Google Analytics is interesting, but not exactly reliable. I have five active blogs/websites, and three of them each show one visitor (besides me). That visitor resides where? Alaska!
I've never visited Alaska, but I watched enough episodes of Living Alaska to know that the state contains vast territories of basically nothing but scary bears and roads only accessible by snowmobile. Maybe that's why this one guy has so much time to scroll through blogs. And it's a wild coincidence that he stumbled upon three of mine.
Mister Alaska, if you're out there, shoot me a comment and say hello! You're my only fan!
I'm glad he hasn't yet visited our band site, because I am still working to make it more visually pleasing. I mentioned in a previous post that we have no band photos, so I hit upon the idea of showing a male/female duo in shadow performing onstage, just to use as a representation. Well, those images are impossible to find! I even tried asking AI to create one. Here's a little secret about AI: It's dumb as a rock. I didn't ask for a cartoon drawing, but all the different AI sites I tried insisted upon presenting several to me. Also, AI struggles to understand English. I was very specific about what I wanted, but it couldn't comprehend my instruction, or maybe it's simply obstinate. Bing's co-pilot was the worst. I asked it to create an image, but instead it gave me reams of text describing a complete movie scene in which a couples duo was onstage, and then they fell in love or some other thing happened. And I stopped reading and reiterated, "No, an image!" Co-pilot apologized profusely and basically gave up.
So much for images. What I have managed to accomplish is redesigning our two album covers. They're still not perfect, but that aspect is easily changed. I'll let them marinate a while.
In lieu of a "photo" I designed a band flyer, which I placed on our "Reviews" page. It's a sorry substitute, which is why it's not on our home page. I'm still struggling to make our home page stand out, and that will require some contemplation.
I did look into online selling (of music downloads). There are a few sites that offer an online store option, but I'm not willing to pay a monthly fee for one, plus once the store is configured it will require HTML placement, and that thought frightens me. Have you ever checked out the HTML on your blog? It's pages and pages of gobbledygook. Where exactly would I paste my code? It would be a guess, and probably a wrong one. At this point I don't know if I even want to mess with an online store. Although I really hate just listing each title and linking to its Amazon buy page. It looks cheesy and unprofessional.
So many things to suss out. On the plus side, this exercise keeps me from stewing over my author "career". Nothing good can come from looking at reviews and sales (or lack thereof). I didn't go back to look at my newsletter stats. A long break from all that is emotionally necessary. I'm already feeling my mood lightening, simply by avoiding dwelling on those things.
Right now, anyway, I really need to get this band website thing together before Mister Alaska finds it. I don't want him to be disappointed.
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