How cool is this? Click image for source.
Isn’t it strange how things come around?
About two days ago, after moving house (again – permanently, this time) I put my home studio back together again. It’s nothing to shout about, just a keyboard, mic and acoustic guitars plugged into a laptop, but I can honestly say I’m at my happiest sitting on the floor plugging bits of hardware together in cruel and unusual ways. It’s probably a hangover from my days as an only child (yes, it shows, doesn’t it?) spending hours engrossed in Lego Technic sets. The similarly minded among you may remember the fork lift truck, the motorbike with sidecar, and, the apogee of technic, the car chassis with differential steering, adjustable seats, gears and suspension.
I digress. So, after a few false starts the studio is back up and running. Press a key on the keyboard and you get a thunderous noise coming from the monitors. And once you stop the feedback, you get a nice noise coming from them.
It’s strange, then, that three music-related things happen over the next couple of days. To wit:
- I discover there’s a Last FM plugin for Media Portal, the open-source media centre software that my media PC is now running. This means I can access virtually any track I want online through my Media Portal-enabled media PC. It’s something I never knew was lurking there. It means I can play my own music back to myself if I want to totally trip out on my own ego (or you can listen to the FIR podcast where it made a cameo appearance under my old Friendly Ghost moniker a couple of years back).
- I take delivery of Philip Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, because I’ve heard about it recently and find insights into the minds of such people fascinating. One of these days I’ll get the Crumb documentary for the same reason.*
- I meet up with someone who might have a use for the music, if simply just for podcast duties. This is all part of what I’m trying to do right now as a freelancer – get out, meet people, have a chat and see whether we can do business together. It’s not all copywriting. I still ‘do’ social media as well. And, it seems, I’m about to ‘do’ music as well as well.
See what I mean? I feel a ‘musicy’ episode coming on.
Given that this blog really should be about copywriting with a smattering of social meeja thrown in (and, it seems, me tripping out on my own ego, in this post at least), I should add that I recently discovered I’m the top hit for social media copywriter on Google (I’ve set up a Google Adwords account for that term too, just so I can get to grips with Adwords a bit more).
This astonishes me, but moreover, gives me a way to find out truly how much this blog is now worth. I need to find out a) how many times that search term is used and b) how much it would cost for me to appear top every time it is used.
But, seeing as I’m still getting to grips with Adwords I’m not absolutely sure how I would find either of those things out.
Any ideas?
* In case you think I’m being a bit high-brow here, I also bought the entire Star Trek movie set.
Unless otherwise stated, everything Brendan says on this site is his own opinion. So there.
Glad you’re all moved and settled fella!
Would you believe it, I actually had that Lego car back in the day. In fact it’s probably still in my parents’ attic, all the pieces neatly filed away in trays. OCD, much?
As for Adwords, go through the process to set up a campaign and ad group featuring your chosen keywords (and other relevant terms recommended by the system), then put in an imaginary budget – it will give you an estimated volume of traffic for your terms and average bids. Assume you have Analystics set up already?
Hours and hours of statistical-based fun!
That is a bit OCD. Although that was part of the fun, I guess.
Interesting idea to try the imaginary budget. I don’t have analytics set up because this blog’s hosted on WordPress, you can’t do that on a WordPress-hosted blog (why did I just say the same thing twice but using different words?)
You should sell that car on ebay. You’d get a pretty penny for it, I’ll bet. One day I’m going to ‘do’ a Millennium Falcon, that’ll show ‘em.
Here you go:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180380307230
If I were still 9, I’d buy it. But then I wouldn’t have the money. I think I’m too old to buy it now. Or am I…?