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Several years ago, the trend of creating viral animation clips for distribution on the internet took off. Since then, several character brands have become wildly popular and successful thanks to the power of the internet. Some examples are Pucca, Mashimaro and Happy Tree Friends.

This article takes a look at what could be done today to new character brands who wish to emulate their predecessors' success.

Mini Viral Animation Clips

You can consider producing a series of animated shorts to distribute for free on the Internet through popular channels like YouTube, Google Videos, Meta Café, etc. Creating a fanbase and getting the word out for your product through this method can be very effective. One of my favorite strategies to get a lot of hits in a short time on YouTube is to submit a video response to a current hot video of a related topic. This method can earn you many views as it tags onto a video everybody else is viewing.

My Space and Facebook

My Space and Facebook are very popular cyber hangouts, otherwise known as 'social web 2.0 sites'. Many of the registered users on these portals are teens and adults in their twenties to thirties. It is both easy and free to join these social sites. You can create pages on them to market your products, network and make many friends, join interest groups, set up your own interest groups and so much more. With a monthly page view of 70 billion for Facebook alone, it is not hard to imagine creating a following for your product on such social networks.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a Web 2.0 portal established by renowned marketing expert and author Seth Godin. It is a hybrid between a blog and a static website. Members set up a Squidoo page on any one topic. Unlike a blog, which is a collection of thoughts or snippets of information, put together on a daily - or sometimes hourly - basis, the page is created once. You may go back to revise it, but it is always a one page document. Visitors are allowed to comment, leave links, and vote on the page. These features make Squidoo very interactive, creating the best of the new social Web 2.0. Visibility rate through using Squidoo is very high as it is optimized well for the search engines, making it a great platform to promote and sell products and services. Two of my Squidoo lens garnered high popularity in a very short time and one of them was voted 'Lens of the Day'.

Blogs

Blogs are extremely powerful tools for marketing and they are programmed and structured in a way where search engines can pick up their presence and entries very fast. This means free traffic and in the case where your blog is optimized well for the search engines, this means loads of free traffic! This translates to a high visibility rate for your products. Blogs are also great for encouraging responses and collecting feedback. If you have a great product already, it means great testimonies. If not, take it as feedback to improve your product on.

This article was contributed by Aldric Chang - a creative businessman who is active in music composition and production, internet marketing, casual games production, animation production, cartoon production and character licensing. His 3d animation studio - Mediafreaks - is focused on producing high-end animation work for documentary producers, advertising houses and cartoon animated series - with projects ranging from the animation of dinosaurs to the visualization of natural disasters and something as chic as 3d jewelry animations.  

For more interesting articles on the business side of animation, you can visit the Mediafreaks animation blog.  

You can also visit the Mediafreaks Animation Showcase Site for an extravaganza of the coolest and funniest free animations on the net.