3 Important Lessons I Learnt After Starting A Music Blog At 16 Years Old
I was only sixteen years old when I created my first website. It was a music blog titled Fresh Out of the Booth. I reviewed numerous singles and albums from all genres, from Country to Heavy-Metal. Sometimes both!
After four years of managing the blog, I had published over 2000 articles, appeared in radio interviews, launched a small record label and connected with some fascinating creatives.
There are massive takeaways I have learnt from launching my blog that I would like to share today. I believe these three points are essential to reflect on if you have or are thinking about starting your own blog or website. I also believe this is an appropriate topic for my first post on Medium. (Confetti Pop)
Networking Is Essential
I never truly grasped the importance of networking until about a year after I launched Fresh Out of The Booth. I started to notice reoccurring visitors engaging with my content after some time. Connecting with these visitors allowed me to work with some brilliant artists over the years. One artist, in particular, had recently signed with Disney Music Group (DMG). After a few direct messages, I was able to expand my network and work closely with more artists who had signed with DMG throughout 2018–2019.
Another one of my readers worked at a radio station in Kentucky. After a few emails — I was on their morning show for a one-hour interview! The interview allowed me to share my project and personal experience with a new audience. I saw new traffic pour into my site after that interview — which motivated me to go out and engage more with my readers.
Concise fan engagements such as replying to comments, tweets, emails, and direct messages can quickly translate into spontaneous opportunities. All these opportunities, in one way or another, helped me grow my blog.
It can take some time to find initial success
Whatever project you are working on, it takes time to achieve initial success. Only rarely do people and companies find overnight success.
Whether it be finding readers, securing clients for your business or generating sales — getting that first metric of success always seems to be the most challenging. Then to consistently pull in more readers, clients and sales becomes another challenge within itself.
Like The Snowball Effect, consistent contributions to your projects will create exponential success in the long term. You just need to enjoy what you are doing — and seek fulfillment in your own personal achievements.
Whether this means creating podcasts for nobody to hear or writing articles for no one to read. Eventually, someone will find you. If they like what you have to offer enough to engage with your content, your snowball grows.
My first engagement came two months after launching the blog, and the next was another month after that. It was indeed a grind to obtain my first couple of readers. Almost six months later, I surpassed a thousand readers daily, and that number kept climbing. My passion for music and writing kept me inspired in the early days. Also, seeing something I created being published on the internet was fulfilling in itself.
Get 1% Better Everyday
One thing I wish I did more frequently while running Fresh Out of the Booth would be frequent evaluation. I never set any benchmarks while working on my blog. If I noticed a drop in readers, I used to find an excuse for why that might be, rather than finding a solution. I was young and very naive.
I should have reflected on how I could improve my blog, writing, content, website and marketing. In return, this would have drastically altered the longevity of the blog.
Author James Altucher, in his book ‘Skip The Line’ expands on the idea of improving 1% daily. Put simply, it’s the idea that if you get better at a task by 1% every day, your skill compounds, and you start to improve exponentially.
This could have easily been adapted into my workflow. I could improve on my writing by attending a workshop and then maybe redesigning the UX of the website the next day. These small tasks would quickly accumulate and contribute to the blog’s long-term success.
These are the three tidbits of wisdom I wish I had when starting my blog in 2017. However, we learn from these sorts of experiences and use them to make better decisions when pursuing future endeavors.