I used to think that most advertisements were stupid. Watching cartoons as a kid I never bugged my parents to buy stupid things like moon shoes or whatever the new super soaker was, which means about thirty percent of the time I spent watching television was wasted on companies trying to get money from me.

Recently, though, I learned that that’s not what marketing is about. In the end, technically everything is about money, sure. But advertisements aren’t expected to get revenue for every time anyone sees the product. Marketing is all about quantity over quality.

Just think about all of the mascots and jingles of all the fast food, car makers, repair, insurance, and home improvement things you have unconsciously memorized through commercials and the radio, not to mention the internet. Advertisements aren’t about getting you to spend money, its about spreading that thing’s influence. If everybody has heard of something, it must be important or good, right?

That’s actually one reason why I’m not advertising my blog anywhere. This is just for me, and whoever wants to read it is welcome to, but the primary goal is to get me to write more, which obviously is working quite well. Perhaps once I actually have meaningful things to say or can actually start achieving something with my website I’ll start broadcasting my stuff, but until then I don’t care if any of this stuff stays in the shadows. It’s kind of where it belongs for the time being, anyway.

So if you’re trying to do something on your own, like a blog, or a comic strip, or anything really, it won’t help to tell your friend all about it. It wouldn’t do me any good to tell my friend about how complex and ‘real’ my universe, Nacre Then is. Maybe it gets that one friend to look at it, sure. But its way easier and more efficient to just throw the name out there. Don’t talk about the specific kind of humor your comic strip uses, just throw out the comic’s name and advertise it on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or Imgur. People will check it out, and if they like it, they’ll stay.

When working as a salesperson, your quality should be in the product, not the advertisement. Put the good stuff in the content, and only spend marketing time on spreading the name more quickly. If you want everybody in a crowd to know your name, you don’t introduce yourself individually when you can just shout your name out across the crowd. That shout isn’t going to get people to like you, of course, but it may get people to investigate why somebody’s shouting. After that, it becomes your job to give them a good reason to stay there.

Influence tends to spread exponentially. One person can tell tell other people, who each will tell ten other people, and so on until tens of thousands of people have heard it. There’s no reason to slow that chain down by telling only one person. Tell everybody. Tell everyone and then when you’re done with that go and tell more people. Good luck.