The food is mostly basic, with lots of choices, and all of it tasty. None of it is too expensive. No one leaves Nicks thinking they didn’t get a square deal. But the bonus is Nick himself.

A youthful 87 years old, Nick comes around to every table, “Hello. How are you?”—engaging old timers and newcomers alike. As we’re leaving, we thank Nick, and he asks Juliette about where she goes to school and what grade she’s in. She’s charmed by him; he’s like instant grandpa. Two ladies come through the door, “Hello, ladies, find a comfortable place; take a seat.” After they pass he says, “You talk nice to people, they like you.”

All day Juliette and I imitate Nick’s accent and sweet voice, “You talk nice to people; they like you.” We smile whenever we think of him. Nicks is now our favorite place.

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Personally I don’t entertain beliefs
Any more than is absolutely necessary—
The problem with them being
They rarely perform as advertised
And may in fact more often
Blind us to the truth than reveal it

Today I’m told a story about brothers—
About how when one tried to introduce
The new love who’d come into his life
The other brother’s wife barred her
From ever crossing their threshold—
Living as they were “in sin”

After a lifetime with her and two grown sons
The brothers themselves are barely reconciled.
We visit the one now grown desperately
Lonely for she whose passing
At the mere mention of her name
Brings tears for his shunned beloved

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In moments of unbridled
Optimism and hope
Where his son was concerned,
My father would utter his
Standard pronouncement,
“You’re finally on your way, Dick.”
(I was Dick back then.)

He meant well—encouraging one
Short-lived impulse of mine after another
To attempt a more grounded
Pragmatic approach towards life.
Trust me, if you should ever have a child
Who’s a dreamer, for such a person
Dreams trump practical considerations

Nonetheless we are all always “on our way.”
Arrivals and departures
Like beginnings and endings
Being constraints language imposes, not reality
Where no one can with any accuracy locate
The precise beginning or ending of anything
And what we are belongs to a realm where there are no words

What’s important is that my father loved me
And I him and wished for me the very best.
He viewed the world differently than his son—
My odd view of things providing him
With reason for doubts and concerns.
In the end, though, it all works out, Dad.
Happy Fathers Day

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Growing Up

Growing up we were told, “If you’ve nothing good
To say about someone, then say nothing at all.”
A degree of politeness even civility was expected.
Of course, we didn’t follow that all the time.
Some even learned to delight in saying unkind things.
But mostly we got the point about not being harsh
For the sake of getting along

More and more, conversations seem to occasion stories
About other people not pulling their weight, phoning it in
Getting away with something, just not doing the right thing
I wonder, sometimes, if we’re getting nervous?
Like there’s a report card due and we want to make it clear
That we’re not to blame for all the terrible, disappointing and really
Sad stuff going on day-in-and-day-out on this planet

We seem to be in constant need of reassurance about
How unjustly or poorly we’re being treated
By people who should know better but who apparently don’t.
We’re not to blame for the Iraqi dead and dispossessed
The gulf oil spill, the crooked companies
The dysfunctional government, the financial meltdown
The lousy health care system, the sub par schools, hunger

Pollution, global warming, species extinction…
It’s not us; it’s them who should be taking the heat.
Somehow, deep inside
I think we’re disappointed in us.
I think we know we’re better than this
And complaints
Are just not going to cut it

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I’m the acting head of a hospital ward even though
I don’t remember if I’m really a doctor from a past life.
But I’m also one of the patients in this ward
Who still needs to sleep a while longer
Before I’ll be ready to awaken to whatever this is.

In fact, all the people in this ward have dual roles
As both patients and staff. And we’re all
Trying to figure out what we doing here
In this in-between state between this life
And whatever comes next; I go back to bed.

After I’ve slept, some of my friends
Who are also both patients and staff
Are helping me to clean up my old house—
Organizing all the stuff that can be recycled
All the stuff that’s still useful here

We’re making a lot of progress.
The basement’s practically livable
And outside there’s a large tree in the yard
That we need to remove the dead branches from
So that it can grow and thrive again

There are also thousands of these tiny metal filings that
Need to be drawn out of this chopped-spinach-like stuff
So it can be used for fodder; we use
Our own energy to create the magnet.
Hey, it’s a dream.

One woman, a patient-nurse, awakens
Just before the dream is going to end.
She can see this Oz-like city off in the distance
And because she can see it, I guess I can too.
She’s decided to stay though

Until everyone’s ready to leave together,
So that’s what we’re doing here—
Helping each other, helping with the clean up.
I wake up thinking: this Gulf oil spill is really
A great opportunity if only we’d awaken to it.

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So what does this have to do with online marketing. We build a fantastic website and think we’re marketing, but we’re not. All we’ve done is create a context for marketing to begin. At least in the early stages of building a platform, marketing doesn’t happen unless conversations develop between visitors to the site and you; online marketing is actually all about those one-on-one conversations to find people who might become fans. And being good at what you do is just table stakes—necessary but not sufficient.

So if you want to see and hear not only a virtuoso violin performance of the Beethoven Romance for Violin by Ann Fontanella, but also an absolutely brilliant piece of online marketing, check it out! Notice how Ann Fontanella provides brief commentary in the upper right hand corner of the screen about her interpretation—carefully explaining what she’s trying to accomplish at each point in the performance. She is engaging with and educating her audience. Look at the comments of her viewers. That’s online marketing. That’s engaging the audience, building relationships and a publishing platform for her classical violin music, which, by the way is not such an easy sale these days.

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Just a few days more than a month ago, we made our first significant upgrade to the site. I say first, because I expect there will be a second and a third and so forth. That’s just a guess based on my experience to date that refining the user experience and adding content is just part of ongoing online marketing.

So, what results if any are observable after one-month with our new “Shortcut” option and its new feature set?

We’ve had the most traffic ever: 3739 visits, and with an average of 2.47 visits per visitor. Most significantly the percentages of people spending more than one hour (2.4%), a half-hour to an hour (2.6%) and fifteen minutes to a half-hour (1.8%) and five minutes to fifteen minutes (4.2%) shifted towards the overall number of people spending more than a half-hour to over an hour doubling over previous months. 74% of traffic is gone in less than 30 seconds, however. Also we had visits from 67 countries.

Okay but what does this mean? (Note: I choose the Awstat figures, because they tend to be more conservative.)

We’re hearing fewer comments that people find the site confusing and instead more comments about how easy it is to navigate. We got our first full site review with glowing comments from the Champlain College Publishing Initiative . And it would appear people are staying longer and engaging more with the content. I’m assuming this, because I received more favorable comments about the books from people who visited.

On the other hand, sales are still slow, and I have not seen any increase in the conversion rate (less than 1%). What will it take for people to start buying? I really have no ideas other than the ones I shared in previous posts. I’ll implement them and see how things turn out. But that’s also why this is an experiment worth doing. Onward!

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Here’s the problem with “building a publishing platform,” the term itself tends to take you down the wrong path. It’s visual and intelligent sounding, but it leads you to think in terms of constructing an actual thing (think: hammer, saws, nails).

What we indie artists need to do primarily, from a marketing standpoint, is to establish and maintain real relationships with individuals who truly respond to our work. We need to listen to them and learn what’s uppermost in their hearts and minds, and how our work fits in that context. If we nurture enough of those relationships, there’s your platform. (Personally, I think “publishing platform” is a term that was coined by folks who did not have or need one.)

Now where are these ideas coming from? Mostly from discussions I’ve been having with LinkedIn contacts. Some of them are other indie artists like myself; others are business people who understand marketing and are kind enough to give me some much needed advice.

I wrote this to one of them this morning—puzzling over the gap between site traffic and sales (conversions for those who prefer marketing-speak)

“We are, each of us, in the midst of a process of figuring out precisely how we can connect meaningfully with others online to build a global audience. No one can really tell us just how to do that right now, but my intuition tells me that it requires great patience and refining all the details. What is lovely is that the wired world is somewhat of an upside down world where collaborative behaviors really make more sense than older competitive paradigms. Of course that’s true of all worlds, but we just haven’t opted for that mostly.”

So, here’s what I’m doing starting today. Whenever anyone shows any real interest in what I’m doing or purchases something from me. I am going to take the opportunity to at least ask two questions (not necessarily worded exactly like this):

1. What could I do to make your onsite experience better or more satisfying?

2. Tell me a little about you, and what it is about my work that’s of particular importance or interest to you?

The better we understand what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the people who respond to our work, the richer and more satisfying the communication, the more solid our virtual “publishing platforms” will be.

I’ll let you know what works or doesn’t Let’s stay in touch and share the journey.

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I had a fun time the other day speaking with Susan Klein, who I met marketing on LinkedIn about her company Exit-Offers, which prints out targeted coupon offers where people buy their beer on Long Island. She wrote that she had some ideas about reaching my demographic, and my initial reaction was, “huh?”

My assumption has been that my audience is probably: reflective, march-to-their-own-drummer, new ager, yoga, environmental, meditator, spiritual/philosophical, boomer types. My assumption has been they’re everywhere on the web and nowhere in particular.

Susan introduced me to Alexa and said maybe I’m thinking too narrowly. She suggested: well-educated, with disposable income, skewed toward women with children 8 and over. Seth Godin, whose blog I read faithfully, would probably add, people who buy books.

Susan was talking to me about a small coupon campaign targeted in the Hamptons to build traffic. Now, I have no idea whether or not Susan’s idea would be a cost-effective way for me to use my limited advertising dollars, especially since I don’t have an advertising budget yet. But she definitely got me thinking differently. And she has experiences and knows things I don’t. It’s just like your parents told you: ask questions and listen.

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I use to meet with a group of writers to talk about self publishing and book marketing, because even then we knew the state of publishing was (insert epithet to suit taste). Collectively, we knew next to absolute zero about the subject but were game to learn. We did some reading, some research, met folks who were actually doing it and pretty near convinced ourselves not to. The simple truth was, “We were writers dammit not marketers.” But the other simple truth was, if any of us ever wanted to be read, we had better become marketers. Welcome to the wired world.

Well, that time seems long ago. aSiteAboutSomething took a lot longer to build and launch than I ever expected, and I’ve been faithfully describing the techniques I’ve been using to build site traffic for the past nine months. But this morning, as I was doing my usual—sending out notes introducing myself to folks on LinkedIn and inviting them to my site, I meet Brian P. (name withheld to protect Brian from the embarrassment of being associated with the likes of me) who hands me my first belly laugh of the morning, and we keep it going through a series of exchanges, and I start to think about just how amazing this new wired world of ours is. Because Brian, who besides being a musician, is a guy with serious skills in global video production. And, in the normal course of events, we probably wouldn’t have run into each other, just because we roam different parts of the savanna and run with different herds. But in the space of a just few minutes; we’re connected and this world seems a friendly, funnier place and this business of marketing what you truly love is just having fun.

One of the great joys of LinkedIn marketing is meeting interesting, funny, talented, experienced, generous people in all sorts of fields. It’s not that way 24/7, but it is at least some of the time. Don’t be afraid to jump in; the water’s fine. (I apologize in advance for having just mixed my metaphors.)

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