Well, this is really winding down now. This week’s chapter is fairly short and relatively simple and all about non-virtual communication with people. For instance, going to a party or other event and really staying focused on what you want to achieve when talking to people face to face. I’m not sure who does that anymore but it sounds intriguing. ;O)
Ariel cites Larry Sharpe as the inspiration for some of the information in the chapter and explains the reasons why we network, like finding customers, gaining a sphere of influence and finding resources for new ventures. She’s emphatic about being memorable by getting other people to talk about themselves. I actually really enjoy getting people to talk about themselves so this is easy. I rarely ever say anything about myself unless asked, because frankly, conversation is a two-way street. Now, if someone only likes talking about themselves, I’d just give them a mirror and find someone else to talk with. But maybe now, I’ll give them a business card first, which just happens to be another bit of strategy that Ariel gives.
For getting business cards done, Ariel recommends Vista Print for free cards and Jak Prints for designing your own. I’ve actually been getting cards made at Vista Print for years for the price of shipping. You can choose from a number of templates which change often enough that you may be original, provided that you don’t use the one with the red painted tapestry with the microphone in front. I got that one when it came out and so did 1,000 other musicians. It was kinda funny actually. The only catch is that they put their logo on one side. When “Between the Lines” came out, I got custom cards made with one of the photos from the photo shoot for the cover of the CD, and really spent time crafting a card that was part of the image I was working with for the new CD. They came out very nicely and were dirt cheap, they threw in a custom mailing ink stamp for outgoing mail which is getting a lot of use when I send CDs out, and the turn-around was lightening fast. I highly recommend them. There are some tips about what to put on the card, like your pitch, a photo, something that indicates what you do or play, email, and links to web sites where you’re found. I did all those things and people have actually hung up my card because they like the picture on it, so I know what Ariel is saying is right on.
So, without using the word “intention”, Ariel very much is recommending that you know what you want out of making a contact in a social situation. Setting intention is such a powerful thing because it sets a lot of wheels in motion because you’re putting out there what it is you want, and when you do that, you draw situations toward you that support your intention. Even when meeting people, have a vision of what you’d like to receive, and then be willing to put effort into following up with people that you meet to find out how you can get what you want from them and give them what it is they’re looking for. It’s about creating synergy with people. I always try and think about my music as being something that people really want so that when I’m sharing with them, it’s not laborious to be selling myself. But I’ve found that you have to let them open the door to you, and they do that when they know you’re listening too them. I just never try and sell something without being invited which is why I’ll never be a door-to-door salesman.
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I was with Anthony W in some dwelling that he’d acquired and was making upgrades to. It was an older home that had been Frankensteined since the early 1900’s and we were assessing a room that had once been an outdoor patio, but had a roof put over it to connect it to the main house. Whomever did the work didn’t put a ceiling in because it would’ve made it too low and I was holding up 2×4 to see if there was something we could do to close off the exposed roofing. Anthony was standing next too me and was talking about going into the back where there was a 3 story apartment building with one apartment on each floor, across from a large carriage house. I decided to walk out into the front of the house o take a look at the entire grounds, but when I turned around, all I saw was that the apartment structure was starting to collapse. I started screaming Anthony’s name over and over, but I had laryngitis and could hardly get his name out to warn him. As I started running toward the house, I watched the apartment completely collapse. I ran into the courtyard looking for him but couldn’t find him.
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This week’s chapter is about growing your email list. Last week we created it and now Ariel has some great tips for adding names too it. She recommends that you reach out to your friends and family. This was the first thing that I did when I started my email list 6 years ago. My approach was to just add them with a simple unsubscribe link in the email which should always be present and tell them that they can opt out should they choose to. Make sure that you craft your subject line well. I use Sean Michael Imler AKA Rhythma Newsletter. If you don’t do this, chances are that they’ll delete the email as spam since it likely will not be coming from an address they already have in their address book. That being said, also request that they add the return address to their address book so that their ISP won’t flag you as spam.
Another recommendation is to create a folder especially for potential inclusions to your email list. I really like this idea because I’m always getting email from people but never really think of them as email list candidates. When you sell CDs or downloads from CDBaby, they capture the email address of the buyer, so that’s another source for your email list which is a great source because they’ve already expressed interest in your music. Never just add them without their consent though.
The item that I’ve recently put into action is offering a free download if a visitor at my web site signs up on my email list. It took me a little while to build this and tho I would’ve liked to do it with a uniquely encrypted password, that was more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted to send the url to the user in the confirmation email. I can’t say that I’ve gotten any bites on this yet but my page views haven’t gone up THAT much since I’ve been working on this book’s plan.
And on that point, something you should absolutely do is to get Google Analytics going on your site so that you can track page visits. It’s really easy to hook up and it will tell you if you’re plans are fruitful. To be honest, I think that Ariel should put this in her book, maybe near the front of the book. This should go in a section about “measuring success” because you need a way to track that what you’ve done is actually producing success by comparing it to what you already have.
There are a couple of other recommendations that she’s suggested like starting a text message list and trading email lists with another band. I think the former might work if you have an audience that’s on the go and relies on their phones a lot. This won’t work if your audience is still in the 90’s. Someone told me about 2 years ago that texting was the new email list. I personally haven’t seen that but I am on a couple friend’s text message lists and I’m not crazy about getting them. I kinda want to use my texting for conversations, not announcements. A site that gives tools for collecting numbers for texting lists is BroadTexter. I should be hooking this up this week so that I’m not criticizing without actual experience.
The trading of lists I’ve always found a little weird because email is already so impacted with spam and other business promotion communications that I haven’t wanted to try getting email addresses that way. I like the opt-in approach but maybe the right opportunity hasn’t presented itself, and maybe I haven’t been looking at myself as a business. These are things I should cogitate on.
The gem here is actually scheduling time to do email list promotion and not waiting for people to find your list. This is something I’m working into my schedule. I’m not sure how email lists rank against Twitter, Facebook and MySpace work but I’d be curious to hear about other people’s experiences with these other networks and their successes with them by comparison. Could it be the email lists are too last decade?
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I was laying in the water bed that I had as a kid when I lived with my mother. I was curled up and very comfortable when my body started being pulled to the foot of the bed. It was like I was sliding because my posture wasn’t really changing, just my location. I felt a presence in the room like I wasn’t alone and whatever was there with me was powerful. When I finally stopped moving, I looked down at my feet and they seemed incredibly close too me. Then, a woman was there, standing at the side of the bed. She was in her late 30’s/early 40’s and was dressed in weekend night attire like she was going out. She had on a green blouse and black pants and wore a lot of silver jewelry. She started talking to me about something but I couldn’t recall what it was, but I flat out asked her if she was there for my highest good. I guess she wasn’t because right after I asked her that, she vanished, leaving her clothes rumpled up on the floor. I swung my legs over the side and stood up and kicked at them to make sure that there really was nothing left of her.
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I was holed up in an apartment that belonged to a Mafia boss. His daughter was hiding me because the Mafia boss and a lot of others were looking for me. His apartment was the last place he’d looked so I was in the back in his daughter’s bedroom. I could hear men out in the streets shouting and I was pretty nervous. I knew I couldn’t stay there and needed to get out but wasn’t sure how. The ceiling of the room was about 12ft. high and at it’s apex was a small window that I was considering climbing up the edges of the wall to get to. I heard someone come into the house and realized I didn’t have much time. I was getting ready to climb when I looked to my left and noticed a small hallway where the washer and dryer were, and at the end of the hallway was a small window that led to the backyard. It was covered by a screen, and tho I didn’t want anyone to know that I’d gone thru this window, I cut a slice in the screen at the edge near the frame, and stealthily slid thru the opening and escaped out the backyard, up a small hill. I knew that I was going to be able to escape and I wouldn’t be found.
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I was on a large helicopter with a group of people. It was nighttime and there was some sort of system malfunction. The pilot was the only person who knew how to hold the helicopter together long enough so that the passengers could parachute up and jump before it went down. He crawled to the back where he was rewiring and literally holding parts together and keeping connections alive and it seemed certain that he was going to go down with the ship. I was the last passenger and it seemed so heroic and noble to keep the helicopter airborne while the passengers escaped, even if it meant that the pilot would die, that I couldn’t just leave him behind; I wanted him to survive but didn’t know what to do but I didn’t jump with the rest of the passengers. Instead, I crawled to the cockpit chair on the left. The ground was approaching really fast and just as we were going to hit, a voice in my head told me to grab the joystick and yank it to the right, right now. I followed this instruction and just as the body of the helicopter was about to hit the ground, the blades struck first, causing the body to shift upward and alleviate sudden impact that would otherwise have crushed the body. We essentially escaped without a scratch and the pilot was so very grateful for hanging on with him.
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“In order to be successful you must think about your fans as customers”, Ariel says. First, wrapping my head around fans is enough. I know I have people that like my music and I’ve sold music to them, but when I think of the word “fan”, it’s hard to picture these people as fans because I know nearly all of these people personally. They’re friends, family, acquaintances, people that I see around. I haven’t made a really long reach yet, and I have trouble reconstituting these people as customers. I have asked them to buy music from me and review it, but I do so thinking that they want to support me as their wacko music writing buddy. Maybe a shift in my perspective will help, but I’ve never really enjoyed sales. I think that’s probably the point here is to start thinking like a business person. I find something that helps is only sell when the other person expresses interest. That’s the opening to shift to sales person. Don’t try to sell to someone before you know that they have interest. This helps me stay authentic.
There are a ideas in chapter 6 of the book Music Success in Nine Weeks that I like better than the last one. Make ringtones out of songs. ReverbNation has a new store and selling ringtones is something they offer their artists so I’m going to try and get a few good excerpts of songs to post there and see how that works. Something else I’ve thought of doing is making stickers. I really like the Rhythma logo and I think it would make great rub-on decals, so that’s on my list of things to do. How many of you would buy stickers, 2 for a buck? Do I hear t-shirts?
A good portion of the chapter is dedicated to email marketing and building your email list. I’ve had an email list for over 5 years now. It’s not a huge list, and I don’t send out that many emails which according to Ariel is not good. You need to be consistent and frequent. For much of last year, I abandoned the list because I wasn’t doing much music as other things had priority in my life. I shant do that again. She really presses the idea of knowing your audience so that you can think of interesting and relevant things to add to the newsletter to make it compelling. I’ve always thought of the common thread is the love of music so I only talk about things that are going on musically. People are so inundated with content being pushed to them that I tend to keep my newsletters short and to the point. According to my analytics, only 30% of my newsletter mail-outs are read. That’s a really big concern and I don’t know what to do about it. Is it spam, are they getting lost in the shuffle, or are they just being deleted? I recently upgrade my software and found that there are rejections from some servers thinking that I’m spam. I’m remedying this. Spam is a real problem because it’s easy to get black-listed from major email servers if a few people have a spam happy trigger finger or mass mailings to larger email servers trigger their alerts and once you’re on those lists, they’re really hard to get off of.
The other thing about the newsletter is the formatting. I always keep my subject line reading, “Sean Michael Imler AKA Rhythma Newsletter.” That’s pretty clear. The book then talks about the 3 G’s: greeting, guts, and getting. Got that the greeting as my software Active Campaign’s 12All adds personalization of the sendee via hooks. The gut is the content which should always be compelling in my opinion. Getting is where you get the readers to do something, which I’ve always done, no matter if it’s primary or secondary to the guts of the email. She prescribes only one call to action tho. I’m a firm believer in staying to one point. Readers can only handle so much at once and will easily miss the point because most people are skimming because of time constraints.
Last but not least, she recommends surveys. I’ve haven’t done this in a long time, since before I put out my first CD in 2005. Anyone remember the poll I did to decide which songs to put on “Rhythma?” Well, I set up a new poll. It was pretty easy to do now that I’m using WordPress. I used a plugin called WP-Polls. It was a little tricky to hook up because you have to have the wp-head and wp-foot php includes in your templates. I’d removed mine not thinking they were needed and I ended up at their forum trying to debug why it wasn’t working, but it’s all good now. I posted my first poll asking everyone to pick between two versions of a song that I recorded.
So, this is good: Ariel’s getting me to be more active with my email list. A couple of sites she recommends to use for email lists and polls are SurveyMonkey and BandLetter. They seem like pretty cools sites but I’m such a DIYer, I probably won’t go down that road. ;O)
Rhythma Music | Comments Off on Music Success in Nine Weeks: Week 6
I submitted this to a Taxi listing that was calling for a tense acoustic singer/songwriter type song that raised an air of suspicion for an indie film. I thought that “Falling” was perfect but it wasn’t dark enough so I rewrote it in E minor and rerecorded it. Unfortunately it didn’t get selected. But, I have something to share with you so check it out. You can even leave me a comment. If I get some decent responses, maybe I’ll polish and produce it with more instrumentation and it will make it onto my next CD.
[poll id=”2″]
Rhythma Music | 3 Comments »
I was at some conference where I was talking to some people about heading over to different conference to register for it but was worried that I’d misread the documentation about the schedule and expected that I was too late to get in. I left anyhow and drove into a parking garage that was very similar to the one where Road Rally was held.
When I got inside, it was indeed completely jammed with people waiting to register. The line was so long, I didn’t think there was any way that I was going to get any of the accommodations I was looking for, but I got in line anyway and started chatting with the people around me. Suddenly, this young woman walked up and asked if I was Sean and told me that they’d set aside some panels for me and that everything I had wanted to attend was attainable. I was elated. I went back to the other conference I was at shared my excitement with my friends that everything had worked out.
What a nice dream. ;O)
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Songs making my world go ’round…
- Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek
- Burlap to Cashmere – Eileen’s Song
- Lupe Fiasco – Hip-Hop Saved My Life
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Soft Shock (Acoustic)
- City and Colour – The Girl
- Ok Go – You’re So Damn Hot
- Cold War Kids – Robbers
- Muse – Uprising
- Bob Schneider – 40 Dogs (Like Romeo and Juliet)
- Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys – Empire State of Mind
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