EXTRA CRITICUM

The Roland Tec Inner Circle Transitions to a Patreon Membership Tier

As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years. 

Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?

Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year. 

It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.

$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.

I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.

This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:

That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month. 

 

It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.

That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.

But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshop in which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).

As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.

Here's what I was able to remember:

Only URL You'll Ever Need to Access All Things Roland Tec on the WWW

If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.

R O L A N D  T E C  U M B R E L L A  .  c o m

Search Engine Optimization vs. Authentic Useful Content

The other day I was chatting with a friend who is something of an expert in the field of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and all things WWW-related. And a fact of life of our brave new online world just sort of spilled out and I'm embarrassed to admit, although this fact of life or fact of internet architecture is apparently common knowledge to anyone posting content online, I had somehow never heard or read this fact. 

Blog posts should be written around a set of search terms and the search terms should be carefully selected through research into the most common search terms in the topic about which you're writing. Apparently this is the way people who do not already know you and your blog will find their way to you.

When your posts have been carefully constructed around a curated set of key words and phrases designed to attract the right people to your blog, i.e. the people most likely to find it interesting and worthwhile. 

Here's the very first post which now strikes me as a little wet behind the ears and possibly somewhat blind to the vast tundra that the internet can be to the writer who posts from the heart without even a moment spent considering how people might find their way to you.

In a way, then, this blog has been floating in the shadows, only entering the field of vision of the people somehow connected to its contributing authors. Maybe that's why what began as a group blog eventually dwindled down to pretty much me posting 90% of the time. 

Were the other E.C. Authors simply not getting enough bang for their buck? I wish one of them had told me. 

Since I founded Extra Criticum in May of 2008, I have simply been writing about whatever thing struck me as important, odd, amusing or troubling. The most thought I ever gave to search happened once I'd finished whatever post I was working on when I'd stare at that empty box and come up with about a dozen key words to enter which I assumed would assist the Google bots and any other search engine creatures to find the article based on... what I thought it was about.

Boy was I misguided!