Since I discovered this forum yesterday I've spent countless hours reading old posts, absorbing things, and smartening myself up. It's a lot to take in, but it's great, and sooner or later I won't be a total marketing/promotion newbie. Thank you to everyone for making such useful information available. What I'm working on right now are three similar sites, one for bands, one for writers, and one for filmmakers. The idea is that each month people will submit content to be voted on by the users and I'll be giving out cash prizes to the winners. I'm convinced it's a great idea, and something people will really enjoy participating in. Since I'm not actually selling anything, I suppose the marketing approach would be pretty different -- so, are there any obvious places, other than indie music, film, and writing sites/forums/zines that I should announce this to? (For those of you that are curious, it's indiebandchallenge.com, indiewriterchallenge.com, and indiefilmchallenge.com).
I think you'll have a much easier time with bands and indie filmmakers (they always want to push their work), but writers may be a bit more difficult (writing contests have fallen a bit out of style, and once their work is posted online, it can lead to them being penalized if they later post it to their own sites - it's going to also depend a lot on what rights you claim to things posted, so be careful about that). As for bands, since I work a good deal with that market, alongside writers, I can tell you they'll likely be your easiest market to reach. Once word gets out, it has a nice habit of spreading through the indie music circuit. I'd suggest strongly you set up a legitimate myspace profile for both the music and film challenges (by "legitimate" I mean no bots, spammy bulletins, etc.), and you'll get an ok response. Advertising on a few larger indie music sites won't hurt, or submit articles to them (I believe indie-music.com accepts submissions, although I've never used them), and put links in your sig. While I'm not for article marketing with directories, writing guest pieces on highly-related sites, and giving it to them exclusively can be a nice plug for you. There's another site (indiemusicacademy.com? - not sure about that, can't remember off the top of my head) that might be good for the same thing.
jhmattern, Absolutely - bands and filmmakers are hungry for recognition. The writers are a lot tougher to convince, but I do have contact with a lot more of them through All Possible Worlds magazine, so even if the interest level is lower I think I'll be able to reach them effectively - and if done tactfully I could work it into some of the rejection letters without offending (especially the "Sorry, this is good but it's outside our genre" letters). Since you mentioned the rights issue I clarified it a bit in the guidelines. I'm totally fine with them posting work to their own sites after it's been posted to the challenge. I've started to get a slow trickle of users. I'll be thrilled if I get enough submissions on each site to have an actual vote-off instead of "Bob was the only entrant, he wins by default." I have until April 1st to reach that goal, so it's totally doable. After that it'll be a lot easier to build momentum since we'll be able to point to real flesh-and-blood winners and refer to previous content. The MySpace thing is rough. It's such an awful site, cobbled together with rubber bands and paper clips and half the time I cilck on anything I get "blah blah this is broken and has been forwarded to the technical group". Not that something that would stop me, just slow me down a bit - enough that I won't get that done today. I took your advice on posting to indie-music.com and the other site turned out the be musicbizacademy.com, easy enough to find thanks to your hint. I suspect that the hardest folks for me to reach will be the flmmakers. I know a lot of musicians and a lot of writers, but few directors. The most obvious tactic that occurs to me would be contacting folks who have posted videos on YouTube. I wouldn't know where to begin with article-based marketing. Are there any good tutorials, sites, FAQs, or books on the subject that you know of? I've skimmed tons of posts related to the subject, but lacking some sort of a "conceptual overview" they don't mean much to me yet. As for the blog, I do have one that I post to pretty much daily.
I'm not a fan of article marketing (believe wholeheartedly in keeping the vast majority of your content unique - especially as a writer, b/c directories devalue our work when we charge a good bit). So I won't touch on that. Glad you found that link. I hadn't been there in quite some time, but it's a decent site. Myspace definitely sucks in a lot of ways. It can get word to spread like wildfire though in the indie music scene, and it's why I have labels and publicists on my case constantly now, with more submissions (even offline) than I have the time to review. So it can be worth the frustration. In that group, you could also start local. In indie music, it's amazing how everyone knows everyone else within a certain region. It's pretty easy to expand once you get started too. Same with filmmakers. I'm trying to track down a few notables in indie film now for a book I'm working on, but luckily I have contacts. Another tactic, if you don't want to set up your own myspace profiles, is to just browse their site and see if any of the filmmaker profiles there list their main site with contact info. Youtube users is probably another good bunch to hit.