Help With Google Analytics

Do you have a website? If not, stop reading this and go build one.

If you do you should be using Google Analytics to analyze everything about the people visiting your website. What are the search terms that are leading people to you? How long are people staying before they leave? Are they using mobile devices or desktop computers?

The list goes on and on and all of this information can help you to best craft your message and then to get it in front of the right eyeballs. This type of analysis is not an option if you are taking your business seriously.

Don't know where to start? There's good news!

Arts Hacker, a website by Drew McManus, has a whole slew of tips on how to use Google Analytics. The posts at Arts Hacker are very well laid out and present actionable advice for anyone regardless of technical ability.

I just used this article to filter out my own visits to andrewhitz.com in order to get better data across the board. This is something I should have done long ago but until I saw that very short and to the point article leading me step-by-step through the process I never got around to it.

Arts Hacker Articles On Google Analytics

I'd encourage you to poke around the rest of the site. There's some very powerful tools there which are completely free!

Article: 10 Skills Online Marketing Teams Must Have to Succeed

Whether your marketing "team" is a dozen people or like most musicians, just you, this is a good, quick read from Entrepreneur Magazine of things to be thinking about on the digital marketing front moving forward.

And as I've said on the podcast over and over again, getting noticed is by far the most difficult thing in the music business in 2016. By far the most difficult thing!

The good news: The gate keepers of the music business are gone!

The bad news: Those gate keepers are gone for everyone else, too!

So if you don't consider yourself a marketer, you better get started today.

Article: 10 Skills Online Marketing Teams Must Have to Succeed

(I'm especially fond of #10.) 

Who is your bio written for?

In my work as a consultant, there is a mistake I see individuals and groups make with an astonishing frequency. To see if you are making this mistake you need to ask yourself one question:

Who specifically is your bio written for? 

If you can't answer this simple question I bet I can answer it for you. If you haven't targeted a specific group of people with your bio then chances are very good that you wrote it for someone you know quite well:

Yourself.

One of the most common problems I see people make is writing their bio as if they were the intended recipient.

If you are writing the bios for a chamber group (both the collective bio and that of each member) who wants to be a touring ensemble performing on different concert series around the country, who is your target audience? (Hint: Who does the hiring for those series'?)

The answer is concert presenters. The answer for me would also be "not fellow tuba players."

A fellow tuba player may be impressed that I have studied with Sam Pilafian, Rex Martin and David Fedderley. 99% of concert presenters have never heard of a single one of them. They also don't care that I went to Northwestern.

None of these facts will help that presenter sell tickets or sell you to her board of directors (who she generally reports to.)

So why do the bios of so many musicians start with where we went to school and who we studied with? The answer is because we were writing the bio for ourselves and not for a targeted audience.

I frequently challenge people and groups I work with to do the following:

1. Identify exactly who the target audience is for their bio.

2. Put yourself in their shoes and figure out what in your bio they'll be most impressed with.

3. Write the bio using words and terms that your target audience are already using.

If you take these three steps when writing your bio you will nail it every time.

Finally, it should be noted that each person or group should not necessarily have only one bio. If you end up targeting different audiences with your various skill sets (which almost all of us do in this age of the "portfolio musician") then you will get very different results from the above three steps depending on who you are trying to reach.

Shows you should listen to: The #AskGaryVee Show

The #AskGaryVee Show is an absolute must watch (or listen) for any musician with even one entrepreneurial bone in their body. It is hosted by Gary Vaynerchuck whose energy is manic and contagious.

Gary is a marketing and entrepreneurial genius who is really great at quickly breaking down any topic or problem to its core and stripping away everything else.

His book "Crush It" is what led me to start andrewhitz.com which then led to Hitz Publications and eventually Pedal Note Media and The Entrepreneurial Musician. The passion he puts forth in that book made me believe that I could do anything I set out to do and I was off and running.

The #AskGaryVee Show is just Gary answering questions submitted by his fans. The episodes range from insightful to life changing. You never know when a nugget is going to fall out of his mouth.

You can find the show on YouTube as well as a podcast via iTunes or your favorite podcast app.