Social Media for Crowdfunding & Privacy Concerns

I can see the necessity of Social Media marketing across platforms, and am ready to get on board, but for two concerns (we'll use Facebook as the predominant example):

1. To get the most exposure, I need to start with people in my current network - my friends and family, and hope that it expands beyond them; but, in terms of my network itself, I know most people in it will not be inspired to do Permaculture themselves, but will instead be inspired by my bounty and perhaps hope to "mooch" off of it...

How do you start an intensely personal project, using your personality and property as an attractive factor, while also distancing yourself from it for privacy and or security concerns?!

2. Due to Facebook's recent scummy business practices and methodologies being brought to light (and we know most of these sites do the same, even if not publicized yet), I would personally like to wipe my presence from the internet as much as possible, but all these social networks and SEO/Internety strategies involve having as much info out there as possible - how can I willingly expose myself to these evils while simultaneously offering up knowledge and hope with the products/content I hope to be producing?!


Sorry for the mini-rant; technology is so frustrating, especially since the slant of my life/permaculture is to DECREASE our dependence on outside resources.

Has anyone found a good balance here in any of their projects?

You could try some of these privacy+security-focused social networks or this one as an alternative to the one with the issues you mentioned.

How many views do you suppose you get from facebook for something like that?  

And if you post the same thing to permies, how many views do you get?

How much income?

You can post to permies and every time anybody replies, it gets bumped to the top and more people see it throughout the campaign.   But on fb, after three days it is gone and you pretty much have to start over.

Hey Loxley,

Thanks for those suggestions - Tails seems pretty cool! I'll try to see if I can run everything I want on it, then try to convince the wife to get on board (we share a computer).

You're right Paul, the answer was more obvious than I realized; I definitely will begin advertising here when I am ready to release my project (YouTube Video series journalling my progress).

After you commented, I found this thread:

Advertising on Permies

Wow, talk about better exposure, it's amazing!!


Can I ask you one more question?  If you are willing to tell, what is the conversion rate from forum viewer to customer (either clicking an affiliate link or purchasing from the digital market)? Are you able to "track" such a thing with your Java magic on Permies?


Thanks for creating this community Paul!

We are gearing up for more and more conversion tracking and better conversion on permies.

Right now, the kickstarter i have running has a 30% conversion.  And a lot of the stuff in the digital market have much less than a 1% conversion.  So we have a long path ahead of us to solve this stuff.

paul wheaton wrote:We are gearing up for more and more conversion tracking and better conversion on permies.

That's wonderful news; thanks Paul!