From Scratch – Adventures in Independent Music Making

Connecting with fans after our set at The Horseshoe, Toronto, Canada 083110

Read this blog in 27 different languages

Fans are the single most important key to becoming and remaining a career artist. It doesn’t matter if we are major label acts or independent artists sleeping in our tour vans, if we don’t have fans we have no one to sell records to; radio djs will take our songs out of rotation if no one requests them; bar owners won’t give us a guarantee if we can’t draw a crowd; and we’ll go bankrupt renting venues if no one ever buys a ticket. I don’t know a lot at this stage of my development, but this much I understand and that is exactly why I, along with so many of others, have joined Ariel Hyatt’s Music Success in Nine Weeks Blog Challenge.

In my Week 6 blog entry of Wave 2: “Newsletter & Surveys” I described how I came to reincarnate my newsletter by conducting surveys/focus groups with existing newsletter subscribers and asking them what they would like to see in my newsletter , what they would like to see taken out, and/or what they would like to see done differently. This “study” resulted in the creation of my Choose Your Own Adventure style newsletter. Remember those books from the 90s? Where you didn’t read the whole thing through from start to finish and you had no idea where the story was going to take you? That is what my newsletter is like now … with a twist: it’s still based on real life. It’s a fictional story that unravels my monthly news as the story progresses and has a summary at the end for readers who are pressed for time. Basically, you are given 2 options to choose from at the end of each “page” and that determines your trajectory through the story/updates. It’s not all fun and games though: make the wrong choice and Brad (our drummer) might turn into a rabid zombie and eat your brains for dinner!

Zombie Brad is a character from my most recent (Halloween themed) newsletter that went out just after October. It was a lot of fun to create and with 25% of my listers reading it within 2 hours of it being sent out, I can see that my efforts are being appreciated and that creating a unique newsletter which reflects this writer’s personality and artistry really works. 2 weeks later, that particular issue has had a readership of 37% . Though down from the first ‘new’ newsletter (which closed at 40% readership), it’s still 10% more than I had been getting before starting this new format … and there is bound to be fluctuation from month to month, so I’m not disheartened.

Do I think you should do a choose your own adventure newsletter?  No. It would be safe to say that I spent around 20 hours planning, writing, editing, formating, coding, and creating images for the last one. To commit that kind of time to one aspect of your overall project, the inspiration has to come from your own ideas. As Derek Sivers (founder of CD Baby) says, “Every contact with the people around your music  (fans and industry) is an extension of your art”.

This quote comes from his Free E-Book, which he directed me to after chatting with him via email over the weekend. It has a lot of really useful and inspiring thoughts and approaches to communication. If you are an artist, you should definitely read it. It fits nicely in line with Ariel‘s teachings and expands on issues many of us have been struggling with from day one (many of you are familiar with my panic attacks over “I can’t keep up with my email!”, “I don’t have time to do all of this!” and “How do I communicate this to people?”, well he’s got lots of suggestions that I can already tell are going to help … and, obviously, are ones that have worked for him, considering he’s managed to create one of the most valuable indie music distribution sites out there.

~By the way, he likes the idea of our Cyber Jam! :) If you haven’t experienced the webcast yet, join us on Tuesdays. 8pm EST~

Now, do I think you should ask your fans what they want from their interactions with you and then find your own unique way of connecting with them through your newsletter? Absolutely! Ariel encourages us to do this for our ‘products’ (CDs, merch, etc.) and, in my mind, it should apply to any part of our musical business that is dependent on fan reception/interaction.

Our true fans (see 1000 true fans, an article heavily recommended by Ariel and many others in the industry) want to be involved with our projects. They want to connect and help us create a ‘product’ or experience they will love. This became more evident to me yesterday when we reached and surpassed our RocketHub goal for our button maker campaign (I am now going to be able to make and sell buttons so that I can pay the artists that come to perform on my weekly webcast).

With RocketHub I set a financial goal and asked my crowd to help me raise funds for this special project in exchange for a piece of the end product (in my case, buttons … for the most part. Some people ordered custom written songs). I was confident that we could reach our goal, but I never expected each fan/supporter to contribute as much as they did… or to reach our goal 9 days early… or to still have more pre-orders coming in after the fact … people actually want this stuff and want to suppport our vision :) What a great feeling, to know I’ve started something people really want to be a part of. We’re onto something!

Much like the focus groups I did for my newsletter development during the last wave, this RocketHub campaign also served as a testing ground to see what kind of products people would be willing to spend money on. 1 person was happy to pay $50 to join the button of the month club; 2 people liked my custom magnetic x’s and o’s game enough to pay $25 for them; 2 people were even happy to pay me $150 for custom written songs (something I have done many times for free … maybe I should take this more seriously); most of the people (9) wanted 100 buttons for $20, which suggests to me that most of my business will likely be in regular straight forward buttons for businesses and artists. And that’s great! Now I know where I should start promoting and to whom.

Both Derek and Ariel highlight the importance of having a compelling subject line of an email/newsletter. One that stands out in a busy inbox and screams ‘open me!’ to people who were too drunk to remember signing up at your gig last week. I was originally going to write about how I was stumped on subject lines, but after reading Derek’s e-book (if you haven’t clicked the link yet and you are an independent artist, do it! DO IT! Imagine me staring you down right now until you do. Intimidating, I know. haha). In the spirit of what I have learned from this document, my next newsletter subject line is going to be “daring”, “weird”, and “say the opposite of what I want them to do”. It will go something like this: “This newsletter is not cool at all! Don’t open it. Ever! Not even if your Mom says it okay” … the next experiment beings …

Any other suggestions for subject lines in the audience?

(by the way, signing my name at the bottom of the blog post -as per last week’s experiment- didn’t work. It didn’t come up in the Google alerts. Matthew Morrison and that Snuggie Sutra girl keep hogging all the spots … hmmm maybe having those words in there will help :) … or maybe I just need to get more readers hahaha)

Meghan Morrison

P.S. Not only do you get to read my creative stories (Which aren’t cool at all! Don’t ever read them! Not even if you’re threatened by a marsupial), but you also get a Free Download of My Tour Album when you…

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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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Read This Blog in 27 Different Languages

Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Facebook fan page, You Tube, Twit Pic, Flickr, Forums and the list goes on … there are SO MANY avenues for connecting with people online. It is both a burden and a blessing and for career musicians, whether we like it or not, it is an integral part of marketing in today’s world. Note that last word: “world”. Isn’t that what makes social media so exciting? It doesn’t matter if you have a label or management team and a big marketing budget, as a musician in this era you can literally connect with people (aka potential fans) all around the world… and the only investment you have to make is the cost of a computer and an internet connection (both of which can be used for free at the library). Limitless. That’s empowering. That being said, having a marketing team certainly would make your life A LOT easier and free up your time for improving your songwriting and stage performance.

Toward the end of this 4th week of Ariel Hyatt‘s Music Success in Nine Weeks blog challenge (Wave 3), I started feeling “the angst”. The ahhhh!-I-can’t-keep-up-with-all-of-this-and-be-committed-to-my-music-too! kind of pain that  suffocates you every now and then. I think it’s healthy though, it proves to me that I am still an artist under this business hat. That is a comfort in itself. Though I try not to get caught in the viscious cycle of complain-suffer-complain and burden my friends/family with that kind of negative energy, which really just keeps the problem alive instead of fixing it, I do think it is necessary to let the frustration out when it starts to rumble in your tummy. If you’re like me, it will be on your mind until it leaves your lips.

A few strategies I have adopted to cope with “the angst” and that have helped me complete the full 9 week challenge once (going on twice):

1. I tell someone … once. Then thank them for listening and tell them I’m moving on now (it usually gives rise to a chuckle). Telling them one idea for how I might be able to fix the problem also helps, because it gets my mind moving in a productive and positive direction. Did you know that if you ask yourself a question, your mind will keep looking for the answer subconsciously until it finds it? That’s why when you can’t think of the name of  a song it will come to you spontaneously hours or days later. I learned that during my training as a Cutco sales rep (oh yes, I once sold knives. I love those knives) and have found it to be a very useful tactic in approaching problem solving and creative endeavours.
2. Telling myself it’s okay to step away. Sometimes a break is as good as a vacation, right? Sometimes 5 or 15 minutes isn’t enough though and once I’ve given myself permission to abandon the project I tend to be happier coming back to it and often come back earlier than I planned because…
3. I remind myself that this is the Dip;  it takes as long as it takes, costs what it costs, and I’m going to do it regardless of the challenges, so I might as well enjoy the ride. If I’m feeling like I’m not enjoying it, then it probably means I have neglected something else that is important to me and I need to find a way to get my needs back in balance (or harmony, as I prefer to approach it).

And that is exactly how I came to write my blog tonight. I have absolutely no desire what-so-ever to write about social media this week, but this program is an important part of the long haul I’m in for, so I am determined to make some kind of step forward in this dip. What is my problem? So much of my time has been gobbled up over the past 13 weeks, trying to learn how to set up and use all these new programs, that I have felt a bit mechanical and my creative side has been neglected. I was expecting this. This is bootcamp and what Wave 2 was all about for me. It was about dedicating myself to my marketing project so that I could build a strong business foundation that I can be confident will support my creative pursuits and, eventually, lead me to a place where the house is capable of running itself without my constant supervision. I wanted Wave 3 to be about smoothing the integration so that I could focus more on music this time around. I don’t feel like I’m there yet. Thanks for listening, I’m going to move on now :)

A solution for my problem?  I wrote a lot about setting up social media sites during my Wave 2 Week 4 blog, so during this wave I want to satisfy my artistic need to reflect and write about the experience of using social media as an artist.

It has been AWESOME! Yes, it was a lot of work to set up and once you open a new social media application it never ends… but that’s a good thing. I can’t express how vitally important platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been in developing not only my online presence, but also my connection to the people who care about me and my music. My numbers suggest I don’t have a ton of followers at the moment, which is true, but those numbers are always growing; Especially with the webcast (84 visits to my website on the day of the last show. That’s huge for me!). With physical exercise, in order to maintain or improve upon the gains you achieve with all your hard work, you have to keep exercising. You don’t always have to be pushing your limits and comfort zone, but you do have to keep using those muscles and systems for them to continue functioning optimally, keeping your body healthy and efficient. Same thing with social media. If you stop using it all together, you will be forgotten and unfollowed. What I am trying to do now is find a way to blend it into my daily routine so that my social presence is alive and healthy, but not overwhelming me and taking all of my attention (if you only exercise your right bicep, it’s not going to help the strength of your left arm).

One major thing that has helped with this is … a team. Having other people on board that are actually keen to help out with social media and marketing has been a major asset in integrating social media into my life in a more manageable way over the last few weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I tweet my own tweets and post on people’s walls myself, but I do have a couple people now that can help with setting up and optimizing profiles on new sites (Addie), desiging/managing event pages and booking gigs (Leandra), and other tasks that don’t require an authentic artist interaction. You’d be surprised how much time it takes to upload music, pictures, etc. and design profiles when you’re trying to be everywhere on the net.

The team is still pretty new though, so it doesn’t always run smoothly yet and there have  been challenges in communicating my vision to others and we have all made mistakes along the way. For example, team members forgetting to sign out of my facebook profile before commenting on something on my wall … which makes me look like I’m having a conversation with myself or attempting super cheesy promotional tactics. While this is kind of funny in some ways, it’s also really serious. I don’t want to lose my fans/friends’ trust. If they have reason to believe that someone else is posting for me, they will have no reason to believe that I’m the one responding to them and may stop following.

Something that surprised me in a pleasant way was that even though I have my facebook fan page linked everywhere, there are waaay more people finding me and adding me as a friend with my personal account than liking my fan page. Though it doesn’t look particularly good for me as a musician, I think this is far more exciting. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that people I meet at shows and online are genuinely interested in getting to know me, not just my music. I’ve never used the “suggest to friends” function before, so I’m going to try that this week when Addie comes over.

Addie is a Fanshawe graduate who is really keen on getting into music marketing, especially social media. I recruited her by contacting her program director at the college (who was very eager to help me  and recognized the value of real-life experience for their students). I sent him a list of ‘available opportunities’ and he forwarded it to all the students in their Music Industry Arts program. Addie responded with a resume, came in for a semi-formal interview, and got the job! She has been coming over once a week for what we are calling “office hours” and has been a major asset in helping me cope with the demands of social media.

Leandra is a Harris Institute graduate who seriously wants to get into booking. She has scored me some pretty big gigs and free recording sessions and I am very grateful for her firey ambition. I met her at the NXNE conference this year through a mutual friend (who I met at a CIMA talk). When the arrangement she had with the band she was representing didn’t work out, she contacted me and asked if I was looking for management help. Indeed I was, so she came out to a show and interviewed me. We discussed our visions, goals, and work ethic and have been learning a lot together ever since.

I want these ladies to feel like the professionals they are and I want my business to operate like a real business, so they both have contracts (I got a package of music industry contract templates from Indie Artists Alliance) that are open to renewal and renegotiating. They also get paid. Not much, because we’re not bringing in much yet, but by offering to pay them something instead of asking them to work as unpaid interns (which is very common in this industry) they know that I respect them, apprecaite their work, and want them to be compensated. They know that the better we all do as a team, the more I will be able to give them.

If you want to build a team around you, I’m not an expert, but here is my suggestion: don’t give up on the idea when the first person doesn’t work out (because it probably won’t) … or the third person … or the tenth. Addie wasn’t the first person to send in a resume and be invited to join the team and I’ve gone through a number of people who tried acting as my manager or  booking agent, but in the end couldn’t commit to it. It has to be the right fit for everyone or it won’t work. Don’t take it personally and don’t blame the others for not following through if it’s not the right gig for them. It sucks to deal with turn-over, but it will give you the momentum you need to eventually get the right people on board. When you can advertise that you’ve got a booking agent, for example, that gives you credibility. People will take you more seriously and that will help attract other people who are interested in this kind of work.

It’s all stepping stones until you get to the other side of the river. Much like this week was for me. I don’t have my entire social media network all together and I haven’t quite figured out the best way to integrate it into my daily life, but I’m getting closer! (TweetDeck has been a BIG help with keeping updates regular, even when I can’t be at a computer for  a while. And the Pomodoro Technique has helped me make better use of my social media time when I am at the computer -thank you for blogging about it Ethan Waldman. I typically arrange for 1 “pomodoro” to check my tweets and schedule replies at the beginning of the day. I’ll also schedule retweets of things I think other people will find interesting. During the rest of the day, I send my own personal updates from my phone and catch up with the replies the next morning. I generally dedicate 1 – 2 “pomodoros” to check and respond to stuff on facebook before I go to bed. Since some of my tweets are set up to go through as facebook updates, this gives people time to comment on the posts and start discussions before I sit down to interact and catch up.

If you’re an artist going through “the angst” I hope this blog may have provided some coping strategies for you :) Feel free to forward it on to other social media sufferers :)

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How did I do that?

During the 3rd week of the 2nd wave of the Music Success in Nine Weeks blog challenge, I did a complete overhaul of my website from creating a brand new background graphic (from scratch) to re-designing the layout of the content. A few people wanted to know how I did it and so I decided to take this week to finally complete the description and share it with everyone in case there are more people out there that could benefit from the answers. It’s laid out in a relatively simple format with links to sites, articles and videos I found useful during the design process. I had absolutely no training in graphic design and very little knowledge of web design going into this challenge, so if you find yourself in the same shoes you might find it interesting to read. It is posted on my website under “About: My Web Design“.

Since most or many of the people in the #Msi9w3 challenge use Bandzoogle (the builder I use for my website) and may read this blog, I thought I would include a snippet from the description of my process that guides you specifically through the Custom Style builder in the Bandzoogle platform, using my website as an example.

• First step: I selected “Custom Styles” and uploaded the custom graphic! Then set the background colour to white.
• Under “options”, which is beside the thumbnail of your image in the control panel, I chose to have the image aligned in the top-center part of the page with no repeat (you would use this if you were tiling so that the image would appear all over the page, but I have just one big image so it wasn’t necessary). I decided not to have the image scroll with the page and selected ‘no’ for that option That means that my background image stays still and the content moves up and down while someone scrolls along my website. If you select ‘yes’ for this option the image will also move with the content. Like most of this stuff, it’s easier to understand once you try it and play around with it.
• Under “Page Layout” I made the “Top Margin” 438 px (that means the menu bar will be 438 pixels below the top of the page), checked the ‘standard width’ box and ‘position’-ed it on the left.
• I chose not to put in a header, as the background image serves that purpose
• I chose the option to have the menu placed after (below) the header instead of the top of the page with 0px  padding (px = pixels & the more “padding”, the taller the menu and more space between the menu buttons and the borders of the menu bar)
• I decided not to use a solid colour instead of an image as the background of the menu bar, but I could have done either. The colour I selected in Photoshop with the eye dropper tool. I copied the colour code (this shade of orange is #9c510f) and pasted that into the colour choice box in the Bandzoogle colour picker. Opacity set to 90%.
• The Menu Button spacing I set to 5 px (that’s the distance between menu buttons) with font “Mailbomb” (a font that’s in theBandzoogle library) size 20 px
• I chose not to use custom background images for the buttons, but you can. There are a lot of things you can use custom images for in this builder.
• For the Sub Menu (aka drop down menu) I used 2 shades of grey colours from my background graphic and set the opacity to 100%. I used colour #333333 for a dark background & a lighter #525252 for when the visitor’s mouse rolls over that button in the list. This gives it the effect of being highlighted and shows the visitor which page they will be selecting if they click the mouse. You can do the same thing with the font colour, but I decided one roll over option is enough for my page and set both the font and roll over colours to white (#ffffff) so that there would be no change to the font when the visitor hovers over that submenu button.
• Under “Content” I kept the padding at 0px because my menu bar is already pretty far down the screen, I didn’t want the content of the page to be any lower (the padding in this section determines how far away your content is from the menu). I set the background to the same shade of white, but this time made the opacity 80% so that my background image still shows through a little bit when the visitor is scrolling.
• I chose Verdana (size 14px) for the content font because it is easy to read and is thin. I write a lot, as you can probably tell, so being able to fit more words in less space is important. For that same reason, I made the line spacing 0% (as close together as possible). Because the content font is on a white background I made the text colour black (#000000) and made the link colour the same orange that is in my menu background and background graphic (#9c510f) to make it easier for readers to recognize when a word is clickable.
• Under “Sub Headers” (not to be confused with sub menu, the sub headers are lines of text to indicate a new section in the actual content of your website, not in the drop down menu. I didn’t use any padding for the sub headers, though you do have the option to use vertical and/or horizontal padding in this part (meaning you can decide how far from the side and/or top of the page your sub headers will appear (this does not change the position of your content).You can also choose to have a colour or custom background image for your sub headers, but I wanted mine to be completely transparent so I chose no image and turned off colour. I used the “MailBomb” font that is already in the Bandzoogle builder library. Because I didn’t want the subheaders to be too distracting from the background graphic, I set the colour Black so that they would blend in with the rest of the text, but still create enough distinction at size 20px to create clear divisions of the content on the page.

You can read the rest of the example here

There Was More Work to Be Done …

The website wasn’t the only thing I had to consider optimizing this week though.  Caught in a fit of inspiration on Wednesday night, I emailed the most awesome person I met at NMS 2010: Vladimir Vukicevic at RocketHub to find out how fast we could put a campaign together. He responded within minutes and we spoke on the phone the next morning. It was my hope that by the weekend I could send out my newsletter with news of my latest adventure: I’m starting a button making service to go with my webcast and general music business! As some of you may have noticed, I didn’t send out the newsletter this weekend (In fact, this blog is even late because of it), but I sure did optimize the h*ll out of my campaign page! So why am I so excited about this? And why am I blogging about it? Because RocketHub provides a really cool service to artists to help you acquire funds for your music and I think you might want to check them out yourself.

In brief, I want to pay independent artists to perform on my webcast. The show isn’t ready for approaching sponsors yet, so we need to be entrepreneurs! We make fine art pieces during each show and I want to be able to make buttons out of them, sell them on my website, and give the profits to the artists :) I’d also like to be able to make buttons for artists on the cheap and rent them the machine so they can learn to do it themselves. I am offering 100 buttons for $20 (shipping included) to those who pre-order now and help me get the machine by Dec 1st so that we can start making buttons in time for the Webcast Art Show  I’m organizing (concert and auction to raise funds for the food bank during the holidays). I have exhausted my funds on new cameras/computers etc for the webcast and recognized that I needed help raising the funds for the button making machine . Many artists need similar help for financing their next album, a tour, or even music videos. I hope they’re reading this :)

If we get enough pre-orders to reach our goal by December 1st, RocketHub will give us the funds and we start making and shipping buttons! If we don’t reach our goal, everyone gets their money back and I start over from scratch (noooo!). If we raise more money than we need, we’ll put the extra funds toward other gear and programs that will improve the webcast (see the campaign page for more details).

Recognizing that a lot of my friends don’t have credit cards and lots of people don’t like to give out that information online anyway, I created a “friends without credit cards” profile so that after people contact me and make alternate arrangements for payment (paypal, cash or email money transfer) I can fuel up the rocket on their behalf. You might want to do the same if you decide to start a campaign. I’ll be blogging about my experience with RocketHub as the campaign and blog contest progress to let you know my thoughts on the service. So far I love it!

Some of Examples of our Products & Services During our Start-Up Campaign:

• 100 custom buttons for $20 (shipping included… what?! Well, express post is extra)
• Magnetic X’s and O’s game for your fridge or locker (fully customizable and comes with a gift box & card to match)
• Just one lovely button. Send me the picture you want or choose a piece from the Webcast Art Gallery OR send me your friend’s funniest facebook profile picture and surprise them with it as a gift (comes with matching gift card)

For More details go to my project page on RocketHub: http://www.rockethub.com/projects/536-i-want-to-push-your-buttons

More? I didn’t sleep much this week …

I think that’s why I’ve caught a cold. Bleh.

Naturally, after developing a webcast pitch I had to incorporate that pitch into my webcast page and the ustream page that hosts my stream. Basically, I just made adjustments to my original website background by flipping most of the horizontal images 90 degrees and shrinking them to fit along the left hand side of the screen (becuase the content is in the middle, like Twitter. In fact, you can import your Twitter background to use as your background in Ustream … and that’s just what I did!). Then I used the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop to cut and paste images of my guests performing on the show and made a small profile picture with my pitch written on it (this shows up where the video would be when streaming). Voila! Time for a nap … no, soundcheck for the webcast starts in one hour. AH! haha Feel free to join us in the chatroom starting at 8pm EST and bring your instruments:

www.meghanmorrisonmusic.com/webcast

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Here we go.

After completing the second wave, I am joining the third wave of Ariel Hyatt’s Music Success in Nine Weeks Blog Challenge, not to compete for a prize, but to challenge myself to build off of what I have started and hopefully be a resource for those who are starting out or trying it again.  I accomplished a lot and learned a lot during the second wave, but I neglected other parts of my life (especially health and social life) in order to push myself bootcamp style. I don’t regret it one bit! I knew it was only temporary and I knew I needed it. While the blog challenge is only 9 weeks long, however, music marketing is an aspect of the business that will go on for as long as you are pursuing your music as a career. I plan to be doing that for a long time, so now I need to focus on finding balance and/or harmony.

I imagine the second time through this program is going to be more fun. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the first challenge series, but being a very reflective person, I’m actually excited to look back on my older blog posts and see how much my project has grown since the last time I visited a particular challenge. This week: Setting goals and acknowledging accomplishments. It feels like forever ago that I sat down to evaluate my goals in a formal way, which probably means it is high time to be doing it again! … or that I should be purposefully making it a part of my regular routine.

During the first week of the last wave, I made a ridiculous number of goals for myself; both long and short term. Though I have always been a dreamer and have always had big picture goals in mind, going through that process certainly helped me achieve a clearer picture for what I want to achieve overall.  Where I struggled mostly during the past 9 weeks wasn’t so much with goal setting, but with goal planning.The marketing process was very clearly laid out (thanks to Ariel), but I didn’t have a handbook for all my goals outside of the marketing side of music… or life in general … or how to work with unexpected responsibilities that cut into the time I needed to do the challenge work that week. This became more evident to me during the first few weeks of the challenge as I consistently missed goals;  partly because I planned far too much for myself and partly because I didn’t realize how much time the blog challenge work was actually going to take. Since my long term goals are still basically the same, this time around I want to try a different approach for week 1: focusing more on short term and intermediate goal “planning” vs “setting“. The strategy is to build off the work I did under Ariel’s tutelage during the last wave by blending in the Pomodoro Technique and, what I’m going to call, “1 Thing at a Time”.

How I’m doing it and what this means:

Ariel’s Tutelage: I have used the focus areas that Ariel suggests in her book (as well as a few custom areas that I felt were necessary for my project) and the 3 techniques Ariel teaches on page 16 (Clarity, Involve Only You, Achievable) to generate ideas for goals and setting goals. My Statement Piece survived the move and is still hanging up in my room so that I can see it every day. This time around, however, I have created a more organized system for storing and working on my goals: A binder with tabs. Go figure. Just like I have a binder for my daily 5 Successes.

1 Thing at a Time : Because I set so many goals for myself, I need to start breaking them down into what I can plan to achieve this week and evaluating my progress and goal setting on a weekly basis. A lot of the time my goals are really just ideas; being ambitious, I tend to treat the two things equally. A goal, however, is more formal than an idea. As such, in my goal binder, I have included one page of loose-leaf under each focus area tab/divider just for ideas (goals in training) and a separate “Activity Planning Sheet” (from the Pomodoro Technique) for formal goals that have specific dates and time allotments.  This has helped me develop a clearer picture of the success I can achieve over the following 7 days. To promote this feeling of achievement (and eliminate the feeling of being overwhelmed), I have decided to plan 1 goal and only 1 goal as a “priority goal” for each focus area that week. Other goals that I will attempt to achieve during the week are listed under each focus area tab, but I only put one goal for each focus area on my ‘This Week” page (that goes at the front of the binder) which absolutely must get done -no excuses!

Pomodoro Technique: This technique was introduced to me by fellow #msi9w3 blogger, Ethan Waldman.  After seeing in my Google Alerts update that he had blogged about me, I checked out his Week Zero blog (clever, Ethan!) and learned about it there. Basically, this technique makes you break down your tasks into 25 + 5 minutes chunks to help you get more value out of your work time. It also teaches you how to manage interruptions (from outside and within) and stay on task. Though I am very task oriented, focused and determined, as a creative person my mind is still always wandering. Often to things that make my project better, but also often to things that are completely irrelevant and can wait until later.

In my strategy for goal attainment during this wave, I am going to use the Pomodoro Technique not only to to help me organize the time I spend working on tasks, but in planning my weekly goals as well. At present I have my 1Thing at a Time goals (organized by focus area) planned out for the week based on how many ‘Pomodoros’ it takes to complete the task and have left time open for unexpected tasks that need immediate attention, free time/personal life. Like Ariel recommends, no more than 6 things to do per day. At the end of every day, I will sit down with my goals and successes binders to track what I have done and reflect on how I can plan my time better if I didn’t achieve what I wanted to.

I found that writing blogs on Sundays (to have ready for Monday) left me feeling too rushed because of band commitments on the weekends. So this time around I’m going to try posting on Fridays, before the weekend, and then promoting on Mondays. This gives a couple of days for reflection and editing and offers the die-hards a chance to comment before everyone else reads (*ahem*… James), huzzah! If you know of any other time management strategies or have success stories of your own that you’d like to share, I’d love for you to leave them in the comment section below.

Here’s to week 1 of Wave 3! Kudos to everyone who has signed up and blogged.

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Eternal Clock, available for use under a Creative Commons 2.0 License, by Robbert van der Steeg

I just got back from dropping off my Creators and Composers Grant application to the Toronto Arts Council (… fingers crossed for a successful outcome). It seems the more I take on, the more I take on, the more I take on… and, being a perfectionist, the more I edit, the more I edit, the more I edit. Alas, for the first time in these 9 weeks of the blog challenge, my Music Success in Nine Weeks blog is being written late (on Monday instead of Sunday). Four weeks ago I would have beaten myself up over this: “I should have planned things better”; “I shouldn’t have taken on so much”; “I can’t do this all on my own”. Now I’m able to look back and say “Balls! That sucks. I really like getting things done on time, but look at everything I DID accomplish to keep me from getting my blog done on time! I bought a house, set up the utilities, packed everything, moved in, met with contractors, cleaned the house before helping roommates move in the next day, started setting up the studio in the basement; I put in 3 solid days at the vocal school, had office hours with Addie (my volunteer online promotions teammate) to draw up her contract, hours, and action plan; Overcame the challenge of  “Surprise! No Internet Today!” by finding an alternate venue for my webcast and making sure all the guests knew about the changes and where to go … then ran the webcast; Finished a grant application, press kit and log book with my manager; Went to investigate button making machines for my Continuum Program and created a first draft of ideas for said continuum program (see below); Had a decent rehearsal and started writing a new song; Went to see my friends play their last Canadian tour gig and revelled in the magic of Nuit Blanche“.

I think I’ll forgive myself for being late this time … and anytime, for that matter, because it’s still moving forward, even if it’s not on time.

Directly, the experience of going through this 9 week blog challenge has taught me an incredible amount about marketing my music. Indirectly, it has taught me how to survive. The last two years, after giving up my academic life in pursuit of my artistic life, have been an emotional rollercoaster to say the least: Excited for the ride, but also scared as hell; Not knowing how fast it’s going to go or if I have the strength to hold on if my seat belt breaks; Just knowing I’m on board and trusting the instincts that told me to get on the ride in the first place … it is frightening and blissful at the same time. You know, something only crazy people get themselves into. I’m a little less of a madman now, because I no longer feel like I am precariously juggling life, business, and art (trying not to let one or all of them drop). Rather, all the facets of my passion have become stripes on a beach ball; one cohesive unit that has clearly distinguished parts that are sewn together, bringing me a sense of balance and strength when I’m being bounced around.

As romantic as the craziness was (and still is), I did want some semblance of structure -a way to know I was doing everything I could do to keep the tracks maintained. Ariel’s program was just that. Being involved in this blog challenge has helped me develop the framework I need to really turn my music into a career instead of a sideshow. Now I am more confident than ever that I can and will pull it off, but also know that if I’m in this for the long haul, it will always be a process, it will always take time, so why not let myself enjoy it now? Industries and times change and, because I am an artist, I also change and grow with time and so should my business. Now that I’m a little further up the slope, I can finally take a look back, take a breath and think it through. Then make a plan and build the wall again, each time reusing the pieces that worked well and putting the others off to the side for other projects or perhaps future use later down the road. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s not starting from scratch, not really. It’s a healthy cycle of repairing and reviving. So there is no need for me to panic and get frustrated anymore. That is why I decided to sign up for the third wave of Ariel’s blog challenge. This time my challenge isn’t going to be whether or not I can accomplish everything that’s in the book (admittedly, there are some things I need to catch up on), but rather how much I can surprise myself with ways to build from it now that I have a strong foundation, a clearer vision, and a bigger team to help me. Third wave starts October 11th, if you want to join me.

As for concluding my marketing plan for this wave, Week 9 involved designing a continuum program. Basically, a way to make money off of all the work I have done in the previous 8 weeks and will continue to do in the future. Ariel suggests creating your program by visualizing it as a funnel (or upside down pyramid). At the top of the funn-amid, you have smaller (or free) purchases that many people will be likely to snag, like free downloads with a sign up for your newsletter. As the funnel gets smaller, so does the number of customers, but the price gets higher and these are the items you offer to the true blue fans that want to support you and your art, regardless of the amount of money. Everywhere in between are a variety of services and items that you can create for all the fans who are in between (weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down! … where did that come from? The easily distracted mind never rests).

I have decided to start with a small funnel for this wave of the blog challenge, with my focus on getting the button making project together. Critical Buttons in Toronto sells and rents the machines (and also just buttons if you don’t want to make them yourself). Because we do an art project during every webcast (the pieces are going to be auctioned off for charity at the end of the year), I thought it would make sense to start making buttons out of the art pieces. Half of the proceeds will go to the charity (yet to be decided) and half to the artists.  Plus, this way I can make my own buttons or even buttons for other artists/bands. Then I’ll start a button of the month club where people can subscribe to receive either that month’s featured button, or a button that I choose at random… haven’t fully decided yet. Maybe it will be both. The rest of the funnel will include CD packages. I have decided to do some remixes of the DTour songs (the album is a limited quantity and I will not be making more of them) and plan to package those with a copy of the CD my brother and I made with our old band (Purl of Surf). Then at the bottom of the funnel, I will offer to create and record (at home) a custom song for anyone who wants one. I’ve done a few of these as gifts this year and really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to getting the “store” up and really running.

Well, that’s all for now, but I guess there are no sad soppy so-longs because I’ll see you again next week in Wave 3! Kudos to everyone who stuck it through these 9 weeks and beyond. It was great to read your blogs and learn alongside you.

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