Author David Meerman Scott made a honest and realistic quote, “if you want 20,000 fans you must do 2000 different things that each generate 10 fans.” This was my favorite quote from 2010 and I am going to take this on as a challenge for 2011 for an ambitious project to give you 2000 different things you can do to generate 20,000 fans.
Some of these items will apply better for larger acts, some items will work for any act. Some may work for you, some may not… not yet. Some these can be done with little effort, some will take some web development, some might even require some significant development. Some of these have successfully worked for me over the years. The point is to create a list of items that would cover a wide range of acts and abilities.
The end result of all this will hopefully be more Facebook likes, Twitter followers, email list subscriptions, more sales and more traffic to your website… more fans!
2000 Things to Generate 20,000 Fans Challenge
18. Create a eTour Book.
Maybe you or your band is not big enough yet to create a real tour book. Or maybe you are. Either way this idea would work for everyone.
Fans love tour books. When I worked for Signatures Network, a concert merchandising company, one of the best selling items was always a tour book. They are very collectible. Fans buy them from old tours, they buy them if they didn’t see a show on the tour.
One of the hottest things on web now are ebooks, many purchased through websites such as Amazon or Apple, or free downloads from your own website. Ebooks are great marketing tools, excellent incentives for collecting emails and can be another item in your toolbox of viral content.
Gather some photos from rehearsals, in the studio, photo sessions, and in concert. Add some text; maybe a list of dates or cities you will be playing, your bio, some personal messages from each band member and finally a thank you page where you can give credit to all the other people who helped make things happen, such as crew members. Since this is a ebook you don’t need hires images. The layout would be different than traditional tour books as well, they may be more oversized and vertical. Your eTour Book can be screen size and horizontal. Use something like Keynote or Powerpoint to build your ebook. No restrictions on how many pages it can be, but don’t go overboard. Once you build your ebook in Keynote or Powerpoint save it as a PDF file. That’s it you have a digital eTour Book.
If you feel so inclined you could sell it. But I would suggest giving it away for free, in exchange for a email address. You can do this easily enough with nearly all email services. In the email your fan gets to confirm joining put some copy and a image in there up selling they will get a free eTour Book when they confirm. Then in the email they get confirming they have joined, just include a URL linking the PDF for them to download. Yeah they could just email copies to friends, don’t worry about that. Because email lists won’t let you add a email address that is already in the list, create a new list just for the eTour Book campaign. You want fans who might already be on your list to have the ability to get a copy of your eTour Book. You can always import this list into your master list and merge.
Create eTour Books as often as you want, make them collectible and desirable.
great idea
Neat! I’ll have to try that. Couldn’t hurt! “If you sign up for our email list, you’ll get a free eTour book and free mp3s of the songs we’ve been playing on tour!”
Embed links to the mp3 files in the eTour Book.