I have been practicing online marketing for nearly twelve years now. As in, during that time, I have maintained email lists, built and kept professional websites, and generally aimed to generate business in various ways online.
When I say “various way,” I primarily mean the following musical and creative activities:
- In-person piano teaching
- Piano gigs
- Music sales
Of the three, piano teaching by far has been the most successful by far. It has been, after all, my “bread and butter” (as a woman I worked with when I first started teaching put it) for over seven and a half years, or since I moved to Sacramento. In fact, my piano teaching website has largely been the means through which new students contact me. So I can say with great confidence that it has been a real winner.
As far as booking piano gigs, my own online efforts have been less important. Most of my gigs came either because I made a phone call to some venue, or someone made a phone call to me because they got my name from someone. Some gigs also have come from the online gigging platform GigSalad. Since coming to Sacramento, I have mostly waited for gigs to come to me.
As far as selling my music, this has proceeded in fits and spurts. My biggest success to date is when I sold my “Cherry Rainbow Piano Experience” album a couple years ago. Prior to that, most of my sales success was from live shows.
So while I have some considerable wins in online marketing (ie, Piano Teaching), in other areas the results have been inconsistent or even disappointing. Despite many years of effort, I never really found my sweet spot as a music artist marketing my own music. And as a piano player, where I have been much more successful, I mostly relied on word-of-mouth and the old fashioned dial-for-dollars method.
Considering all this, the overall area of marketing got quite confusing for me. Looking at it now, I see that I was badly out of alignment. I was trying too hard, hoping for results, barking up the wrong tree, trying to fit that square peg into that round hole, looking for love in all the wrong places–any bad cliche you can think of, I was doing it! I was doing what I thought I should do instead of what I truly wanted to do, trying to measure up to other people’s ideas at the risk of betraying myself, and following screwy ideas about success instead of adopting my own authentic view of it.
In short, I was completely out of whack!
And so I grew weary of marketing. I was resigned and discouraged, and rather tired of the whole thing.
I needed a change.
Enter this 365 Day Blogging Project 🙂
Suddenly I had a way forward. A way for me to express myself online to the world, but without the stress, pressure, and expectation I was putting on myself in my other endeavors. It was purely about expression. It was purely on my terms. And it was fun.
What a concept!
In fact, with this blog project, I have achieved the satisfaction I was wanting all along with all those other creative and professional endeavors. Satisfaction. Joy. Eagerness. Expression. Expansion.
If there is anything my happiness obsession has taught me, it is that these intangibles are everything. Even if this blog hasn’t earned me a single dollar to date, as far as I’m concerned, it has been more fun than most of the marketing plans I’ve put together. As I wrote awhile ago, this blog has been the perfect non-business business plan!
Perhaps it will prove to be the cure for those marketing blues 🙂