This is the second part of a series on How To Build an Audience For A Web Show. It will be updated whenever I learn new stuff from making dumb mistakes. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to get the latest updates.
We launched Hilah Cooking about a year and a half ago and we’re still going strong. In fact, we’re going stronger than ever. I thought this seemed like as good a time as any to update everybody on our progress and share a few more audience building tips that we’ve learned along the way.
When I wrote the first post in this series – we had about 400 YouTube subscribers, 1,000 Facebook fans and were happy anytime an episode hit 100 views in the first 24 hours. As I write this almost a year later, we are about to hit 4,000 subscribers, we have over 2,300 Facebook fans and reliably exceed 1,000 views in the first 24 hours. Our website traffic has tripled and subscriptions to our email newsletter have exploded.
These numbers might not blow your mind – but I am extremely proud of them. We started this show from ground zero – with little more than a second-hand camera, an ancient iMac and a used shower curtain. We also had no idea what we were doing. So I’m not only proud of what we have accomplished on a production level, but I’m proud of the audience that has grown around the project. These are not empty numbers generated by Spam or paid traffic. We have a very loyal, highly engaged audience that actively watches the show, responds to what we do, tries out the recipes and even sends us the photos to prove it.
I almost hate to refer to our viewers as an audience – because it’s really a community now. Using “audience” feels like a group of people who watch, rather than a group of people that are actively contributing. But I digress. It’s this community that gives us the energy to keep going when things get really, really sucky from time to time.
Now – here are a few more things we’ve learned since the last installment.
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