Music Success In Nine Weeks #6

Well, we're coming to a close now with the old MSI9W challenge thing but it's been interesting, and I've definitely learnt a few things about online marketing that I wasn't previously aware of such as the value of a mailing list, which I now have along with incentives for people to join. For the first time ever I actually went round the room after a gig this weekend and asked people if they'd like to join my mailing list in return for a CD, and low and behold people were only too happy to do so, and one's actually unsubscribed yet!

Another useful tip was the use of Google Reader, which I'm now getting pretty addicted too and it's how I now start my mornings before leaving for work, it's like the ultimate newspaper that caters just for me ;-) Here's a handy hint too, why not pop a little star next to the articles you comment on, that way if you filter by your starred articles you can see where you've been spending most of your time "interacting" within the blogosphere, and this should act as a fairly good indicator as to who may be more likely to write about your own musical antics.

Podsafe has also worked out to be a great little resource, and I've been played on a couple of shows already, I have the feeling that podcasters tend to mainly look at the new uploads on this site though, so if you have a multiple song you want to upload then don't put them all on there at once, ration them out slowly in order to make sure you have something on there that's amongst the new stuff for as long as possible.

Anyhow, I'm gonna sign out now as I'm pretty short on time as write this, it's Thursday, which means I'm gonna have get my latest Song A Week song out for tomorrow!

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.

Music Success In Nine Weeks #3

The Perfect Pitch
So here we are in Week 2 of Ariel's magical world of Cyber PR, which is all about "The Perfect Pitch". Luckily for me I actually hired a PR man last year who wrote me a couple of bios and I now freely borrow random sentences from those whenever I need to summarize myself within one sentence, however I still went through this section and filled out the three lists which consisted of:

• Artists people think I sound like.
• Artists that influenced me.
• Feelings and vibes that I want my music to convey.

After a couple of attempts at using these lists to create my "perfect pitch" I decided that the one's I'd already been using from the pre-written bios were actually better, so I just used one of those instead, it reads:

"Taking the ramshackle charm of Guided By Voices at their most melodic and adding a boyish enthusiasm that tips its hat to both Weezer and Matthew Sweet."

I said it out loud a few times, and it sounded cool and made me think "I I hadn't heard my music, I'd probably really want to based on that sentence!! I am great!! Grrrrr!!

I then promptly went round the Internet and began plastering it about, if you'd care to check out Aidy.com for example you'll see it proudly displayed on the front page, and next time I make some postcards or flyers, I'll stick it on those too.

I did attempt to test it out on the "fabulous website" 15SecondPitch.com that Ariel suggested, unfortunately after churning away for a couple of minutes it finally came back with:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/new/createuser.asp, line 276

I tried a couple more times and got the same thing. Annoying, but hey ho, at least I've got my little daily notebook of achievements to get me through ;-)

Music Success In Nine Weeks #2

First Things First
Well I've now gone through the entire book and I've started a few of the later tasks already as I was slightly concerned after reading the fact that potential fans could have the attention span of gnats and may not be prepared to wait for longer than 3.5 seconds for my website to load. So I did a bit of tweaking to Aidy.com. I've enabled caching, enabled gzip and I've also gone through the images on the front page and re-formatted a few of the larger ones. The only thing that's slightly bugging me now is that even though my site loads fairly quickly the Reverbnation widgets that I've got on there don't, and yet these come highly recommended by Ariel. The whole page seems to load in under 3.5 seconds but after it's loaded you can still see these widgets loading up. I've emailed Reverbnation and asked if anything can be done to speed them up a bit. Another thing I've noticed with the Fan Collector widget is that the @ comes out as a “ when viewed using Google Chrome, which seems like a major flaw in an email entry field, though it does work fine in IE.

The other main thing that got my attention upon my first read was the value placed on an email list, which I don't currently have, so I've now started one. I got the ball rolling by asking a few friends if they'd like to be the first of many to join this prestigious contact list and also asked a couple of people that randomly emailed me about my music recently, and I now have an email list in double figures! But I obviously don't want to stop there so I shall continue to ask others and I've also added the previously mentioned Fan Collector widget to my blog, MySpace and Aidy.com. Let's just hope that none of my potential new fans are using Google Chrome ;-)

Week 1 – Getting Mentally Prepared
So after kicking off my email list and streamlining the website I it was time to start going through the book from the beginning, in a more formal manner, so where better to start than Week 1! This chapter actually made me cringe slightly as it reads like a self-help book, encouraging me to write down my dreams and aspirations on paper and then decorate them with coloured crayons and hang them where I (and possibly others that might start to question my manliness) can see them. Never the less, I sat down at my dining room table with a cup of Early Grey and some art supplies and began to scribble.

I found this activity rather challenging, as I have a rough idea in my head of my ambitions and goals, the main one being to actually make enough money from music to be-able to do it full time, but to articulate these ideas into fully formed sentences on paper along with deadlines was slightly more tricky. After a couple of hours I came up with the following:

1. To be-able to quit day job and make a comfortable living from music alone.
2. Complete my Song A Week project at Aidy.com.
3. Increase traffic to Aidy.com to around 1000/day.
4. Get paid TV/Film placement.
5. Increase fan base to at least 1000 solid fans.
6. Sell enough merchandise and music to make at least £2000/month.

After creating this initial list I started going through the other suggested lists and then I decorated my ultimate list of goals as suggested by Ariel and and I hung them up in my kitchen.

On top of all of this I have also purchased myself a little notebook, as per Ariel's advice and each day I'm scribbling down 5 small successes that I've made. Yesterdays list consisted of:

1. Mailed out some CDs to a college radio station that requested them.
2. Added some more people to my mailing list.
3. Purchased and assembled a fan for my housemate who was complaining about the temperature of his room at night time.
4. Added email capturing widget to my MySpace.
5. Did weekly food shop.

Even though this activity felt like a waste of time to someone like myself, I've actually enjoyed doing it and it does leave me thinking “God I'm great! I've done loads today!” So hopefully I'll stick to it, and it'll help keep me motivated throughout the darker hours of my musical endeavours. Once I've finished this blog entry, I'll be-able to put that on todays list!! God I'm great ;-)

Music Success In Nine Weeks #1

Well along with all my other music marketing shenanigans I've decided to purchase myself a copy of 'Music Success In Nine Weeks' work my way through the book and also to take the blogging challenge whilst doing it. If you've got no idea what I'm talking about go here.

I first came across Ariel Publicity a few years ago, I can't remember how exactly, but it was probably through my usage of CDBaby and somehow I've found myself on founder Ariel Hyatt's mailing list, and I also now follow her antics on Twitter and YouTube. Though I've never paid for the service of Ariel or her company, I'm eager to try out some of the techniques in this book and blog about them to see if I can get anything out of it.

As her site suggests I'm also able to enter her contest for some free Cyber PR by blogging, which is quite cool as I would have probably blogged my experience anyway. If you're interested in my current state of affairs, at the time of writing my stats are roughly:

YouTube VLOG: 40-100 views per week
Twitter Followers: 49
Aidy.com unique hits: 1000/month
Most downloaded track: Hodge Plays Mario Kart, approx 250 downloads
Facebook Fans: 181

As a wise man once said "Let's go, let's get cracking!!"