How to Boost Your Audience

[ysabetwordsmith]

The better an audience a crowdfunded project has, the higher its chances of success. Here are some tips for improving the activity and size of your audience, useful for cyberfunded creativity and for blogging in general.


To make an audience more lively:

• Invite comments by asking questions.
• Praise people when they comment.
• Track your main topics: go to your Profile page, select "Organize" and then "Manage Tags." Look under "Your Tags" and sort by "Usage." Click each tag topic to display its number of posts and other data.
• Ask your audience if they like the topics you are posting about most frequently and what topics they would like more (or less) of.
• Post polls.
• Watch for active people who interest you. Subscribe to their DW journal and/or grant them access to yours.

To make an audience bigger:

• Post on other blogs that have a big, active audience and are related to your topic.
• Join some networking communities, such as addme.
• Watch for people whose interests match yours, and add them to your Circle.
• Join communities related to your topic and post frequently there.
• Scan the membership lists of communities you frequent, visit other members' journals, and connect with the ones that appeal to you.
• Encourage your current readers to link to your blog and tell their friends about it.
• Announce that you will release new material when a target number of new Friends join. (This idea courtesy of Ave Pasifika.)

More and better content will, of course, help with both of the above goals:

• Post frequently. Once a week is the minimum for an effective blog, several times a week is better, and daily is best.
• If you cannot post frequently, post regularly. Pick a day of the week or several days in the month when your blog always updates, and tell people when.
• Post good material. If it is dull, ugly, or difficult to decipher then people will probably not pay much attention to it.
• Posting experiments, failures, and/or works-in-progress can draw attention if you discuss your goals and what is going right or wrong. This attracts other people who are trying to learn similar skills.
• Post original material. If they can't get it anywhere else, people are more likely to hang around your blog to get the goodies.
• Relay interesting material. If there is news related to your blog topic(s), post an excerpt and link to the original article, then add some personal comments. When people find a good source for news that interests them, they tend to check it often.

What are some of your ideas for boosting an audience?

(This is a revised version of something I previously posted over on the LiveJournal community Crowdfunding.)