Week 7 - Ariel Hyatt Blog Challenge

Week seven is here, only two more to go! This weeks lesson is very refreshing because it is focuses on the exact opposite of everything that’s been talked about so far. We’ve been mostly working on our online presence. Now it’s time to turn off the computer (Yay!) and get out into the world for some real-life networking. Wha? I can’t just sit at my computer and get fans and sell CD’s? Dang it!

There is some great real-world advice in this lesson, and while most of it seems like common sense, I think the most important piece of advice is to resist the temptation to be constantly promoting yourself. When you are passionate about what you do, its easy to get caught up in the mind-set of seeing each person you meet as someone to get on your mailing list or to get a CD in their hands, but really, it’s o.k. to just be yourself and get to know people. Honestly, most of the time, this is exactly what we do. When we are out at an event where we should be networking, we end up just chatting with people and forgetting about the mailing list or our CD or the fact that we even have business cards! We walk out the door smiling until we realize that maybe we should have given that person we talked to all night a CD or that we missed the perfect opportunity to get them on the mailing list; why didn’t we take it? We can definitely work on our real-life networking!

But, on the other hand, I’ve also been assaulted by musicians who walk right up, introduce themselves, proceeded to try and “sell” me on what they are doing without even asking my name, then they shove a demo or card in my hand and walk away. What’s up with that? Maybe they can canvas a whole room quickly, but how many people do they actually make a connection with?

So, I guess the point of the lesson, among other things, is to find the balance between your life and your music and to use common sense. I thank my lucky stars that I have Tim on my team because he is the king (in my eyes) of face to face networking and a genuinely interesting person to talk to plus an over-all nice guy! Don’t you agree? If you’ve never met Tim, make a point to seek him out, I guarantee you will be laughing and carrying-on in no time!
Sara

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We Were Winners at the WAMI CD Roulette

We, and three other bands, won the WAMI CD Roulette contest on Sunday!

The Wisconsin Area Music Industry, or WAMI for short, hosted an event yesterday called the WAMI CD Roulette, in which musicians entered one song to be critiqued by a panel of judges, all with experience in the Music Industry. The judges were played a 90 second clip of each entry and were asked to rate it (and provide feedback) in each of the following categories: Originality, Performance quality, Commercial appeal, and Overall impression. The top four entries we're awarded performance slots at either Bastille Days in Milwaukee's Cathedral Square, The Wisconsin State Fair, The Milwaukee County Parks Summer Music Series, or Summerfest. They'll let us know soon which spot we won!

The judging was done in two sessions and we were in the first. The judges we faced were pretty tough and at times quite harsh in their feedback. To quote a judge from the second session "I sat in and listened to some of the critiques from the first session and was pretty sure the suicide rate was going to go up." We entered our song "The Long Road" and we faired pretty well in the critiques. The judges all seemed to think that our song was well put together and well played. They had a few minor criticisms but all in all, we did well. One of the judges, a radio DJ even asked that we submit it to her station!

There were 15 entries in our session, 26 overall, and many of them were very strong contenders so we were extremely surprised to win.

Among the other winners were The Liberty Bluegrass Band, World Minus One, and Katie Lafond.

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Week 6 - Ariel Hyatt Blog Challenge

Even though we have fallen a bit behind in our blog posts for the Ariel Hyatt Blog Challenge. I am pretty impressed that we have made it this far. And, in the process, I think we found that writing a blog a week is really not that hard to do. I hope that we have not been boring our readers (I think we have readers:) to death with all the serious talk. I promise, more interesting stuff is on the way, we have a great story to tell about going to see John Prine play at the Capitol Civic Center in Manitowoc. It involves a chance meeting with friends and a real live pig, so check back soon!

On with this weeks lesson! This is all about the importance of building your email list. Social networking sites like Facebook are great for communicating with your fans, but you can’t count on them being there forever.

For example, MySpace was once the best thing since sliced bread, but now it is being replaced with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. And what if it shuts down completely? All of the connections made there may be gone forever. This is why an email list that you control is so important. Keeping our fans up to date on our shows, releases and lives is paramount to keeping our music going!

There are many tactics to getting people on your list. I won’t go into them all, but just asking people to join is not the answer. Just like any favor, it needs a return favor, so I think the most important thing we gleaned out of this lesson is to thank fans that sign up with a gift that they can’t get anywhere else. Right now, our fans have access to exclusive song downloads through Reverb Nation. And we are trying to figure out how to do video, too.

The lesson also stresses that you have to come up with creative ways to get fans on your list and block out the time required to get the job done. We are working on this. Time, there just are not enough hours in the day!

So, if you’re not on our list, join today! We won’t bombard you with emails and we never share your information with anyone, ever! And if we annoy you, well, you can easily unsubscribe. So, what have you got to lose!

Sara

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Week 5 - Music Success Blog Challenge

The week 5 lesson in Ariel Hyatt's "Music Success in Nine Weeks" book focuses on your newsletter and having a feel for the people on your email list and the kinds of things they are interested in. Fans who receive emails from you that interest them are more likely to stay fans. The assumption is that most of your fans are probably going to be a lot like you and share a lot of your interests, since like-minded people usually enjoy similar music, but there are a lot of people out there who enjoy a wide genre of music and reaching them is equally important.

So, what does Ariel have to say about it? Well, she suggests that you start off by writing down who your fans are (male, female, single, married, old, young, etc…) and then what they like to do and where they might hang out. Excellent advice. But how are we supposed to know all of this information? Not every name and email address on our fan list is put there as a result of a handshake and a five minute conversation. Some fans are added from our Web Site/blog/Facebook page and some are added through raffles and sign up forms at our shows. We have decided to take two approaches to solve this problem.

The first is that we can use some of the information that the internet has available. Facebook does a pretty good job of showing you some of the demographics of your fans. There is an insights section that tells you how many of your fans are male, female, single, married, their age ranges and all sorts of other things. Thats a pretty good start! Google Analytics is also a really powerful tool because you can dig a little deeper. It shows you the sections of your Web Site that people visit the most, where in the world they are, and how they are finding your site. So, we know roughly how old they are, and if they're boys or girls and if they're married or not, but we still don't really know what they're into. This is where another part of the weeks lesson comes in and where we really need to trust a piece of advice that Ariel gives about our fans.

The second approach that we're going to take in the quest to learn about our fans is something relatively obvious. We're going to ask them. At the end of the chapter Ariel mentions sending your fans surveys and we think it's a pretty good idea. So that's exactly what we're going to do. We are in the process of writing up a short, not too intrusive list of questions we want to know about our fans and we're going to ask them. This raises a few concerns about over communicating with people and driving them to unsubscribe from the list, but Ariel has the following piece of advice on that subject and we agree with her: People who ask to be removed from your list probably aren't interested in what you're doing anyway, so remove them with joy and get on with bonding with the core that want to hear from you. Well said.

The information that we gather will help us to create a more in-depth relationship with our fans, the people we are asking to support us in the increasingly difficult music career journey, and in the end will help us give them more of what they want. Or, everyone will just unsubscribe from our list....lets hope not!

What do you think? If we asked you to answer questions about what you're into would you do it or would you be offended and unsubscribe? Do you have any ideas to improve our newsletter or other communications with you? Lets hear 'em.

Until next week,

Tim

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Week 4 - Ariel Hyatt Blog Challenge

In case you're just finding our blog now and haven't read the last four posts or so, we have been participating in a 9 week blog challenge put on by Ariel Hyatt. Ariel's book "Music Success in 9 Weeks" very smartly lays out 9 lessons on how to improve your approach to marketing your music. We are now on week four and are quickly realizing we probably should have thought about the fact that we were going to be honeymooning in a remote location with no internet access during the weeks when the internet is the focus of the lessons. As a result, this blog entry is already 3 days overdue!

Week four is is all about using the internet interactively. Using forums where people don't just stare at a page, but enter in the discussion. The message that we took away from this weeks lesson is that the internet and the way people find and view information is changing and becoming more community based. It is no longer effective to put up a digital version of a brochure for yourself, call it a Web Site and be set in the online advertising department. The music scene has changed. It has moved from record shops to the internet and finding the dirt on your favorite bands has moved from black and white fan 'zines to places like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, vlogs, Myspace, Youtube...lions and tiger and bears, oh my! The book discusses many of these places in detail (blogs, photo sites, social networks, etc…) and makes it quite clear that you must be involved in the online community in order to make it work for you. Being involved doesn't mean just having a Facebook page and hoping that people find it, it means actually reading and participating in discussions on the blogs that you hope will write about your music. It means giving your fans a window into your world with photos on Flickr and videos on Youtube. Don't just post and walk away; Start a conversation and be fans of your fans!

It's a lot to take in and maintain. Ariel likens it to your web garden. You must feed, weed and water on a continual basis to keep things growing. We've been doing a lot of this for a while now. Some well, some not at all. We're alright at the planting part, but we miss the weeding and watering sometimes. This week we will focus on what parts we've been neglecting and try to give them a little TLC.

One of the parts of this lesson that we do fairly well is our Flickr page. Photography used to be a career for me(Sara) and I now enjoy using my skills to photograph other musicians and document our lives together for my own enjoyment. It's easy to do something well when you have a passion for it! Flickr is an excellent way to not only show your fans what you've been up to (not only as a band, but as people) but also a way to attract new fans. We have attracted more than a few hits to our Web Site and blog from our Flickr page. We include tags on each of our photos and participate in several groups, which has definitely had a positive effect. Have a look at our Flickr page HERE

The blog section of this chapter is without a doubt an area that we need some work on. We both read plenty of blogs, music related and otherwise, but we aren't very active commenters. We have both started organizing our Google Reader pages and have started to focus more on blogs that we have something to say about.

This weeks lesson is something that you cultivate over months and years so taking a big breath and diving in is good, but understanding that it won't be done overnight is a must! One foot in front of the other....

Until next week,

Sara and Tim

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