Somewhere on my list of things to do before I die I scribbled down that I wanted to make a million people laugh. I figured that would be quite an entertaining little landmark for myself. As luck would have it when I started a new venture last year with some ex-colleagues from university, one of the ideas I had for a viral marketing campaign will help a lot with this goal.

We developed a platform on JustOneSite that allowed users to create their own cartoons for free and then email it to their friends. The emailed cartoon would be placed into a marketing frame for JustOneSite so awareness of the site and its offering would be increased. It turns out that making cartoons isn’t quite as easy as it looked. While we did witness some pretty good ones from JustOneSite users, there weren’t enough decent cartoons made for the concept to really go viral.

One of the happy side-effects of the JustOneSite project however was that I discovered I had some talent for making cartoons. In October last year, I created a cartoon blog for myself called Wonkie CartOOns!. Wonkie has grown well over the last 8 months and even was ranked as having the best post on a South African blog written in 2008 in the annual SA blogging awards (Click Bring me the head of Kgalema Motlanthe to read that post).