How This ‘How-To’ Works
This is a wordy site and blog. It’s designed to be an online learning resource - one that over time will become pretty comprehensive on the subject of audience-building.
It’s not necessarily meant for quick digestion… In fact, you’ll probably want to read over parts or all of it again at different times, depending on where you and your project are at.
All in all, this How-To is a work in progress. Beyond what you can see here now, it will be completed in installments. Pages will likely often be revised. New pictures, links and videos might be added. Once it’s completed, I might update it at any given point, perhaps extensively, when it seems relevant to do so.
OVERALL STRUCTURE
I’ve structured this How-To in two ways – as a site and as a blog. Structure itself has been my main obstacle because the field is circular and the information is usually interrelated. That said, I’ve settled on the 9 elements this site is composed of:
Preamble – This section gives the background to me and the site.
This Page - that explains how everything works.
Introduction – this page covers general ideas about the web that you need to understand in order to approach building an audience effectively.
An ‘Audience’ section which contains:
- ‘How To BUILD An Audience’ - a section which mostly outlines the concepts and objectives you’ll need to know when using the web to build an audience for your projects. (Final installments to come soon.)
- ‘How To KEEP An Audience’ - a section which is mostly an outline of attitudes you’ll need to have along with practical advice. (Will be added soonish.)
A ‘Tools’ section - which in many ways is the ‘how’ of this ‘How-To’. It contains specifics on many of the tools at your disposal. (Will be added later on)
Case Studies - I hope to get others in the field to elaborate on their own audience-building strategies. (Will be added later on)
Links and Sources – I’ve included links to sites you should keep an eye on and a glossary of people, sites, panels and articles I’ve used to put this how-to together. Where relevant, I’ve attributed major ideas to the people I got them from.
The eighth element is particularly important – for you and for this site – it’s the Comments section. Each page will be comments facilitated. Please leave questions, answers to others questions, information that builds upon the info on that specific page, anecdotes that coincide with that page’s content, and your experiences dealing with what is covered on that page. Through that we’ll begin to build a community and knowledge-base and help each other with our endeavors.
Lastly, over time I hope to create a system of tags you can use as another way to navigate all the information here and bring it all together. That way you can hone in on particular ideas or areas of interest.
“How To Build an Audience – And Keep It!” is also a BLOG. I’ll use the blog to build on the subject of the site, to interview people with useful and relevant experiences – hopefully expert specialists in certain fields like PR and marketing or people who have had tangential but related successes with levering the web to create community and opportunities. As I mentioned above, there are holes in my knowledge and I hope to compensate for some of what I’m currently not comfortable writing about through the guest blog entries. Examples might include more detailed info on roll-out models, DVD and theatrical releases and utilizing ads to help your strategy. Lastly, I have some ideas for challenges to help you get nimble and agile at thinking about all this stuff. But that’s for later and we’re not there yet.
I hope to post fairly regularly but will only post when it seems there’s useful information to add and when it doesn’t interfere with my own endeavours.
I really do hope we’ll begin to build community through this project. As any of the key players in the field will tell you, it’s a pretty level playing field, we’re all just starting out, there’s loads to discover and we all can benefit from the sharing of those discoveries.
