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8 Roadblocks and 8 Winning Moves for Recruitment and Retention of High School Band Members

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:44:00 -0400

If you are a high school band director in the U.S., you most likely have had to take an active role in recruiting and retaining students for your band. There are many obstacles and roadblocks that discourage students from joining or remaining in your program. It goes without saying that having a strong feeder program at the elementary and middle school level is critical, and that, as with everything else in life, success is all about building personal relationships with other stakeholders who benefit from the relationship.

Eight Roadblocks

Here are eight roadblocks that I have personally encountered that have prevented or removed students from my high school band program:

1. Band grade brings down their GPA

2. Band is scheduled at the same time as other singleton AP classes

3. Feeder programs are poor quality

4. Feeder programs do not communicate with the HS program regularly

5. I picked drum majors that other students don’t want to be under

6. I held students accountable to a written policy that they didn’t like

7. Parents didn’t like the decisions I made and pulled their kids (or in one case, defamed me publically)

8. The community I taught in did not value the arts and only wants a band to play in the stands at football games

Notice that most of these roadblocks are caused by misperception and ignorance. Part of recruiting and retention is educating the people who support your program on how they can support you. The other major part is creating an environment that makes students feel welcome, comfortable, and successful.

Eight Recruiting and Retention Moves That Work

Here are eight efforts I've made in recruiting and retention that have worked for me. This by far is not an exhaustive list!

1. Having high school students play for the middle and elementary programs

2. Having high school students sit in to play with lower ensembles

3. Having high school students teach lessons at the elementary level

4. Hosting an all-district concert with beginner band up through senior HS – everyone can see the scope and sequence in action

5. Music demonstration days to recruit new players into the elementary program

6. Elementary band plays at one football game in the stands with the HS

7. Community performances by band members at holidays

8. Hosting a band festival/exhibition

Getting high school students involved with the lower grades in multiple ways is a total win-win for many reasons: it develops the teaching and personal skills of the high school students, it creates personal connections to younger students who will one day be in their band, it gives young students role models to emulate, it gets young students excited about being in high school, and so on.

Creating an all-district concert is also a powerful win-win activity: it builds connections between ensembles (especially if you do a combined number), it allows all stakeholders to see how a student will grow in ability and skill throughout the entire band program, and it will draw a big audience.

Another important point in recruitment/retention is that students need to make a personal connection to the band director. Performing ensembles are very personality-driven. If students like the director, that goes a long way to keeping them involved.

Building personal connections between people (including the band staff at all grade levels) is critical to the recruitment and retention of high school band members. Make your band "the place to be" for kids who love to play music.

This article (c) 2010 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

Music Composition - The Ultimate Final Exam

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:50:00 -0400

Throughout my experience as a musician, I have grown through many different kinds of experiences. I began as a child enjoying music performance. In order to remain involved with the kinds of performing groups I enjoyed as a student, I became a music teacher. Gradually over the course of my teaching career, I found myself increasingly interested in teaching music in its own right in addition to enjoying a performance. Eventually, my teaching led me to composing music.

Commonly Held Myths About Music Composition

I, like most people I know, once considered original creative ideas to be hard to come by. Nothing could be further from the truth, whether we are speaking of new inventions, scientific discoveries, new products and services, or new ways of human expression in the performing and fine arts. We as a culture have simply talked and taught ourselves out of it. Consider these commonly held beliefs about music composition specifically:

Great composers are people like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven who are "supremely gifted" and super-human in their abilities
To be a composer, you have to study music for years and become an expert
You have to be completely original and unique to write new music
No one will want to hear music that I write myself because it will "sound amateurish" or sound like something that's already been written
I have to get my music published to be considered a true composer

In our culture, we have over the past 100 years changed from the average person being a music (and dance) performer and composer to a music consumer. The technical traditions from Western Europe combined with the creative style from Africa created Jazz, Rock 'n' Roll, and everything that followed. It used to be that folk music was actually music composed by and sung by "regular folks". Along the way, we left the composing, creating, and performing to the "experts".

How Necessity Got Me Composing

I'm sure my first experiences with composing were not unlike anyone else that has tried to write anything original. You sit there and think, "Something original - but what?" Nothing comes, and anything you do come up with sounds like something you've heard before. You can even pinpoint the source sometimes. In my case, trying to compose concert band music ended up sounding like Francis McBeth.

Back in 2000, a long-time friend of my band program passed away. We wanted to do something special in his memory, so I commissioned a fellow band director who was a budding composer to write an original piece in memoriam. This occurred in June, and I assumed the piece could be written and we would premiere it at the following winter concert in December. The piece was not ready in time. Ok, the spring concert then. All I got from the composer was an eight bar introduction which was less than I had hoped for, both in quantity and content.

I had promised our friend's widow that we would have a piece for him, and nearly half the students who knew him were graduating within the next school year. So, I did the only sensible thing I could - I fired the composer and wrote my own piece!

What I found is that when I had a specific reason to write and a specific subject to write about, the piece practically wrote itself.

As a band director who had been at that point teaching three years, I knew enough about band instrumentation to create playable parts for everyone. Not only that, I was able to customize the parts to the strengths and weaknesses of our ensemble. The end result was a piece called We Remember and when we played it in rehearsal I was pleasantly surprised at how it sounded!

What You Actually DO Need To Know To Compose

Literally anyone can write music. There are a few prerequisites:

You have to be familiar with at least one musical instrument. That could be any instrument, including the voice or using a computer or other electronic device.
You have to understand at least some kind of music or sound notation. In the traditional sense, this means reading music notation, though there are plenty of musicians who compose strictly by letter names, chord symbols, etc. In modern music making, you could also be familiar only with sequencing software and the sound patches and envelopes they employ. In most cases, there is still a basic knowledge of pitch, meter, and rhythm required.
You have to understand the basics of melodic writing. How do melodies flow? What makes a melody sound like a complete musical thought? An understanding of scales and keys can help here.
You have to have some kind of basic form. Even if the form is as simple as one eight bar phrase, music needs to have form in order to make sense to the listener.

You can actually begin composing with just an instrument you know how to play and a basic tonal pattern such as the pentatonic scale. No other knowledge necessary!

Obviously, the more proficient you are on an instrument, the more instruments you have direct experience with, the more you understand music theory and chord structure, the more you understand texture, form, and expressive qualities of music, the more you are able to communicate with what you compose. That being said, even a beginner on an instrument can begin to improvise melodies after only learning a half-octave's worth of notes.

Why Music Composition Is A Final Exam

This coming school year, I am going to be incorporating basic music composition assignments into my performance-based instrumental music classes. Every student is going to have a chance to write some original music, beginning first with simple melody lines and going from there. Music composition really becomes a outcomes-based assessment, because the student has to take everything they know about music, their instrument, and expression and put it all together in a project that can be easily demonstrated by whatever performers the music is written for.

Quite simply put, composing music is the "kitchen sink" of music education.

Although not every student will be the next Mozart, Duke Ellington, Paul McCartney, or Aaron Copland, giving students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of music in this way will improve their performance as a soloist, an ensemble player, and a lover of music.

Because this is a new area of endeavor for me as a teacher, I will be returning to this Music Composition series regularly on my blog throughout. All of the related posts on this topic will be group together under the Music Composition category of my blog.

Part 2 - Managing The Information Stream on the Music Professional Learning Network

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:03:00 -0400

Because of the flexibility of the Music Professional Learning Network website, there are even more ways to filter and handle the content. Yesterday, I created a video and blog entry to take you through the basics. There are even more ways of making use of the MPLN website, which I highlight in this walkthrough video:

Tips on this video:

Use Groups tab to see a list of all groups
In Groups view, click on Get email updates to set email notifications for your groups. You can set it as frequent as every time something changes to weekly digest to as often as never.
Use My Account > My Groups to see all the groups you have joined
Use My Account > My Friends to see the people on your friends list. Use filters to find who you are looking for - I like "alphabetical" by first name.
Use the search field to literally search anything and everything - this may be the shortest way to find what you are looking for.
Don't forget about all the great information and links on the right sidebar!
Another useful tool is the up arrow icon on the wibiya bar at the bottom of the screen. With one click, it returns you to the top of the screen.

As the site continues to be developed, more features and useful ways of navigating will develop. Be sure to join us at the MPLN website. It's free and the information already being shared in the first week is quite dynamic!

Teaching Music To Students With Special Needs

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:30:00 -0400

Students with special needs are being included more and more in the public schools. Teachers often hear statements to the effect that music is a universal language, and music is great for everyone. As a result, students with disabilities are being included in music classes and lessons more often than other areas. Music is seen as an equalizer.Unfortunately music teachers aren’t always prepared, and sometimes a student is not a good fit for a particular class that fits in his or her schedule.

What is the Difference between Music Therapy and Adapted Music Education?

Music educators teach their students about steady beat, rhythms, singing onpitch, vocal technique, how to play instruments, and everything about how to play and perform music. Music therapists address physical,psychological, cognitive, and social goals, among others. Musictherapy is a related service and can be listed on a student’s IEP(Individualized Education Program). Music therapists can provide individual services to students, can provide services for entire classes in schools, and can collaborate with music teachers.

Visit the American Music Therapy Association to learn more about music therapy.

What About Autism?

The rate of autism has exponentially increased in the last 10 years. Autism now impacts approximately 1 in 110 children in America (1 in 70 boys) according to the December 2009 CDC statistics and has been labeled an epidemic by the CDC. Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and it can affect a student’s ability to communicate and interact with others. It is a “spectrum disorder" which means that affects individuals differently and to varying degrees. There is no known single cause for autism, but increased awareness can help families.

Sensory Issues

Students with autism may also have sensory integration issues, meaning that their sensory signals don't get organized into appropriate responses and that they may be over or under responsive in one or all of their sensory systems. We know the five senses, but there are also two others that we do not often think of. The proprioceptive system and the vestibular systems tell us where we are in space and if we are in motion. A disorder in one of these systems may cause a child to spin in order to crave more input or to calm his or her system.

For more information, visit The Sensory Processing Disorder Foundation.

So, Why Music?

As teachers, we have to adapt our methods to match our students’ learning styles. This just might mean a different focus to preparation in order to learn about the student’s strengths and needs, likes and dislikes. For example, if a student with autism is flapping his or her hands a lot in the elementary general music classroom, I would design activities to address that. I might use scarves, more movement, or a stretchy band. If a student has sound sensitivities, I might move him or her away from the speakers and the large drums. Earmuffs and/or ear plugs also work well.

Peer buddies in the upper elementary through high school years work beautifully since there are usually students willing to help out and be a buddy in music class. Some parts might need to be simplified in instrumental or choral music, or a different kind of visual representation might be needed (note names written in the notes or color coded music). Some students might need a colored transparency sheet over their music to help them with the glare from fluorescent lighting or they might need their music printed on a colored paper.

Although modifications may be needed for some students, others will not require any modifications in music class. Music teachers often use a multisensory approach to teaching naturally, are warm and welcoming,and use practice charts and reward systems. Being engaged with the students, making sure that the students understand the concepts you are teaching, and being consistent are all best practices in education for all students. Teaching in an inclusive setting can be very a very rewarding experience. Teaching individual lessons can be as well in many different ways. I have a number of students with disabilities who also have perfect pitch!

People First Language

You may have noticed that I used “people first” language throughout my writing. It is appropriate to say “a student with autism” or a“child with a learning disability”. It is important to remember that a student is a student first, not a disability first. Get to know the students first and you will find teaching success!

Visit this website to learn more about people first language.

Angela M. Guerriero, M.Ed., MA, MT-BC is the Founder and Director of Tempo! Music Therapy Services, an organization dedicated to promoting the emotional and social well-being of individuals, improving their quality of life through the arts. Their goal is to create a positive impact on the lives of children, adults, and families to help them achieve personal growth and self exploration in a creative way. We believe that every individual has an innate musical ability and it is our responsibility to build upon that ability to create positive changes and to help clients reach their goals.

Managing the Information Stream on the Music Professional Learning Network

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:27:00 -0400

The Music Professional Learning Network is just over a week old, and the response has been nothing short of explosive. Over 300 users have registered, over 700 status updates have been generated, and over 100 forum topics have been created!

One of the common questions that new members have had as they grow accustomed to the site is "What's the best way to keep up with all of the great information?" I created the following screencast in order to help new users and everyone keep track of what is turning into an amazing resource for all teachers of music everywhere.

Major points for managing the stream:

After registering, go to My Account > Settings > Notifications and customize your email notifications. Depending upon how often you plan to visit MPLN, you may want more or less email.
Go to your own email client, create an MPLN folder, and create an email filter to direct all incoming emails from noreply@musicpln.org to that folder.
Unless you changed it in the notifications settings, any content you add to the site, whether a status update or a forum topic, will automatically notify you via email any time someone responds to your content.
Almost every list of information on the site has a filter. The main activity stream can be filtered to show only updates, only new members, only forum posts, etc. The forums can be filtered by most last active, most posts, etc.
In the activity stream, you can follow people's status updates by clicking on the favorite button. This is different than the like button and far more useful than the Twitter favorite feature because when you favorite an update, you are actually follow the replies as well as the original message.
Use the Forums tab to see the most recent activity on all Forums and Groups at once. This too is filterable.
Use the Quick Site Links at the top of the right side bar to get to information quickly. These links are also shown in a pop-up menu on the integrated wibiya bar on the bottom of the screen.

Here's a list of tips that were not featured in the walkthrough video!

Use the Groups tab to view content in a single group that you have interest in. This again is filterable.
Use My Account > Groups to see all of the newsgroups you've joined listed in one place. And guess what? It's filterable!
Use My Account > Friends to quickly find people you've friended. I keep this list set to Alphabetical by first name.
POWER TIP: You can search for anything using the search field found at the top of every screen. Why hunt through menus for things?
Don't forget to use the information displayed in the right sidebar. Lots of short cuts there.
There is a fantastically useful Return to the Top of the Screen button on the wibiya bar at the bottom of the screen. It's on the right and looks like an up arrow.

MPLN is a fantastic resource that is only going to improve with time. As Dr. Pisano said in his recent blog post, this is only MPLN version 1.0 - there are a whole list of improvements he shared for version 1.1 and he already has plans for v. 2.0!

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The Music Professional Learning Network

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:12:00 -0400

It's hard to believe that it has been less than a week since the official launch of the Music Professional Learning Network website. In the first five days, membership has grown to nearly 300. That's a hundred more than the projected goal of 200 by October! More importantly, the conversations within the groups' forums are dynamic, detailed, full of expert "in the trenches" advice, and just pure gold.

Most of us are familiar with the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" In the show, a contestant attempts to answer trivia questions of increasing difficulty. They have three "lifelines": phone a friend, ask the audience, and 50-50. So here's my "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" thread from yesterday on MPLN:

Thomas J. West posted an update: 15 hours, 47 minutes ago · updated 10 hours, 5 minutes ago ·

Anyone have any suggestions for beginning #guitar method books? #musedchat #musiced
- David Ahrens · 15 hours, 16 minutes ago ·
  I really like Leavitt’s Modern Method for Guitar – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0876390696/ – It is aggressive, and thorough. No folk songs etc. like many books – all original writing. The version with the DVD-ROM is valuable – especially for individual learners or teachers who aren’t primarily guitar players. I supplement from other sources to provide material that is familiar to the students.
  - Thomas J. West · 14 hours, 37 minutes ago ·
    Thanks! I’ll check it out.
  - Thomas J. West · 14 hours, 29 minutes ago ·
    Wow! The guitar teacher at my school is a Berklee graduate – I’m sure he’d find this book to be a good one. He’s sick of the method book he’s currently using – he might really go for this.
    - Richard McCready · 14 hours, 21 minutes ago ·
      Leavitt’s is really good, by the way.
- Richard McCready · 14 hours, 22 minutes ago ·
  David is spot on with the need to supply supplementary material.. The students thirst for more than is usually provided in any method book, and they will hunt it down. Unfortunately if you don’t put good quality stuff right on front of them, they’ll hunt on the internet and get all sorts of awful tab transcriptions, which are wildly inaccurate, kill their reading skills, and are of dubious legality. I keep several copies of the Hal Leonard ”ultimate Guitar Songbook”, ”Fantastic Guitar Songbook”, ”Definitive Guitar Songbook” etc. in the classroom, and the kids are forever finding fun stuff in there which challenges them and keeps them interested in learning beyond what is in the method book. In our school, we start with the Russ Shipton ”The Complete Guitar Player” and then move on to the William Bay & Mike Christiansen ”Mastering the Guitar” series, but we just use those as a ready framework, and try to go beyond that with the supplementary material.
  - Thomas J. West · 13 hours, 30 minutes ago ·
    Thanks, Richard. I am just beginning my foray into guitar playing/teaching. The market’s just WAY too big for me to ignore at this point.
- Kevin Coyne · 13 hours, 3 minutes ago ·
  I’ve been using Jerry Snyder’s guitar method for years with my high school groups. I think it’s fantastic. Tons of material, including prepared homework sheets, quizzes, tests, and supplementary pieces. There’s also an ensemble book and make sure to get the teacher’s manual.. I’ve been playing guitar professionally for years and this is the best method book that I’ve found.
  http://www.amazon.com/Jerry-Snyders-Guitar-School-Method/dp/0882849026/ref:/d_sim_b_11
  
  Mel Bay is a huge publisher of guitar books too. They have a lot of resources as well but I’m not as familiar with them.
  - Thomas J. West · 12 hours, 57 minutes ago ·
    The Mel Bay series is the one I currently use with my students simply because it’s the one that the guitar teacher at my school uses with class guitar. In general I like the pedagogical approach, but the folk songs in it are not interesting to students. http://astore.amazon.com/thjwemu-20/detail/0786613696
    - Richard McCready · 11 hours, 32 minutes ago ·
      The Mel Bay I use is slightly different, and I like its use of both tab and standard notation. Some pieces are in tab, some are in standard, and some are in both, so it teaches several methods of reading. The original compositions in there are not too unpleasant at all. I really have no problem with hearing my kids twang their way through them.
      
      http://www.amazon.com/Mel-Bay-Mastering-Guitar-Book/dp/0786605642
      
      There are 7 books in the no-so-humbly-named Hal Leonard Guitar Songbook series, as far as I know – Phenomenal, Super, Incredible, Fantastic, Ultimate, Definitive, and Greatest.
      
      http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guitar-Songbook-Collection/dp/1423421086/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279842826&sr=1-1
- Yoon Soo Lim · 10 hours, 5 minutes ago ·
  Hi Tom,
  
  There are several books I use for my MS guitar students:
  
  There are many good texts but I use Hands-on Training : First-Year Guitar by Nancy Lee Marsters & Guitar Expressions (Student ed): Bill Purse, ed. They are both excellent texts with great supplemental CDs. Sometimes, I get materials from J. Snyder or Mel Bay books as mentioned!
  
  Has anyone used Scott Tennant’s Pumping Nylon for classes?

As you can see, I posted one simple question at the top and within 5 hours had a half-dozen or more methods to check out, including some tips on how to use them in the classroom and what to use to supplement tham! I also got a few replies from Twitter, as I used the MPLN engine to post the same comment directly to my Twitter stream. MPLN member Nicholas Cowall sent me these lists of methods to choose from:

RT @NicholasCowall: @thomasjwest http://bit.ly/ainZqT and http://bit.ly/bearud guitar method lists #mpln

Fantastic! It's phone a friend and ask the audience all in one, except these audience members are all practicing music teachers or pre-service music education students!

In addition to asking questions like this, MPLN is turning into the place where innovators in the profession are meeting to flesh out the future potentials of online music learning. There are several forums where collaborative efforts to move music education into the 21st century are well under way. What an exciting thing to be a part of!

Whether you are a professional music educator, a private music studio teacher, a college music professor, a music education student, a regular education professional with an interest in integrating music into your classroom, or just love to learn about music, the MPLN is a powerful new resource that is going to keep growing. Eegad, we're not even to the school year yet here in the U.S. - imagine what the membership count and conversations are going to be like then!

Not Just for Gleeks: 10 Proven Ways That Music Makes You Smarter

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:05:00 -0400

You probably thought your parents’ insistence that you plunk away on the piano keys day after day was just for torture, didn’t you? But in fact, they were on to something you didn’t yet realize: music — especially music training — can actually improve your memory and other brain functions and learning skills. Your parents knew you weren’t going to sell out Carnegie Hall, but you should be grateful for all the college preparation they paid for, well before those SAT classes. Here are 10 ways music makes you smarter.

It improves hearing: Those who learn to play instruments have improved hearing "for all kinds of sounds, including speech," according to LiveScience.com. That new depth of hearing means that musicians are able to pick up on accents, speech patterns and rhythm, and even lower noise levels that other people may find difficult to hear.
Music training helps build neural connections: As children’s brains are still developing, musical training can help create strong neural connections, which improve abstract and spatial reasoning skills.
Musical training leads to better memory: Those who recite and repeat music often strengthen the connections and networks that improve memory of other subjects, thoughts, and lessons, too.
Musicians might be able to learn foreign languages faster: Foreign languages like Mandarin that rely on different pitches and tones to relate different meanings are most easily picked up by people who have at least six years of experience learning a musical instrument, according to a study conducted by Northwestern University researchers.
The Mozart Effect: In a study explained by the University of Texas, college students who were exposed to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos, K448, experienced an increase in spatial IQ, while students who were exposed to complete silence, dance music, short story readings, or a relaxation tape had no rise in spatial IQ.
Listening to "personally enjoyable" music also has positive effects: You may not have to listen to Mozart to reap positive benefits. Listening to any music that you personally enjoy can improve cognition, scientists found in a 2006 study.
Musical training can help dyslexic students perform better in school: Dyslexic children find it difficult to separate sounds — including voices — when a room gets too noisy. But musical training helps brains process the different sounds without having to make an extra effort. Therefore, dyslexic students would be better able to concentrate and listen to the teacher if they practiced music, even if they were plagued by distractions.
Music training leads to faster auditory development in young children: Young children — from preschool age to 10 years old — develop auditory responses and recognition skills faster than those who have no such training, putting them at the same level as children a year or two older.
Music can "tune" the brainstem: The brainstem is the part of the brain that controls automatic functions like breathing and your heartbeat, and music can actually change the way it functions. Scientists previously thought that music only affected the cerebral cortex, where reasoning and language are developed.
Music therapy helps stroke patients recover: Stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak benefit from musical therapy that challenges them to sing words first. In some instances, Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug found that patients with lesions on the side of the brain associated with language "could sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty" after music therapy.

About the author

This blog article originally appeared on July 20th, 2010 as written by the staff of Accredited Online Colleges dot Com. In addition to interesting blog articles, Accredited Online Colleges dot Com has gathered in-depth information on top-ranked accredited online colleges and created a database search that helps you find a degree program that meets your degree level, category and subject of interest. You can also search between nationally and regionally accredited colleges and learn about the accrediting agencies that fall under these two categories.

Ways of Attracting Attention to Your Website

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:36:00 -0400

My website has been in existence about six years. For the first three, it was simply a home for my band compositions. Three summers ago, I shifted focus and began writing articles about how modern neurology relates to music learning and sharing my own experience with music pedagogy and practice tips. Having little or no money to spend on advertising, I looked for as many free ways to generate web traffic to my page as possible.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Works, But...

When I first started promoting another money-making opportunity on the web back in 2004, I used Google AdWords to drive traffic to that website. It was extremely effective at doing what it is designed to do - bring visitors from all over the world (or any geographic area you target) to your website. The problem with that is, unless the webpage you are sending them to has a sure-fire way of converting those visits into money in your pocket, you are literally throwing hundreds of dollars away.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) works so well because people search Google for keywords related specifically to your niche (specialized market). People interested in what your webpage is about come directly to you. Depending upon the goals you have for the webpage you are driving traffic to, you may or may not want to invest the money. You can easily burn through $50 USD in just a few hours if you do not limit the settings on your ads.

PPC is the "quick-and-easy" way to get people to look at your website, but it also has its own learning curve. There is terminology to learn (like impressions, CPC, CPM, CTR, and more) and there is a strategy, a science, and an art to choosing your ad text and the keywords you advertise on in order to get the most amount of traffic for the least amount of money spent. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts and advertising professionals literally spend hours analyzing the effectiveness of different combinations of ads, keywords, etc.

Long story short, PPC will work for you, but not without a regular budget and time invested in optimizing your ad results.

Getting Seen Through Article Writing

Without spending a ton on advertising, the quickest way to get people checking out your website is to start writing about what you are passionate about. You don't have to be an "expert" on anything (although if you write enough articles around a certain topic, you can start to build an online reputation as one). Just write about what you are interested in.

Getting exposure at the beginning is the hardest part. One of the first things I did that got me some serious looks was visitng BlogCarnival.Com and submitting my articles to blog carnivals that had a theme or topic related to mine. It was actually through blog carnivals that I started crossing paths with some music educators who were writing about the same things I was writing about. More on that later.

Depending upon your niche, you may also find success with posting at Digg. As a teacher and an "academic musician" rather than a "popular musician", I found few people were looking for what I was talking about there.

You can also submit articles to article ezines and search engines, but I find that practice to be a bit like giving your work away for free in hopes that people click on the "About the Author" link instead of connecting with real people.

For me, article writing led to writing reviews and referrals, which has garnered some interest from many music-related products and services. Those referrals have led to more refferals, and so on.

Social Networking - The True Pot of Gold

You can't get very far in American society today without hearing about Facebook and Twitter, and there's a good reason for that. Both have made it incredibly easy to connect and share content with hundreds, nay thousands of like-minded people - all for free.

I finally joined Facebook in January of 2009 after being talked into it following a college 20 year reunion. I was amazed at how quickly people found me and how I reconnected with people from corners of my life that had transpired 20 years ago! I was also pleasantly surprised that sharing content from my website with these friends and family awarded me with a nice bump in website traffic. It took me a while to figure out how to create a successful and active Facebook Group, but now that I have, every blog post I make or review I write immediately spikes my site traffic for a short time.

The real holy grail in all of social networking, however, has been Twitter. On the surface, Twitter appears to be a phenominal waste of time, and it certainly can be. However, Twitter makes it extremely easy to find and connect with people who are talking about the same things you are talking about. It also has amazing, if sometimes unstable, third party application support. The sheer amount of "twitter tools" avaiable make Twitter extremely flexible. I joined Twitter in August of 2009, and now nearly a year later I am approaching 1000 followers and have connected with some of the most dynamic and active people in my profession.

Twitter is really the social media "crossroads." It's the one place online where you can easily connect with anyone in any industry and learn from them. It is one of the major professional learning tools of the 21st century.

Growing a website was never easier than opening a Twitter account and begin chatting. In the beginning, I used a tweet scheduler to automatically send music quotes, practice tips, and links to my website. This started attracting music educationally minded people to me, but it wasn't until I started having conversations with those musicians that the power of online learning began to take off. Twitter has really taken my own professional development (and my website traffic) into an upward spiral. It took me about a month to get accustomed to the way Twitter works (as I wrote about in this blog post) and it was well worth the learning curve.

The Key to Success in Building a Website: Building Relationships

In my days as a Network Marketer, I learned a lot about direct marketing and how advertising really works. A typical return on investment for traditional indirect marketing (advertising to the general public, or to a targeted segment of the public) is 1 percent - for every 100 views of your ad, you will get one person interested. Direct marketing (selling to people who know you personally and trust you) has a much higher return - somewhere in the 10 percent range. Coca Cola would absolutely love to directly market to you. Actually, Burger King got called on the carpet for breach of ethics by directly marketing to peasant women in Romania, Greenland, Thailand, and other locations to taste test their burger. The taste tests were made into a commercial campaign called Whopper Virgins.

While the application of direct marketing in this manner brings several questionable ethical issues to the forefront (and more free advertising for Burger King in the process), their advertising model is still based on the effective direct marketing model. As my mentors in direct marketing used to say to me: Build People - People will Build Your Business.

By attracting like-minded people to your website through social networking, you will be presented opportunities to write, share, review, suggest, and collaborate in ways that you could never think of yourself. I quite literally have a potential "to-do" list for my website that is never exhausted. New things pop in all the time, and all the while the focus of the site, while remaining primarily on music learning, has shifted in the past three years from being about neurology applied to music and practice tips to joining a growing number of professional and non-professional music teachers in exploring what music technology can do to bring creativity back into every classroom.

35 Powerful Ways to Get Noticed

This blog article you are reading now was inspired to be written after reading this article that came across the Webs.Com Facebook group a few days ago. It is a list of ways to get your website seen by people. I am happy to report that through my own trial-and-error and observation of successful private websites, I have done or continue to do 21 of these 35 items, and I have plans to do another 5 of them in the near future. If you notice, nearly all of these items are about building relationships with real people, not just gimmicky ways of getting attention (alright, sponsoring a contest is gimmicky, but it apparently works - I've tried offering incentives for my webcam lessons service - didn't work).

Connecting with real people online is the way to grow a website. One of the most powerful tips that this article didn't mention is maintaining a blogroll and links page. Websites get higher rankings in search engines the more websites are linked into yours and vice versa. Collecting useful links that pertain to your site's niche and trading links with other website owners is a very effective way to grow your web traffic. There are link exchanges like this one that can automate the process of collecting links to a certain extent, but again, you are not building relationships this way. Also, these link exchanges tend to create for you monstrous link pages that are not very useful to anyone. Quality over quantity wins every time.

If you have something to share with the world that is worth sharing, promoting a website is a great way for anyone to become a publisher. It's also a great way to meet fantastic people who have similar interests. Good luck with your site, and if you have any questions about how to make something happen, contact me. I can share with you what I've learned from the School of Hard Knocks.

A Fantastic Artcle on the Brain and Music Learning

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:03:00 -0400

Over the three years that my website has been publishing articles, I have written many special topics on music learning and how modern neurology is providing powerful information on the way we master a musical instrument. I have also done more than one article on mental rehearsal, when one visualizes the motions of performing a piece of music on an instrument in the mind's eye.

Just a few days ago, the very excellent iSchoolBand Blog published a guest article by Michael D Griffin entitled How to Learn Music Properly. In his article, Griffin draws many of the same conclusions that I have discovered in my own personal research of modern neurology and how it affects music learning. I agree that most performing music programs never teach their students how to practice or how to think meta-cognitively.

As science begins to understand how the brain functions with new scanning technologies, we as music educators need to pay attention and apply those findings.

I highly recommend this article. Be sure to give it your attention.

A Phone Call with Janet Horvath of Playing Less Hurt

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:01:00 -0400

It's amazing to me how my attitude stacks the deck in my favor and seredipity is the result. Back at the end of April, Hal Leonard Books was promoting the newest version of Janet Horvath's monumental book Playing (less) Hurt. They had a little contest on their Facebook page to win a free consultation with Janet. The contest was "Tell us your best 'Whoops! I shouldn't have done that' story." My story was an embarrasing teaching moment where I unwittingly embarrassed one of my students and had to do a lot of backpedaling.

I won a phone consultation with Janet and spoke with her last night for about 30 minutes. It was a great exchange of information. I myself have had my own experiences as a performer and as an instructor with repetitive use injuries, especially in the marching band and drum corps arena. I shared some of those stories with her, and her current work is to delve more deeply into the playing injuries that result as a unique part of the band world. She said surprisingly (or perhaps not), that hearing problems are often the result of marching band and drum corps work. Not just hearing loss, either - tinnitus (ringing in the ears) can become a chronic condition that keeps musicians awake at night!

Janet's career as a musician's health activist began with her own injury early in her performing career. As a professional performer, she thought her life was over. Like many performers, her sense of self-worth and value was identified with her ability to play her instrument. At the time, music performance-related injuries were not taken seriously. Music was all "fun and games" and the rigors of playing in a professional orchestra were not understood (some would say that they still aren't). No one really thought of performing as a musician as an athletic endeavor. As anyone who has ever been through a marathon preparation period for a musical performance will tell you, muscle fatigue, tension, and strain are a common occurence.

Janet spends a significant part of her time presenting clinics on the body of work she has collected in her book, and Hal Leonard is in the midst of trying to spread her work to the U.S. scholastic band industry, among others. Her book has received praise from the academic, performing, and medical communities as "...impressive research and work."

At the end of the conversation, I agreed to purchase her book and give it a read. When I am finished, Janet has agreed to grant me an interview which will be hosted on this special web page. I plan to have this interview completed before the end of August.