Winter Newsletter: Fill & Download for Free

Yeah… I cried about this situation…My son who has high functioning Asberger’s was in 6th grade. The school was trying to make money by having students sell items from a catalog. They had prizes for the students who sold the most items. One of the prizes was a 20 speed very nice bicycle.My son was in love with the bike. He came home blabbering to me a mile a minute about how He was going to win that bike. He had it all planned out and he was so confident he could get enough sales to win that bike. He had a straight path and there was nothing I could say to try and let him down easy in case he didn’t win.I live in Minnesota and this fund raiser was in the winter and the cold air can freeze a person quickly. He walked every where in an 80,000 population area. He went if it was cold, snowing or any other weather. He even visited every house in another town that we were preparing to move to in the spring.The catalog had some cute things in it so I put in a $30 order. I was pretty hopeful he could win also. He had over a thousand dollars order. I was waiting to see how he did. I called the school a few times and got evasive answers. Finally they told me he won a pizza party for his classroom.Finally the day came when we had to bag up all his orders and deliver them. Going through the orders my $30 order was missing…all of it. I complained to the committee that my order was missing They offered to give me my money back … little did I know…The school sent out a newsletter saying such and such had won the bike with $20.00 less than the items my son had sold. It was plain to see that the”committee” didn’t want my son to win … The $30 worth of stuff I ordered, that was deleted intentionally, made my son’s order lower than the “rich” kid that won. I was livid.I went to the teacher showing them how my order had been deleted and my son’s order WAS larger than the boy that won. She said there was nothing that she could do about it …I cried … How does a parent explain to someone who worked so hard going out every evening to sell the stuff? I had never been able to afford a “new” bike for him. How do I explain to him that the school wouldn’t do anything about the problem? He knew they cheated him. He is a genius with numbers …I felt so betrayed - how could a school cheat a student? My son was angry about it for a long time. He never sold another thing for those fund-raisers and I never bought anything again from schools.Of course I did have the last laugh. My son went to college and got several degrees in IT. He graduated with honors. He has a very good job managing many people. You know what? He is a sensitive person and would never lie to or cheat anyone. I am still sad thinking about how a school can lie and smash a kid’s dreams. ;) Pamhawn

It wouldn’t offend me, but it’s a Christmas tree, the lights in the tree do not have to be colored for it to be a Christmas tree.(Source)I’d suggest something like this.

I struggled with this same question as I ran the music recommendations site themusiclobby.com for a few years. Like you, we wrote recommendations of stuff we liked, not reviews of all the latest stuff. Making a music site that catches on is incredibly difficult, and then equally hard to monetize. Ignoring the last part of that sentence, there are a few things you can focus on to help traction.1. This a content driven model. Figure out what content drives eyeballs.As cool as personalized recommendations are, people think they can get that anywhere. Last.fm, Pandora and many others do a decent job at this for a music listener, and even aren't terrible for hardcore fans. In order to get someone to look at your site, you need content to attract them that goes beyond that. Not saying you need to do a ton of stuff, but the successful sites in electronic music have found something like this to continually bring people back. FACTMag has the FACT Mixes, Resident Advisor has the DJ charts. You're going to need things like that to initially get people to the site. From what I know already about the site, I'd say weekly playlists through Spotify are a no brainer. Some ideas:Top 10 listsDJ mixesLabel profiles/historiesExposés into different scenesInterviews with prominent DJ's/musicians: especially if they can use it as a pres opportunity for an album/gigGuides to certain genresColumns by record shop workers that power the content: this could get them more excited about the site and drive their visitors there. Right now, it seems like they wouldn't want to do this because it'll cannibalize sales.2. Be obsessive about social.This was the biggest mistake I made with The Music Lobby. I didn't tweet, create a Facebook page, etc. Frequency is the name of the game here. You need to push out five tweets a day that are super relevant for the brand you're trying to create, and interact immediately with anyone who responds to you or just reaches out. Also, strike up conversations with like-minded music fans and artists. Make sure that content I talked about above is given every chance possible to succeed. Some ideas:Facebook/Twitter Connect for creating accounts. It's faster, and makes it easier for users to share content to social networks.Ask if I want to tweet/Facebook share every recommendation I makeGo to popular music forums and build up a presence. Don't spam. For example, most of my install base for my site came from IGN's music boards or WATMM.3. Optimize for SEO.People are going to be searching for that song they heard last night. Be that resource to make sure they find it with the content people are going to search on e.g. lyrics, samples, track lists, cover art. Make sure all of that content is indexed by Google, and interlink all of that stuff on your site. Look at what is trending on Google Insights for Search and see if you can fill a need on what people are searching for. Remember though that those types of searches are typically in and out, so be sure to put the hard sell on your landing page to create an account without being annoying. Some ideas:One site. Not a .net and a .co.uk. That confuses Google.On every release page, link to similar recommendations in text form. Google can't read those images well.Build topic ontology like Quora that creates great high level pages for Google, but for genres and labels and aliases e.g. I had no idea Head High was a Shed alias until I hovered over the reaction4. Make email marketing actionable.Bleep and Boomkat send out great newsletters, and their goal is easy to decipher. They want you to buy records. Because of that, they can't be as good as your emails can be because their opinion is biased.Develop recommendations by email targeted by people's previous recommendationsDrive calls to action to the site to get feedback on how good the recommendations were so your recommendations get betterEmail some of your most popular content5. Optimize content.You want to make this a great resource for finding new music. So you need to optimize every part of the process to make sure it's not only easy, but accurate. That means fast and reliable areMake a master page for all versions of a release. Right now, my recommendations list is just a list of the vinyl versions of all the CD's I already recommended.Make it take less clicks to do everything. If I'm looking at a list of a ton of releases, make it easy to see I can recommend from that list. Right now, you have a grayed-out icon for that. It took me forever to notice it.Make it possible to remove recommendations you know you don't like.DJ's function on genres. Make sure to categorize recommendations so people know what to expect.Pull in data for Discogs, Last.fm, or review sites so there's textual content on the page.Use Facebook Likes of sync with Last.fm to generate recommendations immediately6. Develop a long-term engagement strategy that fits the profile of your users.Figure out what motivates your audience and build engaging features around that encourage repeat usage and sharing. Lesser minded people will call this gamification, but when people use that term they tend to just jump right into badges and leader boards, which misses the point. It's all about what is going to keep your users hooked into the site and getting more people to the site for you. For Dropbox, that was as easy as rewarding people with more storage if they referred a friend. For Quora, it's upvotes and credits.Some ideas:Reward adding a new release to the site (can't do this currently, it looks like)Create experts in certain genres based on activity7. Be iterative.There's nothing worse than a site with a million features that all have zero engagement. You want to add to the site over time as demand build, not add a bunch of things before you have enough traffic to know what people really want to use. Don't have leader boards until you have... leaders. It sounds basic, but I did this wrong with The Music Lobby, and tons of other sites fall for it too. Some ideas:Remove Disqus commenting until you actually have enough people to comment on recommendations