It was the year 2015 and my primary job was facing a huge cutback in hours. So I began to search for alternate ways to make money for my family. I worked in media/design at the time, and I still wanted to work from home, so I tried to find a way to make my cat internet famous.
Now this was a failed attempt so I'll digress to mention that I'm still not attempting to do this. But I wanted to share some of my failures here on my Steemit blog.
It all started with a cute picture of my cat, Tanner (whose nickname is Hoppy Cat):
Which I took back in Johnson City, TN (where she was rescued). I uploaded the picture to Imgur:
Where the picture made it to the 1st page of Imgur for the day.
I don't know if I was expecting to get a call from Grumpy Cat's agent or what I was expecting, but nothing happened.
That was when I realized that there was already a famous cat that stands up named George the Cat; and actually, cats who stand up aren't that uncommon.
So I was on the verge of a marketing crisis. I had people to the left of me saying my cat doesn't really hop, and therefore her nickname of Hoppy Cat was kind of dumb. I had people to the right of me saying that their "great aunt's sister's cat does the same thing - it's cute, but nothing too special."
Around the same time I started a number of social networking pages for my cat.
I paid for advertisers to draw traffic to an Instagram account for "Hoppy Cat" which ultimately I stopped posting to back in 2015.
Twitter was a bust for our meager campaign.
On YouTube we had a slightly larger audience of 8 children. But after working so hard to see if the Internet would adopt "Hoppy" as one of its pet cats, it was actually our kitten Pwaffles that had the most views of all on the channel (at a paltry 58k views).
I did receive an offer from someone to license Pwaffle's "Kitten in a Shoe" YouTube video, which was around $500. But I declined the offer because the buyer wanted exclusive rights - and for no other individuals to have the rights to the video.
I couldn't even consider the offer by that point because the video was already on EllenTube and EllenTube's Facebook page - not to mention I'd already given permission for another company to add it to a compilation video.
On Tumblr we were doing all right but struggled to come up with engaging content:
We tried to market t-shirts based on a well-received photo set we created on Tumblr.
But even that was a bust.
My mom bought 1 t-shirt and sent it to my niece. And since the t-shirt website had a selling threshold in order to cash out, we didn't even make a dollar off of that transaction.
So I decided to do the best thing for us at the time.
I spent time with my cat offline rather than sending her adrift on the Internet. Though every once and a while we receive new fans at her largely abandoned Facebook page (shout out to the Middle East, where most of her fans are from).
Meanwhile, I stopped working from home and I now work in pharmacy claims management.
But my cats are still super cute and loved. We even have a dog now, too (a rescue pup from Puerto Rico):
The only Instagram Tanner / Hoppy Cat will be on any time soon is my weight loss Instagram account I made to try to push myself to become a healthier version of me. And she usually only makes it on there since she joins me in my treadmill walks.
She likes to sit on my treadmill desk while I am walking and I get a workout with my arms when I pet her.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I figured one of the best ways to introduce myself would be with a story. So for what it's worth, once upon a time I failed at marketing my cat's Internet persona.
Maybe offline I will ask Hoppy Cat which alt coins I should invest in and let you know what happens. :)
Until next time, nice to meet you Steemit community!