The Blog of Xangis

I’d like to be able to say how many hours I worked today, but I don’t really know. I think, with the exception of food and restroom breaks, it would be “all of them” (depending upon whether you count research and education as work).

I spent a lot of the day reading the Warrior Forum. It’s a great site if you can wade through the massive quantity of posts. I’m going to need a bigger skull if I keep stretching my brain this much. Thanks to my dual-monitor setup I was able to edit samples from my Kawai K1r synthesizer while reading. I’m slowly but surely approaching the point where I can finish a sample CD and put it up for sale. The sample splitter application I’ve been gradually building should help, and I might tackle that tomorrow.

I also put a lot of effort into promoting the Indie Challenge sites, especially the Indie Band Challenge site. I posted links at musicbizacademy.com, indie-music.com, digg, my MySpace blog, musicforte.com, bandamp.com (post was deleted as spam), Craigslist (only one link, and it was in the musicians section of the L.A. version - I didn’t want to do anything that could be considered spam and I figured that was a city with a highest “band density”), and darksonus.com.

I also emailed the “John Baker” list. Sometimes I feel a little odd about emailing my friends about my projects, but my reasoning is this: They’re my friends, so they care about what I’m up to, and what I’m up to is so cool they deserve to know about it. Heck, I love John to death, but I’m certainly not interested in 100% of what he sends (i.e. I ignore the anime-related emails). That’s OK, I’m fine with skipping the ones I don’t care about because there are those gems that are so funny I fall out of my chair or so awesome I can’t live without them. I’d rather get the extra messages than not get them at all.

I managed to get a couple users to register, and hopefully I’ll have a steady trickle. For the first month I’ll just be thrilled to have enough submissions by April 1 to have a real competition. I’m sure that after that first prize is awarded and people have some real content to see/listen to/read that I’ll get some good traffic growth.

I set up a Google Adwords account today. Bluehost gives a $25 Google Adwords credit when you sign up for an account and I hadn’t used it yet, so I set up a $0.10 per click (the minimum for my fairly well-targeted keywords) campaign for All Possible Worlds with a limit of $2.50 per day. That ought to be enough to dip my toes in the water and get a little bit of a feel for how everything works while still getting the occasional visitor. The trick is obviously to make this equation work:

(Number of Clicks * Cost Per Click) < (Number of Clicks * Percentage of Clickers Who Buy)

Bluehost also gives a $50 Yahoo advertising credit, so I’ll be trying that next.