Top of the list!

Okay, in truth it’s just a list of business and theatrical blogs put together by Ken Davenport , but right now I am at the top of that list. I am pretty sure he just puts new people at the top of the list, so I plan on riding this high for as long as it lasts. Ken’s blog is a pretty big deal in the producing world, and I have been trying to get more traffic to my blog. My numbers go up and down, depending on what I write and where I post it.

Ken just asked that I add him to my blog role, which I did. The test will be to see if traffic picks up. In the first month of the blog I averaged 113 hits per week, and now I average 139 per week. My goal is to have it reach around 300 per week in one year.

We will see if I can keep this up and if people are still interested. Writing a blog is NOT as easy as I thought it was going to be. Fist off, you have to have enough things to write about, which is why I have Ask My Friends Wednesdays so that I can take one day off, but even then I have to line people up and make sure there is good content for them to write about. Then I have to make sure I write the night before so that I can send it off to Clayton, my godsend who edits these blogs. Go back to the first week, and you can see why I need someone to edit. I enjoy sharing my thoughts and hope you all enjoy reading them. I have gotten some really nice notes about the blog and hope to keep it up.

That said, I love writing the blog and encourage others to do the same. Some of my friends have better ideas and things to talk about, and I try to get them to write a blog. Pick a topic and just go. If you do start a blog, let me know and let’s compare how we do it, and who knows...maybe I can put you on my blog role.

Engaging Bloggers

My blog is a small blog with 11 followers and about 29 readers per day. Not too bad for starting less than four months ago. Today I received a press release and invite from Fire! New Play Festival 2009. They invited me and, I’m sure, hundreds of other bloggers to be part of a conference call with the Directors and Playwrights of their festival.

I wouldn’t normally have written about it, but I thought the idea of engaging bloggers to market for you I thought was great. For the fee of a conference call, they can get who knows how many bloggers to write about their festival for free. What a great way to get the word out. True, you would have less control, but you'll reach a whole new group of people who might not ever have heard about you or your company.

I have copied and pasted a little bit of information from their press release since I can’t participate in the conference call, but way to go!

WHAT: Fire! New Play Festival 2009

WHEN: August 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, and 20th @ 7:30pm; $5 Suggested Donation

WHERE: Freedom Train Productions
138 South Oxford Street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Brooklyn, NY: On August 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, and 20th @ 7:30pm, Freedom Train Productions will open Fire! New Play Festival 2009, three weeks of political theatre featuring black queer protagonists. All staged reading performances will take place at 138 South Oxford Street in Fort Greene Brooklyn. A StoryCorps interview with a resident playwright of Freedom Train Productions will be played at 7pm, a half hour before the start of every show. There is a $5 suggested donation.

Google Toolbox

I love Google. I have found so many useful and free things on there. I talked about Google Analytics a while back, and today I will share another favorite, Google Alerts. Google Alerts will send you updates of anything you want as they happen on the World Wide Web.

If there is a project I am interested in, I “google” it. I have alerts tagged on myself, my employer, theatres, and things I am interested in. I have chosen to get the once-a-week option, so once every a week I get a report on my name. Who knew there was a promising high school athlete with the same name? When he makes the news, I get updates. When I start to make the news, the updates will be about me. But my blog and twitter accounts show up every week. If someone else blogs about me, it shows up too.

In the age of the Internet, there is no excuse for not knowing what information is out there on you. I was speaking with a writer last week about a show he is producing. He thought he had an original name for the musical about an assisted living community. Well, when I “googled” it, I found a dozen such communities with that exact name. I was surprised to hear him say he never looked up the name online.

Have you “googled” your name lately?