I’m enjoying a nice and relaxed saturday at home today. Sudden inspiration struck and I just finished a song about a singing kid. I haven’t decided yet if I will record it or not. I think I’m going to just leave it alone for now and see if I still like it tomorrow.
I wrote a kind of love song about a month ago, but I couldn’t get the chorus quite right. The rest of the song sounded pretty good I think, but even after several rewrites the words in the chorus just sounded cheesy. That’s the hardest part about love songs, I think. You want them to sound serious and sincere, but then they very easily end up sounding cheesy and tacky instead. So I tried something different. I made it sincere, but not serious. I rewrote some parts and made the song express what I wanted to express is a rather peculiar, but still heartfelt and sincere way. I think it might be working. Overall, the song sounds better this way.
There’s a thousand million love songs out there, and honestly, most of them sound pretty much the same. Whatever there is to say about love with a song has already been said, written and sung so many times over that it seems almost impossible to write a new song that doesn’t sound like a boring regurgitation of the same old same old. Obviously, I don’t want that. If I write a new song, I want it to be a *new* song. I can’t really say for sure if I succeeded in doing that with this song, as I’m a bit biased about the result, but I like the result. Judge for yourselves after I record the song and post it online.
My latest song is now online! It’s called “Things you’ve seen”, and you can listen to it on my website and on my MySpace page. Check it out!
I’ve noticed that whenever I upload a new song on myspace, the sound quality is pretty badly degraded when I play it back through the player. I wonder why… Should I upload the music in a different format than 224kb mp3 files? I’ll have a closer look at it tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you want to hear the songs with good sound quality, the player on my website works better.
My blog finally got validated on BlogCatalog. When you add your blog, it says it will be validated within 24-48 hours, but I guess they mean within 1-2 business days. I added my blog on friday, I think, and today is tuesday. Still not too bad, though.
Anyway, I found this excellent discussion about how to increase your blog traffic in the discussions section. The users in the forum, and especially one user named Timethief, bring up an abundance of good advice. Someone also wrote about using Craigslist for promotion. The same idea occurred to me. But I think you need to register an account with Craigslist to post stuff. I wonder how that is for spam? Craigslist is a bit of a paradise for spammers and junk, I’ve noticed. Will your mailbox get blown to pieces with junk if you sign up? I’ll have to find out more about that.
I finished recording song number 8 yesterday. The guitar parts were a bit tricky, so I had to practise a bit before recording to get them completely right. Today I will do the editing and mixing, and hopefully I’ll have the song up on my website by tonight.
Most people want more traffic to their blog, and one way is participating in discussions online or leaving comments in other blogs and hoping that it gets some curious people to click through the links back to your blog. It seems like a pretty slow method, though. I figured there has to be some kind of collection of blogs, like a toplist or something where someone has collected interesting blogs. I mentioned Blogtoplist.com in a previous post, but I found another one. It’s a site called Blog Catalog. You sign up, fill out an account and then you can claim your blog in the account. It takes a while for the admins to verify that the blog is yours and such, but after that it will be included in their directory. The site is also a big community for bloggers, and you can take part in discussions with other bloggers about pretty much anything. I haven’t gotten my blog validated yet, so I don’t know yet if this will get my site any traffic. To be continued on that.
In the "studio"
I spent a chunk of the day recording a new song today. This one is pretty tricky on the guitar, so I did a bunch of takes but I didn’t get it quite the way I want it yet. I will continue recording tomorrow. After that, just four more songs and my album The First Dozen will be complete. Then I will start promoting it seriously and try to get it up on iTunes, Last.fm and other similar sites.
Above is a picture of me recording in my “studio”, also known as “the living room.” 
Someone wrote, “He who promotes the most, wins” when it comes to music. With that in mind, I’ve been looking for ways to get as much traffic as possible to this blog and to my website. If you want to do the same, here are some useful things.
I found this video on YouTube by a guy named David Skul. It’s called “6 Tips for Increasing Blog Traffic“, though strangely, I only count 5 ways when the guy goes through it all…? Am I missing something? I suggest you check out the video. Here’s also a summary of the things Mr Skul talks about.
- Make sure the content of the blog is good and interesting. Nobody wants to read about useless junk.
- Technorati. This is a search engine and blog resource that can be quite handy. You set up your blog, include it in your technorati profile, and when you post something in your blog, it shows up in technorati as well. And it’s free.
- Set up nice and proper social network profiles, use them like they are supposed to be used, and link to your blog from the profile. This can be Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, anything you like. Just don’t spam. It doesn’t work.
- Feedburner. This is a handy tool that sets up your RSS/Atom feeds in a simple way. You can use it to streamline your feed to a universally readable feed that works on all devices. Feedburner is a part of Google, so you sign in with your Google account. If you have no clue about feeds or what they are, there’s an excellent explanation about that as well. There’s a bunch of cool features in Feedburner. For example, you can set up a teaser on any page you like to show either short snippets or full entries of the latest stuff posted in your blog.
- Link to other blogs. Linking to blogs that are relevant to what your blog is about, makes your blog a better resource to your readers, and therefore it attracts more readers. Whether the blog you link to links back doesn’t really matter as much.
Do all these things work? No clue. I signed up for all of it yesterday, so I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
One more thing that is really useful for keeping track of your traffic is a hit counter. I use one called Statcounter. It’s free for visitor logs up to 500 entries and breaks down the information about who visits what, how, when and from where, in pretty much any way you could possibly think of. Very good for checking where your traffic comes from. For example: in my case, most of my traffic comes from Facebook right now. There’s some from MySpace as well, and a little bit from search engines. If Rainhat starts becoming more known, I expect the amount of hits from search engines would increase. Info like this from the hit counter will tell you what works and what doesn’t for bringing traffic so that you can do something about it.
I’ve been recycling music today.
I keep all the songs I write, even if I don’t like them. It’s very easy to get a bit blinded when you’re that into the process, so you might like something that actually isn’t very good, or hate something that others might love. So I save every song that I reject, forget about it for a few months and then take a second look at it to see if my first impression was right. In most cases it was. There’s a lot of junk. But in some of the crappy songs there are some half decent ideas, so I pick up those ideas and rewrite the rest of the song around them. I rewrote one song like that today, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Way better than the original version. I think I’m going to record it.
I thought some more about how to get people to see my website and hear my music. I found a Swedish blog top list, and figured it might be worth a try, so I signed up. Let’s see if that brings any more traffic to this blog. The list counts how many hits a blog gets every week and lists the ones that had the most during that week. There’s an English version of the top list as well, but it has way more blogs listed, so mine would drown in the ocean of blogs more easily and get ignored. Besides, if I’m going to build an audience and draw people to come see me live, I guess it makes more sense to start locally anyway.
