The David Andrew Wiebe Show

November has been another crazy month. How have things been going for you (seriously, I want to know)?

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I discuss what I’ve been working on, and how things have been progressing with my projects.

Download the PDF Transcription

Podcast Highlights:

00:16 – Hi, this is David Andrew Wiebe and this is my latest career update

01:46 – New posts I’ve published on The Music Entrepreneur HQ

05:04 – November resource pack

05:25 – Products

06:11 – Other projects I’m working on

11:02 – Performances

12:22 – The latest news about my music

13:37 – Traffic to The Music Entrepreneur HQ

16:00 – Product sales

16:53 – Lessons I’m learning

21:12 – Thanks for tuning in

Transcription:

Hi, this is David Andrew Wiebe with The Music Entrepreneur.

Today, I wanted to share with you my career update for November 2016. Welcome!

I’ve been doing a lot of catching up here in November, but I still don’t feel like I’m totally caught up with everything that I need to do right now.

I’ve had a lot of work to do. I’ve had about 20 extra articles to write this month for my regular work. I always make it a point to prioritize paid work over pro bono work even though I’m really passionate about some of the free or pro bono work that I do even with The Music Entrepreneur.

I’m coming in to support your dreams, your visions, your goals, your honeypots or projects that you want to do.

If you happen to be listening to this on the podcast, just like the last time, you should know that there is also a visual component to the whole thing so there is a video that you can watch and follow along with if you’d like to. But you can also just listen if that’s what you prefer.

New Posts

First thing I’ll cover is new posts on the website at davidandrewwiebe.com.

There is 10 Books Every Musician Should Read in Their Lifetime. This was a guest post via the good folks at OfficeRock.com. Now, you should know I didn’t choose any of these books but they all sound pretty interesting to me and they might be worth the look.

The next post that’s new in the site is What is Music Marketing? You’ll probably notice that there is quite a few sort of back to basics posts and content that’s been published on the site this last month, and that is a deliberate thing, partly because I’ve done more keyword research as of late and there are reasons for that. I’ll explain in a little bit more later but creating content around those specific keywords should help me drive more traffic and appeal to more relevant audiences. That’s pretty much what’s happening there.

Another new post is How to Make a Killer Set List. I think this is pretty self-explanatory. Every band that performs live needs to put together a set list that really captivates their audience and holds their attention. This article talks about that in depth.

But it is an article that used to be on the TuneCity blog when that was still around. It’s an updated version of that so I’ve add a little lot of content.

There is another post that I took from the old TuneCity blog called How to Budget for Your Music Career. Again, I’ve updated it with additional detail. I think that’s a really important topic for any musician. You need to be able to keep up with your finances to be able to sustain your creativity over the long haul. This post covers that.

Then there was Episode 19 of the podcast which was an interview with the wonderful Helen Austin. She’s a Juno award winning songwriter and artist in Canada. She’s not the first person on the podcast with an accent. Although some people might say that I have an accent, so that’s a whole other thing. I probably do have some kind of Canadian accent.

Another post that went up is What is SoundExchange? If you’ve ever been curious as to what exactly it is, what SoundExchange does, and how they are different from PROs or performance rights organizations, I would suggest having a look at this because it tells you a lot about that.

Another new post is What is Bandcamp? I don’t think there’s too many musicians out there that aren’t aware of what Bandcamp is, so I’ve provided some additional detail like how to market your music on Bandcamp and things like that in this post.

There is also What is DistroKid? They are a music distribution service just like CD Baby or TuneCore. Sort of what’s so different about them, and what fascinated me was that they let you pay a one-time fee – I think it’s $19.99 – to distribute as much music as you want.

That may be one of their attractive aspects of this specific service. You might want to take advantage of it if you’re a particularly prolific musician that’s constantly distributing their music digitally.

There is also Episode 20 of the podcast in which I did Traffic Analysis 2016. If you listened to the last episode, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

All this content that I just mentioned will go in the November resource pack once it’s released, but like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been kind of busy. At this point, I’m still working on the October resource pack so I’ve got a bit of catching up to do in that regard.

Products

I’ll talk a little bit about what’s happening with products on the website as well. As you know, I’m working on my next book Flashes of Elation, but that’s maybe a kind way of putting it because I haven’t really had the chance to work on it a lot as of late. But I do want to get to it and I do want to do a better job of promoting it also.

I’m tossing around several other book ideas right now. Now, I won’t really be prioritizing those certainly over Flashes of Elation but they are in the back of my mind as far as what I’d like to do after that. I’m also looking to create 2017 versions or updated versions of all the available products on the website. I think that will help with sales as well.

Projects

Let’s get into projects. Now, something I haven’t really touched on before is projects because I actually do a lot outside of TME and my usual freelance writing work, so I thought I would cover these a little bit because I think they might be of interest to you and they do connect to the music industry in different ways.

The first one is Using Your Power. Now, this is a new podcast. We actually just launched the website here in November. I think it was only a week or two ago that we officially launched. It was kind of a soft launch or I guess a better way of saying that is we didn’t do like a huge promotion when we went live. But I’ll use opportunities like this to let people know about the fact that there is this new podcast that I am a part of.

If you like my posts about personal development, reading books and inspiration, I think you’ll really like this and you may even want to move over there instead of The Music Entrepreneur because as you know The Music Entrepreneur is about entrepreneurship in music.  Although I do cover topics like mindset and inspiration and how to overcome mental blocks and things like that – and I think that’s important in every business.

I also talk a lot about music marketing and some of the other things that I already mentioned like SoundExchange or Bandcamp, so if you’re looking for just inspiration and personal development topics, this is the one that you’ll want to check out. It’s at UsingYourPower.com.

Now, there are several new episodes for November where we actually released a couple in October, but here’s the new ones for November: Buying a House, Pharmaceuticals (yes, we talked about prescription drugs and medications), and Endorsements.

There is a variety of different kinds of endorsements from sports to books to businesses to various products. We all endorse on a daily basis. I’m learning to use that in a productive way. It can help you in your career or in your life.

We talked about Community. That’s another new episode. Then finally there was an episode on Rest. Also a hugely important topic right now since so many people are talking about hustling and work and going crazy with that. There will be more episodes to come in December, so definitely check us out at UsingYourPower.com.

Another project or community that I’m involved in is The Listening Room YYC. Generally, there are two events every month and I’ve talked about them the blog so you can also check out the descriptions or more in-depth descriptions of what exactly these events are.

But I helped out at The Circle which is kind of like it sounds, it’s a singer/songwriter circle on November 2. Basically, what happens is every month we pay tribute to a known songwriter that has influenced all of us.

And then, a group of three people also learn each other’s songs and perform on them. This makes for a very interesting performance because the performers actually only get together once to practice. It’s riding that boarder of somewhere between like a proper practiced performance and just like an open mic night. It’s somewhere in between those.

The other night that happened is the classics which was on November 16, and that’s more of a jazz vocalist tribute type listening room. It’s a lot like it sounds, it’s like a house concert where people come to pay attention to the music and actually listen instead of talking over it and causing a lot of noise. So, the jazz one was also really great.

Another project that I’m helping out with is The Question. In both cases with Listening Room as well as The Question, I do a lot of the website work but occasionally I do a presentation with The Question as well.

Our regular presenter is Fred Tomagi but in November I decided to do my second ever presentation at The Question. So, I wrote a full presentation and shared it at the November gathering on the 20. So, that was another fairly major undertaking. I think it’s something like 5,000 – 6,000 words.

Shows

Now, let’s move on into shows or performances....

November has been another crazy month. How have things been going for you (seriously, I want to know)? In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I discuss what I’ve been working on, and how things have been progressing with my projects. Podcast Highlights: 00:16 – Hi, this is David Andrew Wiebe and this […]

Will you be taking the time to reflect on this last year? Will you be gleaning lessons from what went right and what went wrong? I know I will be.

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I share invaluable lessons I learned from building my website throughout 2016, and look at how it performed overall.

Download the PDF Transcription

Podcast Highlights:

00:16 – Hi, I’m David Andrew Wiebe…

00:23 – The Music Entrepreneur HQ traffic analysis 2016

01:46 – Stipulations you should be aware of

03:14 – Where 33 to 50% of my traffic is coming from

04:15 – Tops posts and pages

05:14 – Important lesson: Focus on your top posts and pages to increase email subscribers

05:41 – How Leadpages is helping me build my email list

07:27 – What people are clicking on

09:12 – How I moved my site from one domain to another

10:58 – Traffic sources

13:50 – Thanks for joining me

Transcription:

Hi, I’m David Andrew Wiebe with The Music Entrepreneur. You can find my website at davidandrewwiebe.com.

Today, I decided to do something fun, and it’s a presentation I’m calling “Traffic Analysis 2016.” First, I’m going to get into some of the things that I learned from building out my website, as well as how my website performed throughout 2016.

Now, 2016 was a breakout year for The Music Entrepreneur, which is quite exciting. But that isn’t to say that I have a ton of traffic. It’s entirely possible that you have a website that gets more traffic that mine does. But what is great is that it’s on a growth curve and I’m excited about that.

2016 was a breakout year for The Music Entrepreneur.Share on X

If you’re a musician watching this or listening to this, know that you might get some value out of it but probably not as much as somebody that owns a website in the music industry. And that’s because we are talking about a music industry website case study. So, anybody that runs that type of website is more likely to be able to take the lessons and apply them to their business.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something for everyone, so go ahead and keep watching if this is something that interests you.

And if you happen to be listening to this on the podcast, know that there is also a video version with accompanying visuals and stats and things like that, so you’ll be able to get more out of it.

First, I have to cover a couple of caveats:

One is that tracking of the stats began at the end of August, and I was still in the midst of moving my site to the new domain. What happened was my website used to be at dawcast.com. But marketing expert Tim Francis told me that it sounded like a steel company. So I decided to register a new domain at davidandrewwiebe.com.

Now, for obvious reasons, it took me quite a while to move the site to the new domain. And that’s something I’m going to be talking more about. But there was some interruption in the tracking, because the stats were being tracked at dawcast.com, and then later at davidandrewwiebe.com. So we’re not working with a full year’s sample, but I think it’s still a pretty good sample.

Two, the stats are from Jetpack. So, if you use WordPress, you’re probably aware of the Jetpack plugin. It’s free, and it will track stats on your site. It’s quite handy, and it gives you a lot of in-depth stats as well. And it also does seem to be on equal footing with Google Analytics, so within a small margin of error, you’re basically getting the same stats.

Now, here’s an important lesson. A third to half of the daily traffic to my site is coming from a single blog post. This is pretty amazing to me. And it’s not even a blog post you would expect. It’s not about marketing, Facebook, social media, and it’s not even about music entrepreneurship. Can you guess what it is?

It’s a post called 6 Things I Learned From The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. It’s basically a book review, and as you can see, it was published on December 4, 2015. So, it has actually taken a little while to gain traction, but it has picked up throughout 2016. People keep clicking on it, and they keep reading it, so the dwell time on my site goes up, engagement goes up, and that will also boost your search engine rankings, which is exactly what happened with this particular post.

Let’s take a look at some of the other top posts and pages. You can see here – it’s not a full list but it’s quite a few of my top posts and pages on my website – the 6 Things I Learned From The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy post has 8,334 views since August. I don’t have anything else that’s even close to that in terms of traffic, which is pretty amazing.

The number two post is another one that’s had quite a bit of traction, and it’s called Top 10 Social Media Sites For Musicians to Focus on [INFOGRPHIC]. It’s an infographic in addition to being a post, and it’s gotten 903 views.

You can review this list for yourself and see what else is getting some traction. Obviously, my homepage – which my top three and four results – a lot of people are checking out the homepage and archives as well.

And one of the things that I learned from this is that you need to focus on your top 10 posts and pages. Why is that? Well, they’re getting the most traffic, and if you want to get email opt-ins, then these are the posts that you’d want to put compelling offers on so you’re converting more people. If you want to build your email list, you should focus on your most visited pages.

Focus on your top 10 posts and pages.Share on X

I wanted to talk a little bit about Leadpages, because I’ve actually known about them for quite a while, it’s just that I hesitated to purchase the product because it costs money. But I’m thankful that I did, because it’s the best tool I’ve found for building my email list.

And I just use Leadboxes. I don’t really use landing pages or anything else. Not that I won’t in the future, but it’s just not a major focus and doesn’t even need to be. And I’m not even that aggressive right now with building my email list the way that I am. I’m just giving away PDF downloads of the blog posts and transcriptions and various other things that I have.

So, I could be more aggressive, but as you know, with traffic it’s about quality, not just quantity. It’s the same thing with email subscribers. You want quality people that are going to stick around over the long haul.

Traffic is about quality, and not just quantity - it's the same with email subscribers.Share on X

And honestly I tried a lot of other things that didn’t work. I have a MailChimp account, and that’s still how I manage and build my email list. But I don’t use whatever forms they give you to build my email list anymore, so that should tell you something.

And even though I’m kind of promoting Leadpages right now, I’m not even an affiliate. I probably should sign up as one, so I could start earning commissions, but this is completely free promotion for Leadpages, so that tells you how great of a product it is. And if you’re not using it to build your email list and you’re frustrated and you don’t know how else to build it, I would suggest having a look at Leadpages. Maybe check out some other reviews or what other people have had to say about it and see if it’s the right thing for you.

Let’s talk about clicks. This basically describes where people are clicking most on my website and analyzing this is a really good thing, because if you’re trying to drive traffic to your “about” page for example, then you want to know that people are actually clicking on it and finding it through your blog posts or wherever else you are directing people to your “about” page.

So here are some of the results. You can see that the number one place that’s been clicked is Leadpages, which means opt-ins. I’ve grown my email list from a humble 200 subscribers to nearly 500 here close to the end of the year. I probably will have 500 subscribers at the end of the year, so again, that’s a testament to the power of what Leadpages can do for you.

The second result is links within the site, which is always good to see, you want people to stay on your site, check out more pages while they’re there, keep them on your site for longer. That way you have a better chance of converting them in whatever way you want.

Number three is Gumroad, which is where all my products live. And that’s also a really good thing, but there is only a total of 34 clicks. So even though it is my number three, as far as number of clicks is concerned, it’s still low. So my goal will be to boost that moving forward and to increase that number so I’m getting more clicks on products and more interest in them.

And you can see some of the other places people are clicking, such as Amazon, in which case they’re having a look at my book potentially, or they’re being forwarded over to an affiliate product.

I want to talk about my domain name, like I mentioned earlier. It used to be dawcast.com, and now everything has been moved over to davidandrewwiebe.com. I still have some work to do in terms of getting some of the images up. When I moved the site over, even though the image folder carried over, some of the images within the blog posts didn’t, so there’s quite a bit of work for me to do still. You have to update your links – that can actually be done pretty simply with a plugin called Search Regex, so I wouldn’t even worry about that. That’s pretty easy.

But changing my domain overall has led to more links from outside sources, more coverage from people who are interested in what I’m doing and want to hear about my opinions and thoughts on the music industry. It’s resulted in more traffic… again, it’s been a gradual increase – it has taken time to build up to this point, but it keeps on going up. And it’s also got me more recognition, so it’s been a good thing for my brand.

Now,...

Will you be taking the time to reflect on this last year? Will you be gleaning lessons from what went right and what went wrong? I know I will be. In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I share invaluable lessons I learned from building my website throughout 2016, and look at how […]

Ever thought about pursuing licensing and placement opportunities with TV, commercials, movies, and video games? Wouldn't you love to be able to create and record music entirely from home? This is exactly what Helen Austin has done, and continues to do. Not that she doesn't work really hard, mind you. In this episode of The New Music Industry podcast, I have a great conversation with Juno Award winning Helen Austin.

Ever thought about pursuing licensing and placement opportunities with TV, commercials, movies, and video games? Wouldn't you love to be able to create and record music entirely from home? This is exactly what Helen Austin has done, and continues to do. Not that she doesn't work really hard, mind you. In this episode of The New Music Industry podcast, I have a great conversation with Juno Award winning Helen Austin.

I'm back with another career update in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, and discuss everything from my music, my performance schedule, all the way over to the podcast, my books, what I'm learning right now, and more.

I'm back with another career update in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, and discuss everything from my music, my performance schedule, all the way over to the podcast, my books, what I'm learning right now, and more.

In the long run, being a jerk will do more harm than good for your music career. And once you have a bad reputation, it will take a lot of effort to reverse that image. In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, we look at why you should be aware of how you conduct yourself while you’re building your music career.

In the long run, being a jerk will do more harm than good for your music career. And once you have a bad reputation, it will take a lot of effort to reverse that image. In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, we look at why you should be aware of how you conduct yourself while you’re building your music career.