La Bene Vita

The Business of Writing

I think about business a lot lately, and an article that Storm Machine sent got me thinking about it more. The article was about blogging to make money, and here's a summary:

1. A good blog post turns a STRANGER into a LEADS by attracting new readers interested in the topic (aka, "traffic")
2. A good blog turns LEADS into PROSPECTS by attracting repeat readers.
3. A good product turns PROSPECTS into CUSTOMERS by compelling prospects to buy your product.
And here's the key:
4. A good customer relationship turns CUSTOMERS into REPEAT CUSTOMERS who buy from you over and over.

One major takeaway: Stop trying to earn money just by writing a blog.

Of course, the article was referring to blogs, but let's look at the business of writing a novel. You don't get repeat customers as a novelist unless you write multiple novels. Of course, the highly successful novelists have loyal followings, which validates the chain of conversion model outlined above. But in order to keep making money as a novelist, you have to not only write and sell a successful novel in the first place, but then continue to write and sell successful novels.

That sounds sort of like work to me. Heh.

The chain of conversion applies directly to the business of music lessons. The majority of our customers are repeat customers, because they come back for lessons month after month and continue to pay. We do have occasional one-time customers who buy trial lessons and sampler classes, but that's not our norm. Student retetion is important to our business, and we offer teacher incentives for keeping students. We still lose them. Either it's not fun, or they don't practice, or they'd rather play soccer. In the case of adults, it's hard to get to lessons, because they're always at meetings or out of town on business. We continue to lose customers every week, and we continue to gain new ones who may or may not turn into repeat customers.

Reach 300 students at MTMS   by 12/31/11.
214 and holding steady, mostly because we're closed for the holiday weekend.

Writing:
(1) Blog at MT.com   by the end of Wednesday: No.
(2) 30 minutes of daily freestyle writing: No, but that sounds kinda like a good idea. Wish I'd have thought of it myself.

Count points:
TODAY:
Look, it's my birthday weekend AND Labor Day. What the hell do you want?