CURIOUS TALE SATURDAYS: ARCHIVE

Marketing Update

Saturday, Feb. 25, 2017

Ahoy!

I've been mostly off the radar this week, nose to the grindstone, working intensively on all things related to marketing the Curious Tale. I had hoped to be able to report completing much more than I'm actually going to be able to, because I still have a good twenty hours of work ahead of me. Nonetheless! It has been a hugely productive week.

CuriousTale.org

First! The long-planned major website revamp and update is substantially complete. There's still countless more work to be done, but I have completed my core objective: make the website much more intuitive for new visitors to navigate, and in particular make it easy for them to find my active content, the Prelude, my Patreon fund, and my social media page.

Besides that, I've updated a lot of webpages that had obsolete information. I've made numerous formatting improvements, although this is a never-ending project. I've also learned an important lesson: Try to avoid using concrete dates, like the year 2015, which appeared in many places on the site in reference to "upcoming" content or improvements.

After a few more hours of work, I'll be ready to look at my Patreon page and make updates there as needed. I'd like to record a new video, but I don't currently have the means to make a video with better production values than the existing one. I have been considering buying a dedicated webcam for streaming, and will probably do so. However, I probably won't wait on this to go ahead with my marketing plan.

Among my other website improvements, I was pleased to discover that, on modern mobile devices, the site is not as completely unusable as I had thought. It's far from optimal, but it's usable, and that's good enough for now. Nonetheless I had already created a redirect script for small browser window sizes and was in the process of designing a pared-down alternative website―something that may still happen in 2017, especially if people report to me that such a thing is needed.

Lastly, a bit of trivia: It gave me serious dejà vu to be exposed to so many different webpages that have basically the same text on them―the bit about what The Curious Tale is. I changed some of these pages to cut down on that.

The Immediate Next Steps

Something else I've been doing in the past week is reestablishing myself in various online communities headed by YouTubers whose work I particularly enjoy. These communities are going to be some of my first marketing targets. Due to my personal ethics, not to mention the rules and ethos of those communities, let alone the effectiveness of such techniques, I can't simply march in there and spam the link to my site a bunch of times. What I have to do is let people know I exist, and, if they show interest, make it easy for them to find my website, Patreon page, and social networks. That's why I've placed such an emphasis on making the website ready for new traffic.

Concurrently, I will be launching my Joshalonian Endowment for the Arts & Culture this week. It's almost two months late, aye, but it's ready to go. I'll be making my final patronage selections in the next few days. This is both a personally meaningful and very gratifying initiative, and also a facet of building awareness that I exist―win-win.

Also concurrently, but running indefinitely to the future, beginning today (technically Sunday), there will be at least one post on my social media accounts every day, from now on.

On top of this, I plan to engage more actively at online social media pages that I already follow or otherwise enjoy. From there I will be actively seeking out additional communities of this nature, and establishing myself there.

Lastly, while I don't have any specifics to announce yet, I will have something to say soon about new audiovisual (or possibly just audio) content.

Hold Your Horses a Little Longer

I've told some of you that I'd like your help leveraging your own social network wingspans to help me out, but to hold on and wait until I am ready to make that push. This is coming soon, no later than the Ides of March. I'll be in touch with some of you on a one-on-one basis to communicate the specifics, so stay tuned.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

This week's article has been one of those no-frills info dumps, written at the last minute after reaching my productivity exhaustion point for the day. Not very aesthetic, but hopefully you can share in some of my excitement for all these new developments.

Oh! One more thing. I never got to do Wiki Wednesdays this week―and have learned not to promise in advance which specific article(s) I'm going to write―so to meet my goal I just converted an existing wiki page to the new format. Check out my article on Divine Locution.

And that's everything. Join me next weekend when I perform a wedding.

Until then, may you find yourself the welcome center of attention!