Made this music video with a combination of some cool stock footage and a cinematic intro that I rendered… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa63YvCyyNI

Its pretty awesome for my first one.  I think the intro music, while it gets your attention, might be too annoying to re-use everywhere because of the loud clangy climax.  Hehe, originally I had some stock space shuttle rocket ignition in as an additional track for the bass rumble, but I took it out - didn’t want to give anyone a heart attack or anything ;-)

I got a whole bunch of other videos I put together, but decided to sit on them and just drop this one initially.  Its a lot of fun putting these together, but if you don’t stay focused its easy to get lost just going through stock video etc.

This week was pretty neat, I had commissioned a whole bunch of different media to be produced for both the online music videos magazine site we have as well as our sister site that I am keeping kinda under wraps until its feature complete.

A bunch of them got delivered at the end of the week and some of them are a real riot!  I then decided it would be cool to create a cinematic trailer for the sister site.  I was poking around online and came across some pretty awesome examples.  So I spent last night messing around and came up with something pretty suspenseful.  I have a 6-core rig with lots of RAM as my primary machine, and I was able to render full HD 1920x1080 1 minute trailer in about an hour.  Not bad.  Then I had to add in the soundtrack and all the sound effects.  It turned out pretty good for my first one ever.

One of things I had produced which I will reveal, is a rap song about MMXMusicVideos.com.  So my next task is to produce a short music video for it, to be dropped on the site.  Its kinda cheesy/funny but catchy.

Something you all might be interested to know, the professional video editing program Lightworks is now open source software.  You can actually download it and use it yourself on your desktop.  It is a bit complicated, but structured to work the way movie guys think, fits the workflow.  The open source version is still in beta, and it does blow up from time to time, but its pretty awesome that you can run and use the same software that was used to edit down movies like Pulp Fiction, The Departed, and The King’s Speech!!!  The best feature for me is the ability to do multiple audio tracks, and the auto-synch capability.  I was able to download it, install it, and produce something useful out of it in under an hour and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what you can do with it.  Pretty excited.

One of the things I’ve been toying around with is that it would be neat if users could have a profile, and then share that profile between the “other” site I am building up and my online music videos magazine site.  I also would love to get more Facebook integration as a Facebook app.  It will make it easier for users to share things, and will enhance the viral-enablement of the site.  So while poking around to see where BuddyPress was at these days I found that some folks have plugins to enable the Facebook integration with Facebook Connect, etc. and I was thinking this would be great, because then Facebook is the common profile.  The integration plugins allow things like synchronizing pictures and videos and media, and posting updates to the users Facebook Wall, etc.  It seems like a great way to get plugged in to users’ own social graphs on Facebook, so the sites can focus on what the sites do best and let Facebook be the common social network.

But I’m debating whether to start going down this road just yet.  I’m using the great Arras theme for WordPress and it seems that you have to do a fair amount of theme hacking to get BuddyPress working properly.  There was someone who made an attempt at a child theme awhile back but its no longer available for download and some other users commented that it wasn’t complete.  I don’t know if I want to start hacking themes to that extent just yet, because once you start you can’t stop until you’re done with it, and I’ve got too many other features and content that I’m working on adding first.

Just another thing thats on my mind that I’m thinking about for MMXMusicVideos.com currently, and really more for the sister site because its more important there.

One of the things I had to do to maintain my sanity was cut myself off from Twitter for awhile, and limit my Twitter time.  I was getting hooked and it was turning into a big time sink eating up the time I had available that I wanted to be using for site development and growth.

I also have mixed feelings about the best value in Twitter.  I think trying to use Twitter to drive direct conversions is just a waste of time.  Especially with some of the feedback I was getting, Twitter users hate being “spammed” with affiliate links.  They don’t want tweet ads.  I’ve really started to feel that the best value for Twitter is in building and maintaining loyalty with visitors you already have.  Kind of a way of extending your website’s “stickiness”.  At least this is the approach we are heading in with our music videos online magazine site at MMXMusicVideos.com.  At some point we will start up with more Twitter involvement again but for now I just gotta avoid the time sink.  It is too easy to blow 2 hours without thinking about it.

Anyway, be careful with your Twitter time.  And don’t spam your followers.

Just a thought I was having, if it is possible to love your website too much.  As I’m building my online music videos “magazine site”, I was reminiscing a bit and comparing to how its different from what I’ve done in the past.

In the past, a couple years ago, I was a “niche” affiliate marketer but on a semi-large scale.  I had built up a network of over 1,600 niche affiliate websites.  They were mostly throwaway sites, I mean I never got too invested in them.  I was doing all sorts of creative stuff with automation, multiple servers in multiple countries, link farming, the whole bit.  But even with the scripts and automation it was starting to take over my life, it required too much care and feeding to keep running smoothly.  I had whole processes figured out for checking popular keywords every week, getting domain names for them, auto-genning a site from one of a few templates (youtube site, auction site, etc.).  I was doing alright with ringtones, ebay, insurance, some financial offers.  At the time I owned a Lotus Exige, and as long as the sites made enough to cover gas and a new set of tires every 2 months I was happy.  I never really killed it in terms of earnings because I wouldn’t cross over into the shady stuff, but they were doing ok.

But then I walked away.  I wanted my life back.

So now, I’ve got just a handful of sites that I actually really care about.  It started as just a fluke, wanting to play around with the latest stuff, and maybe start a site about watches and pull in some deal of the day feeds.  And I find myself building a “real” set of sites that I hope people like.  So, is it possible to love your website?  I don’t know that I would consider MMXMusicVideos.com or its much larger (will have much greater visibility / traffic) sister site another one of my kids any time soon, but I’m finding I actually care enough to put some love into the graphics, the content, the features, etc.  This is a good thing.  Unless it crashes and burns, because then I’ll be heartbroken ;-)

So here’s another interesting couple of things that have been happening as I build MMXMusicVideos.com, which I’ve named Mass Media Exposure.  The first thing that I didn’t think about ahead of time but should have is international traffic / visitors.  I had the typical American blinders on and was only thinking about appealing to US people.  But instead I am getting a blend of visitors, mostly from the U.K. and from Canada in addition to the U.S. along with a bunch of other countries but their contribution is much smaller.  Its actually a pretty even split between UK/Canada/US.

This presents interesting challenges of its own.  The first is making sure I’m thinking about presenting musicians/bands that appeal to those countries.  The second is advertising.

When I first started the blog, I threw some MusicMatrix affiliate links on it and figured I would try to use that to monetize it and pay for itself.  The monetization in my mind was going to become more important as traffic increases and the backend infrastructure for servers and whatnot would need to ramp up.  I need the site to at least break even and pay for itself because I’m not independently wealthy, so I’m not looking to dump a couple thousand a month into it out of my pocket.

MusicMatrix is this online music video contest site.  The concept is that you subscribe for a monthly fee, and then you can enter contests to make your own version of a music video and try to win large prize pools.

I quickly realized that because there isn’t a ton of awareness out there about it yet, and I wasn’t seeing conversions on click throughs, that I would need to expand the monetization on the site to try and generate enough ad supported revenue so I can pay the hosting fees and for new components for the site, content delivery network backend, etc.

So I’ve tried to place ads on the site in ways that won’t annoy people, but that also will help to pay the bills effectively.  I tried to pick relevant ads, and I’m rotating them with various splits and tracking for the different areas.  We’ll see how well they perform.  One of the things I put on the site is ringtone ads, because I’ve had past success with them and they tend to do well on music related sites.  They pay pretty good, so I’m hoping they work out well because it will give me the funding to do some really cool things with the site.

However, the combination of international traffic and the ads leads to some challenges.  I’m gonna have to spend some time building geo-targeting so the ads are appropriate for the different countries.  Geotargeted ads in general tend to work better for pay per click advertising, but I’ve never taken the time before to actually write the code to do it for an actual site.  So for instance for ringtone offers, nobody in the UK can sign up because they have different cell phone carriers over there, so you need to show the ads that work for the UK carriers.  I have to check but I think Amazon automatically just works for multiple countries, at least I hope so, or there’s another set of ads I gotta geotarget.  

I’m also looking at rotating a bunch of other types of offers.  This kinda ties into my post about having a diverse visitor base, because it makes it challenging to create the right ad mix so that there are ads that are specifically relevant for the different types of visitors.  I mean, I know the visitor diversity because of the feedback and contacts I’ve received and doing some traffic analysis, but its hard to determine and segment the visitor programmatically when they hit the site.  So I have to come up with an ad mix that loads all the time…  

Generalized ads are ok, but I’m personally a bigger believer that highly targeted ads are less annoying to the visitor because its something very relevant to them.  So instead of dating ads, a music equipment sale ad is going to be way less annoying to a band getting started.

So, I’m trying to figure all this out now, because I know the traffic is going to start on a ramp up soon.  There are varying opinions on ads, but my personal one is that it is better to have the ads in place first, as opposed to introducing them later to a user base.  Others have the opinion that it is better to have no ads first, grow your user base, and then introduce the ads.

Anyway, just some of my rambling thoughts on the things you have to think about while planning the growth of a site.

So one of the things that happened right off the bat with MMXMusicVideos.com was something I wasn’t really expecting.  I thought we would have an uphill 9-12 month battle to build up content and attract general music fans interested in music videos and the particular articles/posts we write.  But instead right off the bat we had visitors coming to the site.  I was surprised that people were actually seeking this stuff out.  I was also kind of surprised that a lot of the people coming to the site were what I’ve been calling “aspiring artists” but I guess really fall under the umbrella of indie and unsigned musicians and bands, as well as a fair amount of industry people.  I guess I didn’t think I had anything particularly compelling to say just yet that would interest them, I mean it has only been a month and although I have a lot of cool stuff I’m working on it takes time.  I thought people would come AFTER that stuff made its way to the site.  Instead peeps are checking the site every day and seem really interested.  In some way this is pretty gratifying and drives me to work hard at building a site that will make people happy.  In other ways it is a little scary because I fear I won’t build what they want.  Its been helpful getting a lot of feedback and suggestions.  I just keep going down the road that I think it should go down and hope it catches on.  So far it seems to be working.  I’ve gotten pretty handy with the graphics editor, and its fun as an outlet for my computer art.  But there are so many features and so much content I am working on that it is sometimes overwhelming.  I need to learn to pace myself and not try to do it all ASAP.  

I have some other sites I’m building up too that kind of tie in to MMXMusicVideos.com and they will help support each other.  So trying to be effective across multiple sites while keeping the time investment down has required some creativity.  I usually work on the sites on Saturday and write content on Sunday and queue it up for publishing.  I’m trying to build up the lead time/backlog of thoughtful posts so its far enough out that I can focus on the rest of the site on the weekends.

One challenge with this mix of visitors to the site is in making sure I vary the posts and articles enough to appeal to the whole group.  In this sense its forcing me to think like a magazine editor, planning out an “issue”.  Kind of cool in a way, learning some new things.

Decided to finally check out Tumblr, glad I did.  I love the interface.  Its like the perfect blend of wordpress, twitter, etc. in one place.  I’m hoping to use this microblog as a place to just keep updated with my thoughts as I build out MMXMusicVideos.com.  I started it as just a simple blog to mess around with exactly a month ago, and it sorta took on a life of its own.  So now I’m trying to turn it into something much grander, part time on the side as a hobbyist, I already have a day job that keeps me very busy, so when I do get time to work on it I have to work fast and maximize my effectiveness.  Its been a learning experience to say the least.  Not the least of which because I have very specific tastes in music, and I have to try to be unbiased in what I present so I can cover the entire music spectrum of genres.

One of the challenges is in writing compelling articles.  On the one hand, when getting started you need to keep a constant flow of something, anything, to keep the search engines happy.  But on the other hand, I really want to build a compelling online magazine type of site that just does things in its own unique way, I have story ideas but researching and building those article series alone is a time consuming endeavor.

So hopefully this will be a fun and interesting outlet for my rambling thoughts as I go through building the MMXMusicVideos.com site, and if it ever gets big or popular or takes off, it will be fun to look back here at the history.

Our logo version 3.  I’ve gotten mixed feedback, some people love it, others hate the font.  I changed it several times, based on feedback the people who love it win out :-)