Aha, so I know this is two weeks late.  But the way I see it, I’ve been working on weeks 3, 4, and 5 concurrently so I’ll be caught up by the end of the week.

But yes, this blog is about week 3 of Music Success in Nine Weeks, which talks about  optimizing the music artist’s website.  Let’s get on with it then…

For the past year or so I’ve been running a site at andrewplan.com through Hostbaby, which is a really user-friendly web hosting and website creation service for musicians and artists in general.  The real challenge for this week was maintaining a consistent look and feel across all the platforms I’m maintaining.  Besides andrewplan.com, I’ve got:

• Facebook/Rootmusic
• Myspace
• YouTube
• Twitter
• OurStage
• Eventful

Needless to say, I was pretty overwhelmed; I’m a to-do list kind of guy, so I made me one of them lists:

Week 3 MSI9W To-Do

andrewplan.com webpage

• fix bio
• update influences, soundslike
• fix homepage buttons
• create announcement for year of song
• announcements for new show dates
• create page explaining year of song
• upload Jerusalem Syndrome with ID3 tags
• modify listbaby notification when signing up

Facebook

• update influences, soundslike
• add songs from Year of Song

MySpace

• update information to reflect website
• add songs from Year of Song

Twitter

• edit bio to reflect website

YouTube

• change color scheme
• edit information to reflect website

OurStage

• edit information to reflect website

Eventful

• edit information to reflect website

I wasn’t able to get to YouTube, OurStage or Eventful, but I can do that in the next few days easy. 

But man, I feel a lot better about the website…it’s quick to load, the pitch is right at the top of the page, and i took the time to make sure that the other social media sites are conveying the same information as the main website.  Syncing up appearances was a bit harder — I managed to do it for my Tumblr blog and my MySpace profile, but I can’t customize my Facebook page using the service I have, and I need to, um, twitter around more with Twitter.

On the bright side, I cleaned up the email list to be a lean, mean, free-music-giving machine!  If you sign up for my mailing list at andrewplan.com, you’ll receive exclusive access to a FREE song!  As a subscriber to the mailing list, you’ll also receive notifications whenever I post a new song as part of my new project, Year of Song, in which I write, record and release a new song every week for FREE until August 2011. 

***end gratuitous plug***

Phew, ok, that was intense.  Expect week 4’s blog soon!

-Andrew