Words    Words    Words

Yesterday we talked in more detail about monetary donations and how to distribute them in your project. What about your fans who don’t have enough money to contribute directly, either through donations or the other revenue streams we’ll detail later? These fans can still contribute positively to your project — in addition to raw traffic, which will help with advertising (the subject of its own section later in this paper), your fans can also contribute whuffie.

Whuffie is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The novel is set in a post-scarcity future where money has become meaningless. Instead, people can award these reputation points to each other, based on how useful, creative, or clever they are. The more a person does for their community, the more whuffie they tend to accumulate.

Obviously, you don’t live in a post-scarcity world and the purpose of this paper is a discussion of how you can make money through leveraging your creativity online. Even so, it’s important not to discount contributions of whuffie or social capital.

One of the most useful ways of utilizing your non-paying fans is to help build your fanbase (some of whom will hopefully contribute monetarily). Encourage your fans to link to you in their blogs, twitters, or in appropriate online communities. Provide small link graphics for them to add to web pages. Most of all, don’t discount the value of “social bookmarking sites” like del.icio.us, reddit, or Digg; these sites allow users to share their favorite links and bookmarks. Digg in particular, which uses a voting system to choose the most popular sites, can be a powerful free way to direct traffic to your website. There are various plug-ins such as ShareThis which give your visitors the option of adding your page easily to multiple social bookmarking websites; an example can be seen at the bottom of this post. Be sure to check the terms of service for each site before you start encouraging your fans to link — some, such as Digg, have restrictions on mature or adult content.

Keep your fans informed of new developments in your project and they will pass the news on to friends that they think will be interested. A blog, RSS feed, or mailing list are an excellent way to keep people informed of the latest. There are many options such as Wordpress for creating a simple blog, most of which come with built-in RSS feeds. If you need to create an RSS feed from scratch, a service such as Feedburner will do it for you. There are also many options, such as Google Groups for the simple creation and operation of a mailing list. One interesting technique for comics or other heavily visually-oriented projects is an RSS window like this one used by FreakAngels.

Your fans can help create a thriving community that enriches the experience others’ will have while interacting with your creations. If it’s appropriate, create a forum for fans to discuss your work with you and each other. It’s also a great idea to encourage fan-created content in the form of fiction, art, music, or other creative works. Not only does this make them feel like a greater part of your project but it also generates substantial amounts of content with minimal work from you. This is one of many reasons that Creative Commons licensing is so popular today; everyone from writers like Cory Doctorow to musicians like Nine Inch Nails make use of Creative Commons licenses. You can even use contests, like this Shadow Unit video contest, to simultaneously generate publicity and content from your fans (but such contests should be free, as we think it’s ethically questionable to collect money while being given free content).

Generating whuffie is an ongoing effort — unless your project is over and done with, and you don’t intend to make more money from it ever again. It’s also important to remember that there is such a thing as bad publicity on the Internet. Don’t betray your fans’ trust by promising what you can’t deliver, or by encouraging fan participation in the beginning then cracking down on it when you get bigger — most of us can’t expect to act like J.K. Rowling and retain successful careers afterwards.

Your feedback helps us shape and develop this series, so be sure to join in the discussion in our comments with your questions, ideas, or other feedback. Tomorrow we’ll examine another potential revenue stream for your project.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations
• Part 8: Dividing Donations
• Part 9: Managing Contributions
  

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.