2005 August (2)

Vinny Lingham’s Blog

GOx Launches

A friend of mine launched his new comic website today! It’s amazing how people are using the web to carve out little niche’s for themselves. The cartoons are pretty funny, (as you can see, above) and here is a copy of the email he sent out to launch the site:

I love creating GOx and love the reactions I get from people. Cartoons though, are notoriously difficult to sustain. Each GOx takes a few hours to draw. The www site is actually very complex and has taken months of development. Ongoing admin is another few hours a day. Newspapers, the traditional market for cartoons, face declining sales and are loathe to take on new cartoons. So for many reasons, GOx is currently a web and E-mail offering. GOx will live or die by paid subscriptions, and by word-of-mouth marketing from people who are ‘touched’ by a GOx cartoon (or maybe by people who are ‘touched’ themselves). I would like to be able to make a living producing GOx. I’d like to be able to share a laugh with as many people as possible all around the world every working day. I’d like your help in getting there.

You can help me by subscribing, and by sharing GOx.

A ‘light’ version of GOx is available for free to anyone on the web at http://www.gox.cc

Anyone can sign-up for a 2 week, full feature free trial. The free trial and paid subscriptions get
- daily E-mail delivery of the latest GOx cartoon, Mon-Fri
- access to all archives (which should become worthwhile in a few months time!)
- access to high-resolution versions of any GOx for personal use
- the ability to send_to_friend any GOx cartoon, when you just want to share a laugh with someone.
- the ability to make an E-card out of any GOx cartoon, for when you want to use a GOx cartoon to share a thought/message with someone special.
- the ability to give a GOx subscription to someone as a present.
- perhaps the most important feature of a GOx subscription though, is that you can read the ‘artists comments’. I included this feature because over the years there have been several occasions when I’ve not understood a cartoon and wanted the joke or relevance explained. This feature does just this, and its been well received in testing. Of course, you get to see what I was thinking, which may not be a good thing at all!
Subscriptions are cheap: an annual subscription is $1.99 per month ($23.88 annually), and a month-by-month subscription is just $2.99. GOx uses PayPal and Setcom so your purchases are handled securely. Of course, subscriptions are what keeps me alive and able to produce a new GOx each day.

Sharing too is cheap - you can send any GOx to a friend from our site (or just fwd this mail to your mates). You can send E-cards with personalised messages. You can give someone a GOx subscription.

The point is, that at only $1.99 per month less all sorts of costs, I need a lot of subscribers before this works out. I would really appreciate your help. I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t believe, from the reactions to date, that there is something good here…So, please help me and get a laugh out of doing so by subscribing at www.gox.cc (the free trial is a subscription option) and by telling your friends. With some luck and your support, GOx can get off to a good start.

AskJeeves Launches Paid Search Placements

Ok, well that happened sooner than we expected! AJ has just launched their sponsored listings program to compete with Google Adwords.

In the short term, I expect they’ll continue to use Google, until they build up enough advertisers, but I expect they will not renew their contract with Google in the long term.

My opinion: This is not a clever move. All the savvy marketers out there know that AJ actually reduces the value of Google traffic and lowers prices due to poor converting traffic. By going solo, this will expose the weakness in their traffic quality and they will now make less money on direct advertisers than they would have by piggy-backing on Google’s 200,000 advertisers and getting a high revenue share from Google. But that’s just my opinion…

Vinny Lingham is an International Award winning Entrepreneur & Search Engine Marketer. He is currently CEO of Synthasite, a Web 2.0 Startup.

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