I usually don’t post over the weekend, but today, 16th November, it’s a big day for GuitarFlame.com and for me.

Today, this site celebrates 1 year since the first post, 1 year of constant posting and searching for new ideas, 1 year of meeting great people, finding about new technologies and guitars, 1 year of new experiences.

I want to tell you I have enjoyed every moment of it, I loved answering every comment and writing every article. I have had some good articles (I like to believe so) and a lot of bad ones (I take credits for them too)

During this year I have met people that were here before my blog came to being, I loved speaking to them, exchanging emails, comments, stumbles, chat by Skype-phone, during this time I have seen disappearing blogs that I have looked up to since day one (IG’s blog, for example) and during this time I have started again to rehears with my band, after about 2 years with no activity.

I have had a contest, which was a great thing for me, new thrills, you know, I had great people guest blogging here, Dr J, Jack Pribek and IG. I promised these guys I will guest posts on their blogs too, as a return favor for taking the time to write a post for my blog. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed so far, so I think I will just publish a TO DO list one day…

I have received a lot of request to publish news about various sites, products, etc, I have stored them in my local TO PUBLISH list, one of these days I will do it.

I have started a dare, a contest with myself, to reach in 5000 visitors per day in 6 months. Some may say I’ve failed. Some, as in STATS NUMBERS. Well, I gained a lot more. I have only reached 550-650 visitors per day, but, as a commercial here in Romania says, a small number, but, mine! How true! I worked hard for everyone of these 600 visitors per day. By the way, trust me I have worked for those spikes of 2500, 3500 visitors in 24 hours too! (Thanks, fellow stumblers!)

Also, for those of you wondering, yes, I have made some money from this blog, I guess around $600, not much, but hey, they paid the bills for hosting and for a part of my guitar, you know, but honestly, I didn’t put too much weight on this, even if I constantly try to find something to make this site bring in some money because I would like it to work a bit for itself, it is 1 year old now, this blog it’s a big boy now! However, that’s not a priority and for sure it is no secret that sites make money. Some of them, big money. Well, not this one.

Thanks to your support for this blog I have gained again my interest for everything that guitar means, I bought a new guitar, my surfer-blue Variax that I really enjoy, I started to experience home recording and man, I learned a lot about blogging! Before this site I was not into blogging much.

By the way, this first year anniversary was celebrated a few days before by a new and lovely spike, with a few days when my traffic was somewhere between 1500 and 2500 daily visitors. Well, thanks for the present, guys!

So, for this, I just wanted to write this post and tell you that you are all part of it, because without your constant participation here, I wouldn’t have gone that far. For me, GuitarFlame is not just a site, it is not just a blog, I like to believe it is a nice community, made of everyone reading my posts and commenting here.

To all of you I want to say thank you for being part of it!

Happy 1 year birthday, GuitarFlame.com!

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What an unpleasant surprise I had this morning when checking up IG’s blog (http://igblog.wordpress.com/), I saw IT IS GONE! DELETED!

Hey, IG! What is going on? I know you haven’t updated your blog recently, but we were expecting you to come back to blogging! I didn’t see this one coming, really! IG’s blog was a very interesting source of guitar ideas, I have always looked up to his way of blogging.

Does anybody know what happened? I will send him an email…

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Yeah, baby, yeah! As I was saying, my feed counter was a bit sick these days, now it’s back to work!

And it is showing me some pretty numbers:252 RSS subscribers! THAT ME LIKES!!

Yeah, baby, yeah!!

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Since 2 days I am having some issues with my Feedburner reports, my RSS stats tell me that I’ve lost almost half of my RSS subscriberes from one day to the next one, from 283 to 147 and honestly I don’t think this is the case.

Feedburner reported some false stats somewhere in the past too, but never more than one day, I think. Today is the second day with this kind of stats. I don’t freak out yet, I think everything will work out fine, they will fix the problem, but still, I have a bad feeling when I look at my stats.

Anybody else having the same problems or is just me?

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It seems that I have some unfinished business here on this site, I mean I started my 6 months dare for 5000 visitors per day, I published 5 reports, but never managed to publish the 6th, so today, due to the fact that I caught a nasty cold and I am not very inspired, I decided to put up a short post about this. So here it is, my 6th report:

As you may have already realized this, I haven’t reached my target, 5000 visitors per day. Or I haven’t YET reached it. My stats at this moment, as reported by Google Analytics for the last 30 days, look like this:

• 15666 visitors
• 22000 pageviews
• 1,41 pages/visit
• 69% come from search engines
• 24.66% come from referrals
• 5.76% direct traffic
• 220-230 RSS readers

It’s true, I haven’t reached my target, but

• I have learned a lot about social media and blogging while promoting this site
• I have learned a lot about guitars and, one of the things I am most happy about, I have regained my passion for guitars. For a couple of years, due to the fact that life strikes you when you least expect (damn, I must be some kind of a philosopher if I write such things!!) I forgot my guitar passion buried somewhere under my work and family tasks. Thanks to you, guys, I have rediscovered the joy of playing the guitar! For me that is the highest reward when it comes to this website.
• I have met A LOT OF GREAT PEOPLE passionate about guitars, with some of them I speak also by email, instant messaging, etc and I tell my offline friends about them.
• I have a steady traffic of 500-600 visitors per day. It’s not 5000 but it is a decent traffic and I’ve worked hard for every new visitor so I deserve it, OK?!
• People point to my site from various places on this big internet saying nice things about me and GuitarFlame.com. Thank you, you should know that makes me feel very good!

As a conclusion to all the people who fight for traffic on the internet, I must say one thing and one thing only: the traffic for such a blog is the value of your proactive attitude! Period. SEO is OK and you must do it, but it won’t work for a blog the same way it will work for a static website. Here the value of your posts and the fact that you are proactive will bring you more visitors than anything else.

Be proactive, write with passion, visit other sites, comment on other people’s blogs, make friends, comment on forums, be active in social media, join or start a community, all these things will mean something and traffic will come to you. In the first 3 months of my quest I have been this way, I have done all these things and as you may remember I had high traffic spikes from social media. In the last 3 months, the traffic settled around a decent value, without spikes and there is only one explanation for this: I was not as proactive as in the beginning.

Be proactive, show you care and you will build traffic! Also, my dare goes on, without trying too hard now. I will keep you posted from time to time.

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A few days ago, during a Skype conversation with Danny from GuitarPlayersCenter, he asked me about embedding audio in your WordPress posts. Since we all run guitar or music related blogs, most of them based on WordPress, and I guess everybody wanted at one moment to embed a song in his/her post , I have decided to speak here a bit about how you can do this. The fact is that is not a difficult thing to do, so, in case you are interested to add in-line audio to your posts, read on!

The solution I propose here is based on a WordPress plugin named Audio Player WordPress Plugin. Pretty straight forward, don’t you think? I installed here on this blog the beta version, Audio Player 2.0, which you can find here. For WordPress, download the first one, for everything else, go with the second one.

Being a plugin, it can be easy installed on your blog, I won’t go into installing WordPress plugins, but just in case you don’t know how to do it, it comes as a zip file, unzip it and copy the whole folder (named “audio-player”) into your plugins folder, usually in “BLOG_ADDRESS/wp-content/plugins/” so you should have it like this “BLOG_ADDRESS/wp-content/plugins/audio-player”

Then you need to activate this plugin from your Plugins page in your admin panel in WordPress (usually BLOG_ADDRESS/wp-admin/plugins.php), just click the Activate link near the name of the plugin, and you should be ready to go.

How you can actually embed music into your post? Well, pretty simple, when writing your daily guitar posts and you think you need an mp3 song in there, use the small icon that says “Add audio” when you keep the mouse over it, the 3rd one just about the editor area in your blog, the one looking like musical notes, pick your song, upload it and wait for the progress bar to reach the end.

Then write all the information you want about your song, then press the 4th button on the right, below the information area, where it says “Audio player” and then “Insert into post”.

That’s all it needs to be said. In case you already knew about this, well, no harm has been done, I guess. In case you didn’t know, well, enjoy, comment and…embed more songs into your posts!

Warning: every song you upload on your server will consume space, if an mp3 has abour 3.5M, then 10 songs will have around 35M. You should check to see what’s your available space on the server before running into space problems. Just to be sure…

And to illustrate my point, here’s a song I like from Alice Cooper, Somewhere in the jungle.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Enjoy!

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After the post about Tiago Della Vega (aka the fastest guitar player in the world, right?), I have looked some more on YouTube to find more videos about him or similar performances. Well, I did find a few, but I have decided to write about something else today and that is branding in online presence.

The fact is that I am not a marketing professional, I have not studied marketing in school but I have become more and more aware of it’s importance over the last years, no matter what’s your field.

I had this post about why marketing a band is so much like blogging, I suggest you read it if you haven’t done it already, and today I have found appropriate to cover this subject from a more “practical” point of view, being motivated by a new discovery on YT.

The idea is simple: make yourself seen, come with a particular something that will help people identify you. There are many good musicians out there, most of them playing very good, but not always become known. Why is that? Because they don’t have an unique presence that help people identify them. Maybe it freaks you out when you see Marilyn Manson or other artists like him, but that guy has an unique presence and that helped him position himself well on this crowded market.

The fact is that a little something can make the difference, and this is where I come to the reason that started of this post: a lot of people promote themselves on YouTube these days. A camera and a computer and you have just about everything you need, right? But there are so many (not-famous)people that play or sing on YouTube, how many do you actually remember once you close the browser’s window?

Fretkillr rules!

Let’s see, from my point of view: fretkillr. I love this guy’s music and channel, I subscribed to it. But why do I come back? How did I manage to remember him the first time? OK, he has a lovely acoustic guitar music, but did you notice the fact that all the time he films himself from a particular position where only the guitar is seen but not him?

Did you notice that nobody knows his real identity, who this guy is, what’s his name, etc. This created a particular cloud of mystery around him, causing interest and people speaking about him and coming back to him.

We have here in Romania an example of a band that started as a project/experiment, nobody knowing who these guys were, nobody knowing they were even from Romania, and this caused a wave of interest. The guys made their identity public only about 6-7 months after the project started to work. And what do you know? By coincidence, they guy is from my city and we used to know each other 10 years ago from recording in the same studio here. That’s marketing.

The kitchen concerts

Also, an other example, not that successful, but interesting from the point of view of creating a name/identity: concerts from the kitchen! Right! This guy films himself singing and playing the guitar from his kitchen, creating a series of clips gathered under the name “concerts from the kitchen”. I think he changes angles and environment a bit too much on his videos, but if he would keep his “thing” he may be easily remembered as “the guy who sings in the kitchen”. Not much, but it creates him an identity!

Here’s the guy:

Sandi Thom, the girl that lived her dream

And as a 3rd and final example, a girl that made it big, Sandi Thom, if I am not mistaken, started having daily concerts from her basement, streaming these shows live on her website. An unique point of view and the strange location and the internet made her big. That’s marketing, right?

Do you know any more artists with unique presence on YouTube?

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Well, what can I say more than this month has been very quiet. I had other things to do and I kind of lost my enthusiasm regarding my dare, even if I should never ever lose it if I want to reach that target.

Not much happened, I had around 10.000 visitors but constant traffic, I had only 1 small spike, on 15, of 507 visitors which is not much.

This month I focused more on monetizing the traffic, and this is not an easy task for a blog, since the traffic for a blog is so much different compared to search engine traffic.

I have managed to make the fabulous amount of $133.5 using various sources, like AdSense, affiliates and direct sold advertising space. I can say I made this money from music, isn’t it?

So, to make a long story short, statistics go like this:

• 9805 visitors
• 10.804 visits
• 15.233 page views
• 1.41 Pages/Visitor
• 143 RSS subscribers
• $133.5

Also, in case you are new here and want to find out the story from day 1, here’s the 4th report which will lead you to the rest of the story.

Ah, and yes, again, if you are new here, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds! Thanks!

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Today is that day again. The day when I look back to what I have done this month and publish here my stats.

As you probably already know, I am on a quest to get 5000 visitors per day. While it is not an easy thing to do and to be honest, my efforts were a bit slower in the last period of time, I experience new things each and every day and I find a great joy in everything that happens with this site.

To make a long story short, here’s what happened:

A very good StumbleUpon activity

Yes, this is one of the parts that made me very happy: out of those 30 days of a month, I had 10 days with good traffic caused by SU. I am not speaking about 3-4000 visits per day, but something like 500-700 visits per day from SU, which is great. Also I had 2 days with 1100 ans 1200 visits. So, if you have the pleasure of stumbling me, be my guest, you’ll make my day!!

Growing traffic, day by day

Beside SU I can say that this site grows in traffic with each passing day. Or week, to try to look for an average. If I speak about the first 2 weeks of this month, I can say 250 visits per day as an average. If I speak about week 3, I have around 300-350 visits per day while in the last week I had around 400 visits per day.

Where is this growth coming from?

Search engine traffic is growing day by day and it is normal, if you write every day, but also being stumbled a lot means you get a lot of recursive, residual traffic from SU. StumbleUpon is good from this point of view, if you have something on SU, you will receive traffic long after the spike has gone.

New layout for my blog and experimenting with ways to make some money from this blog

This month I have also redesigned my blog to have 3 columns. This is because I have started to think of a way to monetize it, to make some money from my blog, because it needs to earn it’s living. It pays rent, you know, hosting, traffic, and I want to have it pay for it. That is why I have set an advertising page that I invite you to read.

New plugins

I have installed and tested a few new plugins, some of them were OK, others were not OK so I removed them. One of the thing I intend to use is the plugin for having some posts only for RSS readers. I intend to publish the results of my dare to also monetize this traffic, to let you know how it goes, what I do and how much I make with this blog, because it could be interesting for everybody running such a guitar blog. You all write out of your love for guitars, but why not make some money out of it so you can pay your hosting expenses easily?

So, I will tell you how it goes, every step of the path, just that I will only publish money stats on RSS so subscribe to my RSS feeds to get these stats.

And now the numbers for this month:

• 14200 visits
• 19600 pageviews
• 1.38 pages per visit
• 10 StumbleUpon spikes
• highest SU spike: 1200 visitors in one day, the article that caused this spike, and at the same time the article that has the most page views is the one about why I love my guitar.
• RSS readers: 129 and grows day by day

Also, for the previous reports, see them below:

• First stats report on my 5000 visitors per day dare
• Second report
• Third report

And remember: starting today I am going to also publish stats on the money I earn from this blog, but they will only be available to my RSS readers, so subscribe now and get my experience on how I try to monetize a difficult traffic: social media blog traffic!

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Today it’s 19 again, so it’s one of those days when I share my past month statistics for my dare of 5000 visitors per day. I haven’t had the time to do it properly yesterday or today until now, because I keep on cleaning windows and furniture since yesterday evening. Easter is coming and my wife launched the operation “spring cleaning reloaded” and in such situation there is no much room for negotiations, computer or playing the guitar. Damn!

So, shortly, here is what happened:

I’ve got ’stumbled upon” again!

Via Guitar Mx, I found about a top of “the greatest” guitar riffs of all time, put together by Telegraph.co.uk. I didn’t want to publish again the same top, but I have observed a few songs that didn’t make it on the list, even if they have famous guitar riffs. Among these, Satisfaction (of Rolling Stones). So I shared my thoughts about that top and you know what? It made it on StumbleUpon and that particular post had 1459 page views that day, and 2580 page views by today. It was again one of those days when my traffic was again nice

I had 1350 visitors the first day , then 860 then 460. The most interesting thing is that the traffic after that spike seemed to settle at an average around 250-300 visitors per day, which I consider good. I know I am still far away from my target, but it’s a good step forward, in my opinion.

On 16 I started again to receive visitors and the first moment I thought I am on StumbleUpon again but that was not the (only) reason. That day I had 815 visitors, half of them coming from the fact that an article of mine about Sungha Jung reached the first page of MetaFilter.com and that brought me 400 visitors one day and 566 visits by today which is again good because I wasn’t even aware of the existence of that site. That is if I don’t count the PR7 link from the first page, even if I don’t think it counts because I was there only 2 days.

I had 100 diggs but I was not on Digg’s first page!!!

This was one of the most amazing experiences I had this month. Really, I’m not joking! I found this guy, Rick Renstrom, which was born, I guess, with physical disabilities, which would have stopped anybody from even trying to think about playing an instrument! Well, not him! Rick Renstrom became a great guitar player! I was just amazed about his performance, so I had this article about him that suddenly started to get dugg! And it kept on receiving diggs! When I woke up the next morning after I posted the article, the article had 53 diggs, it was first on the upcoming list in music category on Digg, so far away from the next article, and I was on the upcoming list in Entertainment, in the middle.

I was sure I will get on the first page! 53 diggs in the morning and counting? I have even spoken to the guys hosting my blog, warning them about sudden traffic! By the end of the day I reached 100 diggs, I can tell you my adrenaline was high, I was very nervous, waiting for that big rush of people on my site and…nothing!?!! Nothing at all?! The article has got 100 diggs and didn’t make it on the first page?

Damn! So if I do the math, I can tell you that 100 diggs in 24 hours brought me 98 visitors from Digg. If I also count the 97 visitors from StumbleUpon, I can say that the article could have done much better, I was waiting for the big wave, the 20.000 visitors or more!! That’s what I was waiting for! Well…

If I draw the line and count, I can tell you that this month meant:

• 9993 visits
• 14500 page views
• 1 SU spike of 1350 visitors and about 2 smaller ones that I don’t count
• 100 diggs on one single article (but no front page)
• 9% direct traffic
• 36% search engines
• 55% referrals
• an apparently steady traffic of a 250-300 average per day, traffic observed in the last 10 days.

I have started to work on adapting my blog layout, so in a few days I will change a bit the way my blog looks, so stay close for the upcoming change!

Anyway, just a reminder, if you don’t know already: subscribe to RSS to get the news every day and never miss a post! It’s that easy, you know?!

Anyway, you should also see the first report and the second report of my monthly statistics.

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