I’m part of a project called Metal Bandcamp Gift Club, which is basically a bunch of metal nerds that gift albums to each other from their Bandcamp wishlists.
If you want niche, that’s pretty niche.
But it’s been going on since 2016, and my sources tell me we’ve helped sell a shit ton of music during that time.
Our website fell stagnant for awhile, but I got it rolling again in October 2019. A few months later we had our biggest month ever.
That big spike is from our February fundraiser, where we raised almost $500 for girls’ rock camps (we eventually broke $500 in March), from Dallas Texas to London and Canada. It was pretty awesome.
I’ve been working on “content strategies” in one form or another since 2001, and what’s really worked for me is this: make the reader feel something, the happier the better.
When I did Skull Toaster (my metal trivia project on social media from 2011-2018), I built the questions with the answers in mind. Some questions were pretty damn obscure, but I usually knew someone would get it, and what would they feel? AWESOME. It wasn’t about driving clicks to my website, it was about that feeling of answering metal trivia.
With this recent fundraiser, people felt pretty good – especially the organizations that got some money in their accounts.