This week seems to have gone by really quickly. I’m still grappling with identity in Flickr and how much personal stuff to share. I can’t seem to make a decision around some things that I wrote about in last week’s post especially concerning Flickr and I’ve neglected to write down the user/pass that I created for the MyBlogLog account that I created as a todo in Week 5 of the book. The most ironic thing is that I had a “personal” MyBlogLog account, and like the Flickr account, I wanted to try to separate Rhythma from everyday Sean, and it might just be that I can’t do it.
It’s quite a commitment to work thru this book and update my blog each week for each chapter, but I’m persistent and will prevail. And, speaking of blogs, that’s the topic for this week: Gittin’ yer blog on. So, if you read my first post, you’ll know that it was a big deal for me to turn this blog loose because although I’d been keeping a dream blog for about 5 years, I’d never made it public. Now that you may have read some of my dreams, you’ll see they can range from short and bizarre to long and bizarrer. I’ve added two other categories, “Rhythma Music” which I’ll file this post under, and “Life in General” which is not getting many posts because I can’t seem to find the time to upload my pictures to Flickr or anything else because this project is taking so much time and after that, there’s music. So, no life.
To turn my blog on was quite the effort because my OCD kicks in whenever I’m working on the computer. I get a vision in my head of the way something needs to be, and I work relentlessly to achieve it. In this case, I had to first upgrade WordPress from version 0.9 to 2.8. A quick synopsis of WordPress would be that it’s a very nicely written blogging application that you install on an internet server so that you can host your own blog under your own domain. When you look at Rhythma.com in it’s current state, you’ll see that there are links in the left hand side that take you to other pages in the site where you can look at photos and listen to music, but in the middle is my blog. The comparison would be to look at Blogger.com where they are the host for someone’s blog which you can write once you’ve created a user account with them, but your blog will always be on Blogger.com. I’ve always liked hosting my own content. In fact, I ran my web site from my own server out of my house until about 4 years ago when I finally decided to have godaddy.com host it because I was tired of the maintenance and hack attacks. BTW – I really like godaddy.com hosting.
WordPress is nice because if you don’t know too much about web sites, you can install WordPress with an incredibly simple installation! If you want to make WordPress look different from the default look, you can pick from hundreds of themes that users have created that give you different styling options and page layouts. It’s really awesome. For me tho, I needed to make WordPress look and feel like my current web site because I’d been running it at an exclusive url and never bothered to give it the look and feel of Rhythma.com. To do this, I had to learn how to create my own theme. Once I did that, I got the current layout that you see on my site, with the addition of plugins available from WordPress. A plugin is a chunk of code that does a particular task that you can add onto an application. The plugins that I’m using and I highly recommend are:
- Socialite – I use this to send the titles and links back to my blog posts to my Rhythma Facebook Page and to my MySpace Page.
- Twitter Goodies – I use this to send the titles and links back to my blog posts to my Twitter Page. I could have Socialite do that for me as it is a feature of that plugin but I have Facebook set up to post all of my tweets to my main Facebook. Not to mention that I get that dandy little right side bar widget that reposts my tweets right back to Rhythma.com.
- Find Me On – This gives me the six icons on the right hand side above the Twitter Feed that point to the social networks where I have content that I want to share with my visitors. You can choose from a whole bunch of them and the icons are very nicely made.
The book recommends that you not only have an outgoing blog to share parts of yourself but that you engage with other blogs online to establish a connection with bloggers that you might at some time get to review your music. This is a road I’ve been down and I’ll share with you my experience and also some of Ariel’s thoughts around this. Music bloggers are a very busy lot. New music is coming out constantly and it’s really hard to get them to write you up. Last year, I went to SXSW and sat in on some panels that talked a lot about bloggers and a tactic that I learned was simply to hunt down music blogs that might be apt to review music like yours. I find my music somewhat similar to Brett Dennen and since he’s been getting traction, what I did was do searches online for “music blogs” and “brett dennen” and came up with a good list of thirty blogs that had reviewed Brett. I then went to each one of them and tracked down who wrote the article and how to contact them or how to send them music. Then, I bookmarked each of those sites and sent out lots and lots of emails. I sent out mp3s via email and even sent out actual CDs for review. The result: Not one review. Months went by and nothing… Pretty disheartened, I wasn’t sure what to do next. After reading week 5, I learned that bloggers are a finicky bunch and to get reviewed by them, you need to become one of them. So, if you notice down the right hand side of my web site, there’s a long list of music blogs or what you might call a blogroll. Ariel’s suggestion is to go to these sites and create an accounts there, make comments on articles, let the writers get to know you, and then… slip in that you create music and maybe they’d want to check it out. The bottom line is that bloggers have a lot of influence over real music lovers, so I’m putting this into practice. Like many of the suggestions in this book, this will take some time to garner results, so I’ll have to get back to you on that. Plus, I need to increase the number of blogs from 30 to 50.
I’ve gone thru the trouble to create this blog because as Ariel points out, it’s really important for your fans to be able to get to know you and it’s important to create as much of a presence on the internet as possible. Big brands spend thousands of dollars in marketing just keep their brand in the public eye and in your face. They do that because of what I call “out of sight, out of mind” which all of us suffer from when we don’t keep in touch with our friends and you find out about the great party that you missed because they forgot to call you ‘cos they hadn’t heard from you in three months while you were dating that hotty that you met at the club, etc. And really, the bottom line for all artists is that you always need to be generating stuff, all the time. If it’s not going to be music, stay in the rounds, keep posting your ideas, thoughts, photos, tweets, anything so that you don’t get forgotten.
