It’s week 6 now, right?  I’ll get there, eventually.

I’m bouncing back. No more negativity. It turns out that the copy Music Success in Nine Weeks that I ordered from Amazon.com was slightly out of date.  Thankfully, a quick email chain with Carla at CyberPR straightened things out.  I now have a brand-spankin new e-copy of the book. 

From what I can tell, the new version diverges from my copy around week 4.  Where my book jumps right into blogging, the updated version saves blogging for week 5.  This is good for me because that means I’m not as far behind as I thought!

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I’ve been feeling a little bit negative about this process, and need to air out my thoughts so they don’t take over. I’ve fallen behind on the challenge.  It’s not that I don’t care about completing it. It’s that I want to do a really good, thorough job on all the tasks and I simply haven’t been putting in the time.  I feel overwhelmed by the fact that I work 50 hours per week for another company, when I'd really like to be working 50 hours a week for myself!

Ariel did say that this process is really meant to take place over one year, not nine weeks.  It’s been hard for me to put my musical/creative projects, because they do bring me a lot of enjoyment.  I haven’t worked on booking, recording new songs, or writing anything since I started.  This is just a necessary fact of life for me- I don’t have enough time to do it all. 

I've always had a blog on my website, but have been making some critical mistakes that have been preventing me from seeing any success with blogging as a way of engaging fans.  My first mistake has been consistency.  I would get excited and blog for a couple of days and then forget about it and let the blog languish for weeks or months.  This is no way to attract a readership.

My next mistake has been the blogroll.  I have been using Google Reader to follow blogs for a long time, and even make the occasional comment.  The piece that I’ve been missing has been actually adding other blogs to my blogroll and focusing on interacting with the people I’ve added.  This kind of community building is powerful and can really help drive readership. 

Next will be to add them to my reader and start commenting on their posts.  I also thought it would be nice to add the active MSNW bloggers to my blogroll.  

Ariel recommends going out and identifying 50 different music blogs that I'd like to get my album reviewed on.  I’ve got some hard work and research to do around this.     

I'm actually doing pretty well when it comes to other social networks. My current blogging platform of choice (posterous) makes it really easy to share photos with flickr.  Anytime I post a blog with a photo, it gets uploaded to my flickr account.  Not to mention the subject gets tweeted, posted to my facebook page, and any videos are uploaded to my youtube account! 

All in all, I think I'm doing pretty well, but as I mentioned at the top of the post, am still not feeling good about my logo/branding etc.  I either need to: A. just go with what I have and stop thinking about it, or B. Hire someone who will do a really good job that I'll be satisfied with. Choices, choices choices…

It may be week 4 officially, but I've done some major catching up!

Thanks to the help of my family and friends, I refined my pitch from week two.  I couldn't decide between a pitch that had other bands referenced vs unique.  What I realized is that I can use both!  My official pitch is polyphonic dream pop nostalgic for folk but ready to rock. Doesn't that just roll of the tongue? What if someone asks me what I sound like?  I've got an answer for that too! Imagine if  The Decemberists met up with Cake and jammed with The Beatles in your living room.

The Website
This brings me to my next point- I've updated my website with some new branding! I'm not a great graphic designer, and I think I need to work with someone to develop more of a 'logo'.  My thought was to have a musical staff swoop down from the left and underline my name, and then after my name it would curl up into what looks like an LP record.  I even carried this over to my bandcamp page so the user experience is consistent!

Sweet, right? Twitter and Myspace still to come.  Also.. is there really much you can do to brand your facebook page?  Last I checked you weren't able to put up a custom header or anything fancy.

The Bribe
I'm also still working on my 'Bribe'.  I'm currently using a flash widget from artistdata, but I don't like that it wont show up for people on iphones and ipads.  Down with flash! Artistdata also offers a simpler html box that I think will ultimately make it easier for me and my fans to interact.  The html widget will also help make the email form look more integrated with the webpage, because I think it's a bit jarring now as it is:

As always, your feedback is appreciated!