An interesting thing has been happening lately - I am getting new students from my community as a result of this blog! Finally, after about a year and half of online existence, the site is paying me back in new student income. Since the middle of summer I now have three new regular students, all of whom found me via the internet. I am also finding that more people are inquiring about lessons (many through my profile at GetLessonsNow.com.)
I suppose I am writing this to help encourage others to start or continue to blog if it means to be an investment in your business. Now I realize that many folks blog for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is just the pleasure of writing about favorite topics. My main purpose at first was to establish an online presence and then just see what might happen. But after I started, it dawned on me that it might be helpful in actually building my own studio.
To be truthful, I was a little disappointed after the first year (I started the blog in the winter of 2007) - not one new student followed through! But it seems that now a longer-term payoff is beginning, even though I am not blogging as regularly as I have in the past.
It is easy sometimes to forget that a blog is also a larger body of work - not just an engine that always needs to produce something "new". It's clear to me that the more important element is the larger base of content that a blog can provide. That's what my new students (or parents) told me - they were able to get a better sense of what kind of teacher (and person) I might be from fishing around on the site.
So even if you're fretting about not having the time or energy to blog consistently, keep in mind that people will still look at the material you have posted in the past. There seems to be a slightly irrational reasoning in the blogosphere that you must absolutely post every day or else risk losing readership. This isn't necessarily true. For me, what's interesting is that I am getting increased business during a time when I've been actually posting LESS. This might just be a coincidence, but it definitely has made me question the "need" to post something new every other day in order to gain more business.
Could this be an excuse for laziness? Perhaps. But it is nice to know that the blog can keep working for you even if you're not nursing it every day. Go ahead and start that site you've always wanted to have - it may take some time for the investment to return something, but that's not a bad thing!
I'd certainly be interested in readers' thoughts on this. Please feel free to share your own experiences with blogging and business.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Blogging - A Long-Term Payoff?
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Life Moves Quickly Sometimes
Things have been pretty slow here at the Cincinnati Pianist blog for some time. I thought I'd throw a bone to my readers with the following update.
Recently it has been problematic for me to do any posting because my own computer has a bad video card and I have needed to use it only in "safe" mode (and only in 16-bit color, which is taking me back to the mid-90's!) My usual dedicated "blog browser" is Opera, but it won't work for me in 16-bit safe mode. But it turns out that I have some deeper hardware problems and will need to replace the poor machine entirely. So I am avoiding committing much more material to the blog until I get the new machine.
How about some good personal news? I have just been offered an adjunct teaching position at CCM in the CMT division (Composition, Musicology, and Theory). The course I will be teaching is a survey of chamber music literature for graduate students, many of whom are pursuing a cognate minor in chamber music. I have done this class once before in 2005 but gave it up after one quarter because I was still pretty burned out on academic life at that point. (I graduated with my doctorate in 2004 after a seven-year slog through the curriculum!)
But it's been a couple of years now; life has moved on, and it's now the right time to get back into academia with this opportunity. Usually this class has been taught by a musicology professor (rather than a performance professor) so the CMT division is showing considerable faith in my academic and classroom skills by offering it to someone who is mainly a performer and private lessons teacher. I am looking forward to improving and streamlining the coursework this time around. The good thing is that my performance schedule will be solely local for a few months, which will allow me a decent amount of time for preparation and research. UC is just down the street from me, so there's really no commuting issue either.
The bad news is that this new part-time job will take even more energy away from blogging here, but I am planning on continuing to post at least once (maybe twice) a week in the new year. Since I will be teaching the history and repertoire of the string quartet first, it will be nice to come back to writing keyboard-oriented material on off-days.
I'll be back soon with new material. Happy Holidays to all!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
CincinnatiArts.com Link Exchange
Recently I was contacted by CincinnatiArts.com, which is an online arts portal supported by the Enjoy the Arts/Start organization.
Their mission "is to promote the arts in the greater Cincinnati region by:
(Source page)
This is a great site that packs a lot of information about arts events in and around Cincinnati. If you are in the area (either permanently or just in for a visit) I would recommend looking there for any arts-related events. All kinds of cultural occasions can be found, including art and photography exhibits, dancing and dining events, musical and theatrical shows, literary events, special museum exhibits, and much more.
Christopher Lamping over at the CincinnatiArts blog was kind enough to offer a blogroll link exhange with my Cincinnati Pianist blog. (You can find my site listed under their Blogroll list, and I put a link to theirs in my blogroll located to the right in the sidebar.) One of the neat things about this blogging project is when an arts organization sees value in a site like this one, which I hope does foster communication and arts advocacy. When arts communities and individuals network online in this way, it really is a step in the right direction for the betterment of interconnected access to the arts (for any particular region). Thank you, Christopher and CincinnatiArts.com, for the opportunity to serve more arts patrons through this link exchange.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
A Moment of Silence
Alright, it’s time to go on vacation! Arpi and I are heading to Chicago to see some good friends (including double bass-blogger extraordinaire Jason Heath), eat some fantastic meals, be a tourist, and catch a Grant Park Music Festival concert. The program for Grant Park is Mahler 5 this weekend. Just thought I'd share.
I’ll return to blogging sometime next week. In the meantime it could be a good idea to browse around here and catch up on any overlooked posts.
Photo of Chicago's Millenium Park by Jerod Schmidt.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Blogging as a Tool for Activism
See anything questionable about the cover art shown below?
It is the cover art used on a new CD released by the label Calliope of music by the Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799). If you are at all disturbed by this depiction of a musician of African heritage, please read William Zick’s recent post on why this cover art might not be in the best taste. (William Zick is the publisher and webmaster of AfriClassical, a great site I wrote about recently. He also just started the AfriClassical blog, which I think presents a unique opportunity for the advancement of musicians of African descent.)
You can read the email I wrote to Harmonia Mundi USA (the US distributor for Calliope) by clicking here. (Mr. Zick was kind enough to present my letter on his blog.) Maybe others would also like to write a letter of concern to Harmonia Mundi? Their email is info.usa@harmoniamundi.com
(My suggestion would be to keep letters respectful and polite. Since I am anti-censorship, I hasten to add that Harmonia Mundi/Calliope has a right to use whatever cover art they want. But they might want to think more carefully about the consequences this art choice could unintentionally generate.)
UPDATE 7/29/07: Check out the valuable, wide-ranging, and honest discussion about this cover art at On An Overgrown Path. (Yes, as you might expect, yours truly wrote one of the comments there.)
Friday, July 13, 2007
Problems with "Expandable posts"
UPDATE 7/14/07: I think I have the expandable posts feature working again. This feature is actually a hack I got from Ramani at Hackosphere. The problem was one of exceeded bandwidth. Every time someone clicks to expand a post, a script over at his site is accessed. Ramani has been gracious enough to supply the actual script itself, which is now in my blog template. Problem solved!
Now, when you click on “Read More….” the actual post page will appear. This is better than before because now readers will also be able to see comments and any post links via a single click.
For some unknown reason my expandable posts feature is not working properly. I'm referring to the little hyperlink text at the bottom of most of my posts that says “Read more.” When you click on it, the rest of the post text should appear. But that’s not happening right now.
If you’re surfing the blog and want to read an entire article, just click on the post title. (For instance, the title for this post is Problems with "Expandable posts".) That will take you to the specific post page and you can read the full article/post there, complete with any available comments and links.
If anyone out there in blog-land had the same problem and knows a solution please let me know! It would be a long and tedious job to tear this feature from all of my posts, something I’d obviously rather not do.
