Raving Fans
With any luck you will end up with a core of raving fans. They will be following you because they like you and what you do. The idea is to build this group up without losing too many along the way. One way to both reward this group and to get some sort of revenue is to use a platform like Patreon.
A subset of fans and regular subscribers will be happy to pay for extra stuff, as well as support your creative endeavor. The challenge is to reward these fans without it becoming overwhelming. A key approach here is "Underpromise, overdeliver". That just means to set their expectations fairly low but wow them with what they get.
Some elements to consider are:
Some elements to consider are:
- Frequency: how often will you be expected to release content?
- Cost: how much does it cost you (in time as well as money) to produce this content compared to the income you get from it?
- Exclusivity: will the content be exclusive to these fans or will you release it later to the wider audience?
- Variety: how different will this content be compared to your usual output?
- Interaction: will you interact more with this audience than your wider audience?
- Tiers: will you just have one tier or two or more, getting more expensive but with more personalised rewards?
Here are some ideas for payable raving fan content.
- Behind the scenes: these are glimpses of your process rather that the polished output that everyone gets to see. This gives an intimate and exclusive look at how you create the content the fans love. Whilst you can release snippets on social media like Instagram, the idea is that these are teasers that will lead your raving fans to support you more.
- Early access: this gives your fans early access to content you will release to a wider audience later. You can even ask for feedback but beware of what you ask for!
- Exclusives: this is great content created only for your raving fans. This has an extra cost but will certainly add to them feeling part of your gang.
- Outtakes / bloopers: in creating your usual content you will undoubtedly stuff up here and there. Save the best of these for your raving fans.
- Questionnaires and quizzes: reach out and ask what sort of content they want to see. Maybe limit the options available rather than open up the floor totally, keeping in mind "Underpromise, overdeliver".
- Discounts: if you have any paid products (CDs, digital artwork, models etc) you can give your fans a discount code. I suggest making these time limited but your call.
- Exclusive live chats: part of your usual content may be interactive chats where people can ask you questions. You can also limit these to your raving fans to get a more intimate audience. I suggest you have a helper to moderate and point out interesting questions as well as screening the nutters. This leaves you free to chat.