Selling Yourself: Website

Now that you've established yourself as a hot-property comedian, you need a place where fans and promoters can visit so they can look at you, envy you and contact you. This is where your very own website comes into play. Follow these tips and before you'll know it, there will be an off-ramp of the information superhighway right at your doorstep!

1. Headshot - Make no mistake; you want people to know that it's your website, so it's preferable to have a large headshot image of you on the homepage. Either looking incredibly smug with yourself for no discernable reason, or looking particularly serious and thoughtful, as if what you do has serious and heavy artistic merit to it.

2. Achievements - Much like Your Blurb, your website homepage should have as many "achievements" and pieces of extraneous information (which mean nothing to the common punter) awkwardly crowbarred into the introduction as possible, almost as if attempting to grant the entire venture some sort of meaning.

3. Showreel - It is also useful to have a showreel on your website. A Showreel is a compilation video clip of all your "best bits", intended to impress potential bookers. There's no need to have the clips in a logical sequence, or the clips themselves to have any context whatsoever. Heavily utilise different clip transitions, such as star-wipes.  Make sure you have some popular music playing in the background throughout the showreel, but remember, not so loud as to distract the viewer, but not so quiet that they can actually make out any of the badly recorded and edited clips you are presenting to them.

4. Quotes - Remember to make use of the various quotes you've gathered and fabricated about yourself in Your Blurb. They can also go on the front page, or in a "Testimonials" section of your website. There's more liberty here to use unverifiable quotes and backhanded compliments to beef up your one-manpowered circlejerk. Always remember to end your quote section with something along these lines:

"Here mate, thought you were funny." - Some bloke after a gig

Guaranteed hilarity. This shows the reader that you actually do have a sense of humour and that people do think you're funny. It also displays the fact that you're in touch with the common everyday man; because normal people go around collecting things people have said about them and pay money to have those things displayed on a website.

5. Facebook - To make sure people regularly visit your website so that your counter steadily goes up, make a "Fan Page" about yourself on Facebook. You can do this after about three open mic gigs. Usually the fan population is made up of closely-related family members of the comic. Science has still not completely deciphered why amateur comics have Facebook pages, but common sense would suggest it has something to do with attention and ego.

6. Blog - A blog is another useful way of encouraging people to visit your site.  Aggressive and favourable introspection and self-congratulation is the most common use of a blog by a comic. Standard blog posts usually consist of a turgid and rose-tinted account of a recent gig, what they enjoyed about it, how the audience enjoyed it, a skimmed over (usually omitted) admittance of failure of a certain aspect of their act, finally finishing with a wry joke or pun in a faux-cheerful manner and a list of their upcoming gigs, as if anyone was reading. A certain level of self-deprecation usually envelopes each blog post, but is strangely absent from the comic's persona, on stage and off. Also, spell-check is optional.

So there you go, lots of people checking out hot, hot comedy websites thanks to these tips! Try them out and make 'em laugh!