>>Which do you think would bring more traffic and commissions? <<
In my observation, periodic events tend to do better, because people think of them when the announcement goes up and they know it's not open all the time.
The only really successful all-the-time project I can think of is Story Sketches by meeksp and she does that by doing free illustrations of ongoing projects -- which means other creators quickly build a 'stack' of things we'd like her to draw, and submit something new after each piece is posted. That's less likely to work with a project where every item is a sale item rather than a freebie.
>>Advertising is my concern-- most communities on here that provide platforms for advertising would probably get fed up with too many announcements per week<<
The rule here is that intermittent projects can post whenever they update. Ongoing or daily projects can post about once a week, or when they do something extra special. So you could be right about getting buried if the project is ongoing -- the intermittent ones seem to attract more attention.
>>In other words, the traffic may be about the same as if I only held a two-day event.<<
That's likely. Consider your work style too -- do you deal better with stuff all at once, or spread out? I like to keep the Poetry Fishbowl concise, because then I can just devote a whole day to writing poems. meeksp spreads out her requests in Story Sketches. djinni takes requests during Icon Day but then spreads out the painting of the icons over several weeks.
>>I see people on my feed who practice crowdfunding and have friends lists of hundreds of people. How did you do that?<<
I built for it, and I've been doing the Poetry Fishbowl for 4 years now. My LJ is a little older; it started in summer of 2007. I looked for people who were creative, or loved reading, or had some interesting expertise. I browsed friends' journals and friended people who made insightful comments. When I saw important issues come up, I wrote anchor posts about them to attract more eyeballs. I posted polls and things to encourage audience interaction. Later on I was able to generate a lot of cross-traffic by boosting the signal for crowdfunding activities, which encourages the creators to do the same for my projects.
In crowdfunding, I made a point of creating a range of prices -- one poem gets posted free, there are different sizes of poetry to buy, and then sponsored poems go up so everyone can see them for free. Scrapbooked poetry pages have a range also.
I recommend the article "How to Boost Your Audience (http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/how-to-boost-your-audience.html)."
Thoughts
In my observation, periodic events tend to do better, because people think of them when the announcement goes up and they know it's not open all the time.
The only really successful all-the-time project I can think of is Story Sketches by
>>Advertising is my concern-- most communities on here that provide platforms for advertising would probably get fed up with too many announcements per week<<
The rule here is that intermittent projects can post whenever they update. Ongoing or daily projects can post about once a week, or when they do something extra special. So you could be right about getting buried if the project is ongoing -- the intermittent ones seem to attract more attention.
>>In other words, the traffic may be about the same as if I only held a two-day event.<<
That's likely. Consider your work style too -- do you deal better with stuff all at once, or spread out? I like to keep the Poetry Fishbowl concise, because then I can just devote a whole day to writing poems.
>>I see people on my feed who practice crowdfunding and have friends lists of hundreds of people. How did you do that?<<
I built for it, and I've been doing the Poetry Fishbowl for 4 years now. My LJ is a little older; it started in summer of 2007. I looked for people who were creative, or loved reading, or had some interesting expertise. I browsed friends' journals and friended people who made insightful comments. When I saw important issues come up, I wrote anchor posts about them to attract more eyeballs. I posted polls and things to encourage audience interaction. Later on I was able to generate a lot of cross-traffic by boosting the signal for crowdfunding activities, which encourages the creators to do the same for my projects.
In crowdfunding, I made a point of creating a range of prices -- one poem gets posted free, there are different sizes of poetry to buy, and then sponsored poems go up so everyone can see them for free. Scrapbooked poetry pages have a range also.
I recommend the article "How to Boost Your Audience (http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/how-to-boost-your-audience.html)."