The journey continues...

I had one free website that I especially liked using because it was reasonably simple to edit. I uploaded a bunch of photos, and some of my witty quips (along with links to my music) and I guess at that time I would have called it my "Home Page". In a couple months, I was getting like 300 hits a day, but still had not sold CD number 1.

After doing some soul-searching, I decided to put my music aside and develop the free website and see where it would lead. After all, I had no investment other than my time. I no longer based the site around my music, just the fun and funny stuff. I joined a couple affiliate programs to maybe make a dollar or two; One was a company that gave away free websites and paid a dollar for every website that was downloaded by a US visitor. The other was a company that (surprisingly enough) gave away free websites. They paid a dollar for each website that someone built by your referral. It was very easy to do, I just copied and pasted the short bit of script code on several of my pages. Some of the code displayed banners and some of the code would be just a text link.

At the end of my 6th month having this free website, I made my first official internet money. It's funny now, but I have never been so excited about making 7 dollars. There is strange guilty feeling about making money anonymously. And though it was only 7 dollars, I could see the potential for exponential growth. I pictured myself like the people on the infomercials that you know are lying through their teeth claiming to $6000 a week working from their home. I now didn't feel so empty for deserting my music. All for 7 dollars...

So What...

Being completely new to the computer, I spent the next year building (or trying to build) a website in every free location I could find to promote my songwriting. I was amazed at the vast amount of places that you can build a pretty cool website easily. I learned a great deal about editing HTML and photo cropping and compression. I now had like 100 websites, but for what? Well... it did absolutely nothing to promote my songwriting except I had quite a following in Belgium for some reason.

So now with 2 years spent on promotion (and approximately 20 years in development), I came to a harsh realization; my singing sucks. Now I still feel my songwriting skills were ok, but unless a producer has a flat tire in front of my house and needs to use the phone while I'm barbecuing briscuit, I'm screwed.

My dream as a songwriter was to be a guy that would be getting the paper dressed in a robe holding a coffee mug while all my neighbors were leaving for work. I wanted to get a whole bunch of little royalty checks that would be residules from some obscure radio station played one of my songs. I would say to someone when one of my songs came on; "I wrote that song", and they would go "yeah right.." But I would have the last laugh when the neighbors would drive by and wonder "what does that guy do?"

But just like the junkman on the garbage route, the skills I learned on the journey would turn out to come in quite handy. My residual checks don't come from the record companies, but I'm not far off...