How to Build a Sizable Audience without a Multi-Million-Dollar Marketing Budget?

That's one of the central questions digital media writer/blogger/journalist Scott Kirsner focuses on in his book Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age, published earlier this year. It's also one of the themes he'll be exploring next Tuesday at a special "Fans, Friends & Followers workshop in San Francisco, at the Bay Area Video Coalition.  

We're excited to have Scott provide a taste on what you might learn at his upcoming workshop below.  So check it out!  (IndieGoGo friends get a 10% discount when you register here.)

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Scott Kirsner, Guest Blogger

Essentially, I think that we've entered a new era. In the old era, your distributor worried about marketing your film and generating buzz once it was ready for release, after they'd paid you scads of money to acquire the rights. In the new era, you need to start building your audience as soon as you commit yourself to making a movie, leveraging free tools like blogs, Twitter, YouTube channels, and Facebook fan pages. Even if your film is eventually picked up by a distributor, the audience you'll have accumulated will be one of your biggest marketing assets -- people you or your distributor can inform about film festival screenings, a theatrical run, a DVD release, an iTunes debut, etc.

In the book and my workshop, I focus on a number of filmmakers who've pioneered this idea of building up audience over time, and forging alliances with people who can help them reach other adjacent audiences (like editors of influential blogs, non-profit groups with big mailing lists, and experts/academics featured in a documentary). One such filmmaker is Curt Ellis, the co-producer, co-writer, and co-star of the 2007 documentary "King Corn." Ellis and his team did a phenomenal job at two kinds of audience cultivation. First, they created a simple database of everyone they interviewed for the film. That enabled them to reconnect when "King Corn" was finished, and seek their help in spreading the word about it. Second, they also built genuine, substantive relationships with a number of influential blogs about food and agriculture, and did guest blogging for them (like I'm doing here) to help reach a really broad audience for their film.

Here's a short audio clip from my interview with Ellis. We talk about how they used databases, and also their experience giving away a 20-minute streaming version of the film on an AOL Web site. (This interview was done for the book "Fans, Friends & Followers," as well as for a set of case studies I produced for the ITVS Digital Initiative.

Just click play below, or click here to download the MP3.

Friends of IndieGoGo can receive 10 percent off the registration rate for Scott's "Fans, Friends & Followers" workshop on December 1st in San Francisco. Just use this URL to register:

http://fffworkshop.eventbrite.com/?discount=indie