“I assume that there are 50,000 people on Earth that have heard of me before, 20,000 that can name one of my songs and maybe 100 people alive today who are genuine fans of mine who love what I do. I want to spend all my time serving those 100 people” -Rob Jay
As an artist I’ve spent a sizeable amount of my time focusing on marketing myself. I focused on making sure I was in the right blog, the right publication, followed the right people on all of the various social networks. I’d say at my peak of online promotion during my career I probably spent more time sending my music to blog sites than I did writing, recording, rehearsing and networking offline combined. This was mid 2009, I was one of the first hip hop artists in Houston to embrace the idea of using blogs to introduce my music. Back then it meant something to say that you had been featured in a nationally know hip hop blog. Not to the people who count but to other rappers you could stick your chest out a little bit. Fast forward 18 months or so and now there’s some free clothes, maybe some free bottles and some free beats, cool……….But guess what, there’s still only 40 people at my show. I’m being featured in these national websites, Armed Forces Entertainment just spent $80,000 to send me overseas to perform for troops and in my home town I’m pulling 40 people on a great night.
Here’s what I believe happened. I forgot about the fans, I started thinking that these websites were my fans, which many are but these websites can’t come to my show. If I send them my album to review free there not gonna buy it. And these websites may feature me or do a write up but best believe before that server finishes uploading my file there already thinking about the next artist that they are goin to feature that day. I didn’t even touch my website, many times for weeks at a time. Luckily I was able to get my actual name as a domain (robjay.com) so fans won’t have trouble remembering. What would happen is one week I tell my fans go hear to read about me, the next week I’m sending them to the other website, on days when I was featured on multiple sites I may send some one way and some the other. I stretched my base then, looking back I don’t think that many of them really cared that someone else was writing about me. They were just glad to see me making progress, they probably would have been just as happy going to robjay.com and seeing new content and a link to whatever website was featuring me there.
Where I am today is my Fan’s First Phase. Fan’s now are my priority not looks, mentions, features just fans. I’m a new person, I’m always lookng for new content about me to post to my website, I keep a flip camera on me to capture any moment at any time. I have various days and themes such as Motivational Mondays, My Song of Day, After Word Freestyle. Now instead of finishing a song and sending it to 100 different websites I finish it and put it on my own site and send to a few select websites that have supported me over the years. Basically, I’ve removed the luke warm support and am going only after those who are genuinely intersted and supportive of what I do. It’s only been a few weeks and I’m so focused on dong my part that I don’t get too into results but I will say. My views are much smaller than they were when I was basically being a publicist for myself. I’m currently posting and average of 2 new videos a day, 3 new songs a week, new photo’s twice a week as well along with other content. Some videos may get 200 hits I’ve had some get less than 10. During my highest times in online popularity with the right people picking up a new song from me I could easy see a couple hundred or couple thousand downloads within that day. However my 300-500 people who are visiting my website weekly are making more noise, send in more fan mail, alerting me of more opportunities than the thousands I’ve had when they were listening to me because someone else said I’m good. It’s still early but I believe in the long run this change is gonna give me longevity and true fans if nothing else. True identifiable fans that I can access and have there sole focus through my website, that’s powerful in so many ways. It’s still early so I could be totally wrong, but I doubt it, This time next month I’ll check back in with another update.
Thanks,
http://www.robjay.com
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