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Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’
Wisdom of the Fish
“I’m just gonna lie here and fish in my mind”…
Sounds like it could be a lyric to a song, doesn’t it?
The jelly fish whispered words of wisdom when I put him in my ear.
He said, “You’ve learned alot about the sea, my Dear, now it’s time to use your fins”.
Last week I didn’t want to blog … at all. When I don’t want to do something I really enjoy, it usually means one or two things:
a) I’m burnt out or
b) The purpose of the thing is changing
I am relieved to say that this time it is the latter.
I am so inspired to create right now (which is what being an artist is all about), but my blog is very ‘Left Brained’. It feels like an assignment instead of a mode of expression.
Now that I am 3 articles into my monthly column on Women’s Radio, I feel the need to divide my brain a little more for these projects. The articles on WomensRadio are the resource-based accounts of my adventure that I hope other independent musicians will find useful. It is time, however, for this blog to become a more personal and creative representation of who I am as an artist and a person; A brief, weekly insight into my oddball mind that my followers who aren’t musicians can relate to along with my fellow musicians (because we’re all a little weird in our own way, aren’t we?).
One week it may be a poem based around an image of me doing something silly. Another week it may be straight up philosophy and reflection. Perhaps sometimes it will be a piece of art I have created or a song I have recorded… it could be anything. It will be whatever I’m inspired by, not just thinking about.
* “I can’t even think about wading right now. I’m just gonna lie here and fish in my mind.” is a phrase that caught my eye when I googled “the fish in my ear said”. It’s on page 77 of this edition of Field and Stream and was said by angler, Colby Lysne.
Meghan Morrison
Blogging … as a Musician
It is Week 5 in Wave 3 of the Music Success in Nine Weeks Blog Challenge
What a week!
My Dad arrived the Friday before last; he came up from Nova Scotia to help me repair and improve the house before winter comes. Coincidentally, he was here during Week 5 of Wave 2 as well and is in the video blog I made that week. We were pretty busy over the past 7 days (the house is a fixer upper … big time!) and I learned a lot about attic ventilation. Lesson 1: don’t insulate your soffits and make sure you install vents to let air in the attic or else you get dry rot… yep, we’ve got dry rot. Fun times. I had the privilege of ripping all the old insulation out. I also went to a SAC Songposium where I had my song “This Song” (the pre-mix is now up on the MyBand tab of my facebook page) critiqued by industry folk and songwriters like Dan Hill and Emm Gryner … and they actually liked it!
Since you can read about how I incorporated Ariel’s blogging strategies into my music marketing strategy in my Wave 2 Post, I’m going to take this opportunity to discuss how blogging is relevant to me as a musician , how it relates to my plan of becoming a career artist, and a few interesting tips & tools I have found since the last wave that have helped me improve my blog and it’s searchability.
It starts with an email…
I received a message this week from someone who found me on cyberspace and has been checking out my blogs and general web presence. They pointed out that from their perspective it was hard to tell if I had a clear vision or direction… they weren’t sure if I knew what it was that I really wanted to do. This took me off guard, I’ll be honest. In my head I have a very clear ‘bigger picture’ in my mind, but it’s true that the paths to get me there aren’t as clearly mapped out. There are a number of reasons for this, but that is probably better left for another blog post. I’m mentioning this now because this communication highlighted something very important: The viewer’s perspective.
I have a lot of different things going on at the same time: The Music Success in Nine Weeks Blog Challenge, Weekly Webcast, Button Making Campaign, Awareness and Fundraising for Charities, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Style Newsletter, My Resources for Indies Page, “A Musician’s Attempt At Videography” (the series of videos I make, usually for other people, on my YouTube page), Songwriting & Performing, etc. Each of those things could be separate pursuits on their own … so which one do I really want to do? In my head they are integral to each other and work as one cohesive organism, but to my readers, fans and followers it’s probably not as obvious. That is important for me to realize! And I’m very glad this person took the time to point it out.
My vision is to create a self-sufficient and self-sustaining career as an independent artist and a business that not only envelopes all of my creative passions, but also provides a forum for me to share my trials, tribulations and resources with other artists as I learn more and work my way through from scratch … because you have to be a business to survive as an artist in the new music industry and all of us are struggling to figure out how to do it. One of the great things about this blog challenge is that the challengers are actually all working together to move forward in their separate careers: sharing their experiences and new found knowledge in their postings, then commenting on and tweeting about each other’s blogs and having meaningful discussions in the CyberPR forum. You’ll notice that Ariel, our marketing mentor, is doing the same thing with her peers in the music marketing business: Bandzoogle and Air Play Direct. They have networked and met with each other (online and/or in person), developed a partnership during this third wave that offers an even better prize for challengers (like we can for our “fans”), and now blog and tweet/retweet about each others projects in ways that are of interest to everyone’s followers.
Network and knowledge sharing is how the record industry has always worked, but the contacts and resources are exclusive and espensive… so if the record companies are going down the tubes, investing less and developing fewer and fewer artists, but wanting a bigger piece of the pie then we just need to make our own network and make our knowledge accessible to each other. In the end, there is no competition and the results are still the same: The great artists will be recognized and succeed over their peers and the “bad” music (as cynics call it) will still be popular if the masses like it. What changes is that the people in the middle actually have a chance to make a comfortable living doing what they love. That is how I see the future of independent music: A strong network of artists who work together, instead of competing against each other, to move the music industry (read: not record industry) and their own lives and art forward. Blogging, by the way, is a great way to network and share such knowledge and resources.
Much like how Ariel teaches us to make our web presence visually consistent across all platforms and sites, my challenge now is to find a way to clearly express not just the image, but also a consistent message of “who I am” and “what I am doing” in all of my online spaces, not just in my head, so that people who follow my blogs and webcast and tweets, etc. can clearly understand who I am … which is ultimately the point of blogging for me. Tomorrow I’m being interviewed by a college radio station about all the craziness that is my music business… I always find that I learn a lot about myself during and after interviews; perhaps the solution will come to me during this reflective opportunity.
A few tips and tools I have recently employed:
Sharability: Did I make that word up? Yep, it’s not in dictionary.com, but I’m keeping it. If you write a blog, you want people to read it, right? So sharing your blog is important to help increase your readership. Obviously, I change my various status updates to show that I have a new blog up, but prompting other people to share is probably more important. Like Ariel says, people are more likely to believe other people’s opinions than your own when you are trying to ‘sell yourself’. That is why word of mouth is the said to be the best form of advertising. So, without hounding people to spread the word, how can you prompt them to? I’ve been adding the “share” button to my posts (which I learned how to do through a Bandzoogle forum), but that button no longer exists and I think they have changed it to “like”. I also saw on AgendaRed‘s Blog a widget from TweetMeme for retweeting a page on Twitter. I’m going to try that out now… retweet if you like this blog! :)
By the way, if you are using WordPress you may find that iframe widgets (such as the facebook ‘like‘ button) mystically disappear from your post even after you’ve saved them. I find it only happens if you switch from “html” view to “visual” view when writing my blog. To get around this, I put them in at the very end and then leave the post in html view.
Searchability. Under the “Blogs” section of my Google Alerts, I discovered that one of my songs was featured alongside Matthew Ebel (my webcast idol) in The Philosophy Guy’s podcast this weekend. I was very excited and immediately went to listen to the podcast … as I was listening it occurred to me that my own blog didn’t show up in the “Blog” section of a search for my own name. Coming from a background in research, I am always keen to experiment and problem solve. So, I asked myself: “How can I get my blog to show up in the Blog results of a Meghan Morrison Google Alert?” … I think I just did it. I never write my name in my blog posts and that is specifically what the search bots are looking for: the words “meghan” and “morrison”. Now, I don’t want to start writing in the third person (that would be ridiculous), so I’m going to try something new this week … signing my posts with my name. It’s authentic and not out of place or cheesy. I think it will be a good solution and will let you know how it goes.
Readability. White on black is hard on the eyes. I recognized this with my old website design and changed it to black on white during Week 3 (Website Optimization). It’s okay for short stays, but for longer reads it can be almost painful for people, especially with lined backgrounds, as Sean T Wright commented on my Week 9 posting (it took me a little longer to switch over the blog page, because I have it hosted separately).
Universality. Being an artist who wants to tour the world and connect with people from all over, it was important to me to make my blog available in as many languages as possible. When I first started researching how to do that I stumbled on Mojofiti and have been re-posting my blogs there (I get Addie to help me with that now when she comes in for office hours on Tuesdays) with a link on the original blog post to “Read this blog in 27 different languages“. I did recognize an important limitation to this: you would have to understand English to read it in the first place, but thought it was a step in the right direction. On Mojfiti, however, people find the blogs in their own language. Both my blog and Mojofiti are WordPress platforms and so that got me thinking that maybe there is a way to make my WordPress blog multi-lingual too. I contacted my web guru, Byron McQuay (of OneDesign) who sponsors my blog site and asked him if he knew anything about it. Shortly thereafter we found and installed the Global Translator plugin. It’s great because translation is as simple as clicking on a country flag (no need to interpret words)… the limitation: You have to translate from my blog’s home page and then select the post you want to read. I’m not sure why, but the plugin doesn’t show up on the individual post pages… something I need to look into (might be my theme design or the way my settings are configured).
I think that’s all I’ve got in me this week, time for sleep! haha
Happy Blogging!
Meghan Morrison (let’s see if it works…)
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Challenge Week 5: Blogging
Read this blog in 27 different languages
I have become immersed in the world of blogging. Chapter 5 of Ariel Hyatt’s Music Success in Nine Weeks does a great job of summarizing a strong rationale for why musicians should blog. It also provides a number of valuable resources for starting a blog and, later, takes you step by step through establishing a protocol for getting the most out of your blogging efforts. This provided some reassurance when I started going into panic mode this week because, let’s face it, blogging is a big commitment and we musician-types still need to have time to write music too.
The overall process, in short, is something like this:
1) start a blog
2) subscribe to some relevent blogs (publications that might review your music)
3) start reading those subscriptions
4) leave some comments (that are related to the actual post, not just a plug for yourself)
5) then ask for a review after you have developed some rapport with the writers
I already had a blog, so I was able to skip step one. I didn’t, however, subscribe to or read any other blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my email, so I’m not sure how this is going to go, but I’m determined to try. Ariel suggests establishing a list of 50 blogs to subscribe to, so that’s what I did and though there are 50 of the list, for now I have decided to just focus on one or two of these blogs for a few weeks and then move on to a few more afterwards. That way I can give adequate attention to any particular blog even when I don’t have a lot of time for reading.
That number 50 was a bit intimidating at first, I must admit. It took a lot of mouse clicking and searching on Technorati and then often times struggling to find the RSS feed links/buttons on a page I liked once I found it. That part was very frustrating. In my head I kept saying, time after time, “I want to follow you, but you’re making it impossible!!!”. Who knew having that little orange icon would make such a difference.
Once I found one good and relevent blog it became easy because their blog roll was also relevant to what I was looking for. I found a lot of great blogs in the blog roll of Einstein Music. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an RSS feed for their own page though, so I had to bookmark them instead. Chances aren’t good that I’ll remember to go back and check on that one when I have 50 others being brought to my Google Reader though.
This “blog roll” thing had me a bit perplexed at first. I understood what it was (a list of links to other blogs and sites that blogger post on their own pages -usually in the right hand column), but I couldn’t figure out where mine was on my page. After some handy Google Mcguivering I learned that it was a multi staged process with WordPress (the program I use) and was able to set up my blog roll after watching a few videos. If you use word press, here are videos on how to add a link to your blog roll and How to make your blog roll visable to readers
Other ways I found blogs to follow: 1) New Twitter followers (a lot of bloggers have Twitter accounts). Here’s one for local Toronto bloggers 2) Indie Charts – you create a profile and submit songs for review by other artists, industry professionals and … yep, writers. 3) Newsletters. In particular, The Digital Media Wire newsletter is where I learned about the MOG Music Network (a network of top music blogs).
Another strategy for finding potential reviewers/bloggers that Ariel recommends is searching your name for existing articles you don’t know about and leaving comments on articles written about artists you know/play with. She suggests starting with a list of ten. This is what I came up with:
Chloe Charles – we share a violinist (Kelly). Chloe is amazing!
Radio Belle – I met Cristina and her brother at the MIAC/PAL 2010 tradeshow and have since gigged together
The Mudmen – a mutual fan connected me with their guitarist
Oliver Pigott – I met through MySpace and wanted to do a cover of his song. He gave me permission and invited me to open a show for him.
The Station Agents – Billy Fong has been playing guitar with me, has been on my webcast, and we gig together often
Beth Moore - she lives across the kitchen from me and has been on my webcast
Hayley Stark – Did a songwriters showcase together and they have also been on my webcast
MIP – I met at The Painted Lady open mic and, coincidentally, my favourite computer repair man is her drummer
Alice Stops Time – I set up a show with them in Halifax on Leg 2 of Dara’s Wedding Tour 2009
First Rate People – we were on Indie Idol (indielove.ca) together and they were one of the first guests on my webcast
Blake Bliss – used to gig together in Hamilton when Purl of Surf was in full swing.
The Skirt Chasers - Hilary and I used to fence together. Now we gig together.
The Danger Bees - played a show with David in Dartmouth during Leg 2 of Dara’s Wedding Tour
Courtesy Blush - Jon and I go to the same vocal school
Axe to Mouth - I’ve been gigging regularly with these guys thanks to The Dishes
… as you can see, I started getting carried away (extending my list past 10). Though there are many more I would like to add to this list, I had to cut myself off and move forward with this week’s challenge (including leaving a comment on each artist’s myspace, since they don’t all have blogs, to let them know I’ve mentioned them in my blog. Sig file -or signature file- will be added at the end, as recommended by Ariel)
Another time saving strategy Ariel recommends is to join MyBlogLog and/or GoogleFriendConnect. That way, if you don’t have time to leave a comment on everyone’s blog, the authors still know you have visited their site. Though not as memorable as a comment, it helps to establish a connection and rapport over time.
Blogging. Some call it a hassle; some call it an addiction. It certainly is an avenue for ranting, raving and sharing news. It is also a networking and marketing tool. My favourite function of a blog: discovery.
Blogs have the ability to tell stories: within an individual post, through a nine week series, or over the writer’s life. It’s not just about connection, but also growth. The writer opens a window for the public to see into their inner world but can also control how high up they pull the blinds. By reading blogs we discover new things others want to share with us. By writing blogs we reflect and learn more about ourselves. This has certainly been true for me as an artist. While my Dad was up visiting this week, there were a number of times where there was no technology around to distract or interrupt our conversations and as such, I heard tales of his childhood and my own (which I don’t remember) that I had never heard before. With all the blogging I have been doing lately, this experience triggered the thought in my mind that people are more than their thoughts and opinions, they are their stories … and blogs are a great way to tell stories.
My story this week (outside the context of blogging itself) was pretty exciting. The Horsehoe show (my biggest show to date) was a success, we bought a house (home studio and webcasting set here we come!), I finally got caught up with all of my social media sites from last week (the MySpace page was the biggest obstacle) and I found out that Mike the Bee featured one of my songs on his podcast in the UK after I signed up with Music Alley last week. Not too shabby.
I feel more comfortable moving forward with the marketing side of blogging now that the idea of storytelling has returned to my line of sight. I started blogging by telling stories, but lately, with all this reading about business and promotions, I have found myself becoming a bit blinded by the exciting statistics, increasing quality of interactions online, and other new developments.
Now, if Ariel could just teach us how to deal with Blog Comment Spam. I had over 200 comments this week, which made me very excited until I saw that they were mostly either:
1) Utterly vague: “Incredible, that’s definitely what I was scanning for! You just spared me alot of looking around”
2) Self-promoting and irrelevant to the subject matter of the post: “if the cops werent so bad in florida it would be really awesome” has nothing to do with my Week 3 post on website optimization.
3) Template messages being sent from different people from the same agencies. Grrrrrr.
For example, I received such similar posts from a 3 different virastop.net users:
“What a blogpost!! Very informative and also easy to understand. Looking for more such blog posts!! Do you have a myspace? I recommended it on stumbleupon. The only thing that it’s missing is a bit of new design. However thank you for this information.”
The other commenters just substituted “twitter” or “facebook” for “myspace” and “digg” for “stumbleupon”. If it wasn’t for the fact that there was more than one comment saying the same thing, I would have thought it was a legitimate comment. So now how do I know which ones are the fakes and which ones are real? I would hate to delete a legitimate comment.
To end on a positive note, my web guru Byron has hooked me up with a translator for my blog so that anyone around the world can read my posts. I just need him to help me install it now haha
Next Week – Challenge Week 6: Newsletters & Surveys
Last Week – Challenge Week 4: Social Media for Musicians
Ariel’s Book: Music Success in Nine Weeks
www.meghanmorrison.com