Patreon Catch-22
How do you drive traffic to content at Patreon without that content being already exposed for free?
It seems to be a catch-22: you want to produce content with some accompanying essay at Patreon, but no one is going to see it without posting that content, say, on YouTube.
A circular-loop problem: unless you gain a presence elsewhere eg a platform like YouTube, Patreon is little-known, so no one sees it. So you have to put it onto YouTube. But who’s going to pay for it on Patreon if it’s already free?
Exactly how to do you drive organic traffic to videos at Patreon?
My existing web sites eg diglloyd.com, WindInMyface.com, MacPerformanceGuide.com can be used to drive traffic to Patreon.
Yep, except that Patreon has a garbage-quality interface for linking to that content. I had to hand-create this post using grep and search/replace. If you don’t know what that means, just give-up now. Patreon provides no ToC or other facility, no HTML snippets or JSON or whatever, not even a godamned plain-text or simple HTML listing (it’s all javascript hiding all the content, totally inscrutable).
Nor does Patreon allow any essay content to go with a video. As far as I can tell, these bozos at Patreon are stuck in 2017 or something. Lame, super lame.
And here I am over on SubStack, who facilities are sucky, but in another way. Still sorting out if any of this is worthwhile. It certainly ain’t [sic] gonna be easy to integrate anything with my existing web sites.
As for Instagram and Facebook, these look like dead-ends, particularly Facebook which has the world’s shittiest presentation. Who the hell uses Facebook anyway? None of my kids do, and I refuse to use a walled-in service like that.
X.com works great for a certain style of brain-fart commentary, but is largely useless for extended instructional stuff, and horrible confusing in terms of organization and navigation. But it might have potential over time.