winter in 1997. Rick was living and working from an abandoned Mississippi warehouse. He was not eating well but had made some good trades with fishing tackle companies to put his fishing-related cartoons on their sites. He took the tackle and lures (sometimes live bait he dug up from the woods) and would fish after working in the late afternoon, sometimes into the night until he had enough fish to make a meal. This man knew how to survive. It was like living and working on Walden Pond.

Though he still enjoys the negotiation process of bartering, he does so less than when he started. He started out of need. Now he is the one solicited by publishers and authors who need his work. He had vision when he created his cartoons into categories that would fit into trade journals and business websites. He knew what he was doing when others thought he was a little "mad".

The Internet had not yet evolved into what it is today when Rick started. Yahoo! was about the only "goodie" on the web. There were blogs but they were known as bulletin boards and rarely used for any marketing purposes. Rick had to use the phone most the time to make his deals and get his name known. He couldn't google anything because there was no Google. All he had at the start was a free domain website (he couldn't afford a www) and about fifty cartoons. I knew this hard-working man would make it; I had no idea he would be at the top in ten years. He is.

I am hard-pressed to find someone who is so committed to a project. A day does not go by that he does not do some article marketing, blogging, revamping his ppc campaign, and even finds time to write new cartoons. At age fifty-three, his mind is sharper than a teenager, and that is not an embellishment. It is almost a phenomena.

Though he is from Mississippi originally (where I met him), he is not from that part of Mississippi that is known to produce such genius; the delta which brought us William Faulkner, Elvis, Grisham, Willie Morris, Morgan Freeman, B.B. King, Eudora Welty, and others. Though Ms. is not known for its education, it is usually last of the fifty states, it still produces some genius. I brushed shoulders with one.

I don't see Rick anymore as we have both moved on and are on other sides of the country. He was like a dad to me. He was trustworthy and kind. And he was very very smart. I still stay in touch via email and he always answers as soon as he can. I order products from his stores which have hundreds of thousands of cartoon collectibles, funny tshirts, things for the office, and all kinds of gifts. I love that man and the work that he has done. And the fact that he started it all with just a thought, virtually not a penny to his name. An amazing story, it truly is.

Article Source: http://articles.yournetguru.com

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