Music Success In Nine Weeks #5

It's been a little while since my last "Music Success" blog entry, but it's been a busy month, with a couple of festival appearances, my Song A Week project and my day job, but I haven't been neglecting my online marketing, and I've still been going through Ariel's various tips and tactics!

I actually sent out my first ever email newsletter today, I've been very slowly building up a mailing list by asking friends and people at gigs to join and I've even had a few people join from the from my site since I've started offering an exclusive MP3 as an incentive, still not in triple figures, but I'm getting there.

Web 2.0

With regards to Week 4, I'm fairly IT literate so I already have a Twitter account and I know how to use it, I also have a Blog, which you're currently reading and I am aware of what an RSS feed is, I have several on my site. The idea of using FlickR as a way of gaining more on-line exposure is pretty cool though, and I've now created myself a profile and I've uploaded some of my better music related pics to get the ball rolling. I've also joined Podsafe, which is a great site and I've already had airplay on one podcast as a result!

I'm now also an avid user of Google Reader and Technorati, which I've been using in conjunction with one another. I'm searching out blogs that interest me and blogs that write about similar artists to myself and I normally spend half an hour or so before going to work, just scanning the latest articles, and leaving the odd comments. It's actually quite addictive, like a magazine that caters just to me and my personal interests! But hopefully after a while, when I start to contact a few of them they may have some idea of who I am and be slightly more willing to deal with me. I actually no this kind of relationship should work fine, as I do write the odd review for a couple of smaller music blogs.

Right, I'm tired and I need sleep, it's been a long day! I'll post another entry soon, and hopefully I'll be a little bit closer to a triple figured mailing list and a couple of honourable mentions somewhere out there in the blogosphere!

Oh yeah, I also started using SoundCloud recently, it's a great site, and I've used it to create playlist to go with my Song A Week project.

BBC Introducing

I've tried on numerous occasions over the past decade or so to get a song played on Radio 1, but unfortunately without success. I've sent stuff to most of the DJs there, including John Peel a few months before his untimely death and the closest I got was when Steve Lamacq put me on the BBC site along with a short review, which I can now recite off by heart due to the amount of bios and press releases I've copy and pasted it in to.

Anyway, I'm now in my early thirties and still hammering away at the doors of the BBC, pleading and begging for one of their DJs play me on one of the national stations, and as a result I've also been using the BBC Introducing site to do this. The concept of this site is pretty cool, it gives you the ability to upload up to 3 tracks every 30 days, these tracks are listened to by your local BBC radio station (Cambridge in my case) and if they like any of them, they play them, and if they play them there's also a chance they'll get forwarded to the big boys at Radio 1. This is a great idea in theory as it probably filters the workload for the likes of Huw Stephens and his chums, and it's good for the environment and my wallet, since I don't need to knock up any CDs or purchase any padded envelopes etc...

However, after using BBC Introducing for about a year, I've only managed to get a total of 3 tracks to them, as doesn't actually appear to work the vast majority of the time. The first time I ever used it I received three emails, one for each uploaded track, telling me that they had uploaded with success, then I got three more emails telling, one per track, as each one of my carefully selected songs was listened to by my local BBC Producer. Cool! I was quite happy with this, the tracks didn't get played but that's cool, I waited for a while and then uploaded another three carefully selected songs. This time I didn't get the emails to say they'd been received, so I emailed support. Support told me the BBC Introducing emails had been problematic but everything was working okay so not to worry if I hadn't received anything.

I continued to upload within the given time scales and nothing ever seemed to get anywhere, and I never got any notification emails, even months later, so I emailed once again just to check that my tracks were uploading okay, they assured me they were and even emailed me a list of the last 3 tracks I'd uploaded. The list they emailed me contained the first three tracks I'd uploaded nearly a year ago! I emailed them once again and got no reply, so I'm now back to browsing through the BBC site for postal addresses, buying padded envelopes and burning CDs.

In conclusion it seems fairly hit and miss as to what's actually going on with this site, and I imagine it's not really top of BBCs priority to get it fixed by the sounds of it, I still use it now and again, just in case it's started working again, but I never receive any confirmation emails that would lead me to believe that it's working again. If you have music that you'd like to get into the hands of a BBC Radio DJ, by all means have a punt at BBC Introducing, but send out physical CDs too as it seems fairly unreliable, which is a shame as it's a great idea in theory.

Music Success In Nine Weeks #4

Optimizing Your Website

If you've been reading my blog you'll know that before going through the book sequentially I read the whole thing and did a few bits and pieces before starting. One of which was to optimize my site, the site now definitely loads quicker than it did! And I'm pretty sure that if you've got a modern broadband connection you should be seeing it fully loaded in under 3.5 seconds! So that's that bit out of the way. Now on to the other more tangible marketing ploys, that you can go and see for yourself at Aidy.com.

PITCH

My pitch is now displayed on my home page in nice big writing, and in a slightly different colour so it stands out from the rest of the text on there.

NO FLASH INTROS

Never had them, never would. Winds me right up when I have to click that Click here to skip intro link on sites that do.

CONSISTENT LOOK THROUGHOUT THE NET

Already there, if you check out any of my various internet incarnations, you will find a tasteful black and white look and a charming picture of my face, much like the one on this blog. If you don't believe me go to my site and click the links section, and have a look! Go on! Do it!!

GIVE AWAY EXCLUSIVE MP3

Hmmm, all my stuff was actually available for free anyway, so I took down one of my songs from the site, and it's now available as an exclusive free download if you join my mailing list. I did this with FanBridge they make the whole thing very simple and they have a nice fast loading html fan collector, rather that a slow loading flash one like Reverbnation, which occaisionally seems to struggle with the @ key when using a UK keyboard and Google Chrome. Anyway, if you join my mailing list you'll now get an 'exclusive' mp3, and you'll also find out what a sterling job the folks at FanBridge do!

MAKE IT CLEAR, SET THEM AT EASE

I have made a lovely little banner, with a picture of my good friend Gimpy on it, which now sits above the fan collecting box thing to make it nice and clear that you are indeed joining my mailing list in return for an exclusive track! Just look at it! It doesn't get much clearer!!

PS. Just a quick note on Reverbnation, I love their site and their widgets and they are very helpful when you email them, but you have to use a horrible email template if you use their services to email fans without paying, and the email widget is slow loading and a bit buggy at the moment. If they sorted these problems and let you send plane text emails without paying $9.99/month, I may actually use their email widget, and I may even pay them the £9.99/month if my email list grows to a more than the 20 odd people I currenlty have on it(only just started it since reading this book). I'm still using there widget on a couple of other sites though, just not the main one. You can quite easily export your emails from them in the form of a spreadsheet and import them into something else.