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One way our family stays close is through the use of what we call "Fun Family Friday" (Fun Friday for short). Here's the gist of what we do on Fridays... and the point is to do them TOGETHER ;-)

1 - Watch a movie.
2 - Make either ice-cream, pizza, popcorn or all of the above.
3 - Play a board game.

Now, there are six of us, so things can get a little crazy in our house. We're not exactly The Cleavers. Well... maybe we are... but with warped senses of humor and an ever increasing number of house pets. Anyway, another point is to have fun. Our kids are home-schooled, so we are around each other a lot. It can be frustrating, but you would be surprized to find out how much you can stand of each other. People say to me that they wouldn't want to be in our shoes, but I love my family. I wouldn't want to be away from them like I used to. We just try to mix it up a little bit. Make Fridays different than the rest of the week. Hey, Fun Friday kind of influenced us to get a stove-top popcorn maker, a pizza maker, a Mickey Mouse ice-cream maker, a drink fountain and a s'mores maker! Again, the point is to have fun and spend time with each other. I've been told that they grow up fast, so we're learning to enjoy the early years before they're gone. Do the same ;-)

Labels: Family, Tips

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Posted by Charlie on Thursday, December 28, 2006

Ok, you are graphics illiterate and you have a huge image that you need to reduce or trimmed down to a more manageable size for use on your web page. You guys are lucky, 'cause good ol' Charlie has been a Graphic Artist for years and knows lots about this stuff! So here's what you'll need... The digital image you want to reduce or trim, in one of the following formats: BMP, JPG, GIF, TIF or PNG. Microsoft Paint (Which you should already have because it comes with Windows). A basic knowledge of Windows.

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To Reduce:
1) Open up MSPaint by clicking on START, ALL PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES then PAINT.
2) While in MSPaint, click FILE then OPEN. A dialog box will appear allowing you to look through your computer and find the image file you want to modify. Once you find it, select it and click OPEN. It may not fit the screen and therefore look something like this:


3) Now click on IMAGE then STRETCH/SKEW. We are going to type in the number 10 for HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL and click OK. Your image will now be reduced to 10%. You may have to try different values before you get your image to the size you want it, but the good thing is that you can click on EDIT then UNDO if you mess up!


4) Save your image. Click on FILE then SAVE AS. SAVE AS will give you the choice of renaming your image so that you don't overwrite the original. I will usually name it something slightly different... for example, I might rename MY PHOTO.JPG to become MY PHOTO 2.JPG.

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To Trim (AKA. Crop)
(Follow previous steps 1 through 2)
3) Click the SELECTION TOOL. It looks like this:
With the SELECTION TOOL click and drag a box around the part of the image that you want to keep:

4) Click on EDIT then COPY.
5) Click on FILE then NEW. (You will be prompted to save your image now... DO NOT save at this point.)
6) After the new, blank page appears, click EDIT then PASTE. Now only the part of the image that was in the box that you drew, will be "Pasted" into the new file!
7) Save your image. Click on FILE then SAVE AS. Name your file with a different name and you're done!

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Tip:
If your image is a JPG, you don't want to OPEN then SAVE more than one or two times. JPGs tend to lose quality the more you modify them.

There are many other ways of doing this, but for someone who doesn't have the extra money to spend on Photoshop or any of the other expensive programs, this way is a snap and it's perfect for web page quality.

Labels: Tips

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Posted by Charlie on Saturday, December 16, 2006

So, how do you get people to come to your web site? There are a few things to do to get your web site ranked a little higher, which basically means getting more people to visit your site.

Link / Banner Exchange - Exchange link text or banners with other web sites. RELEVANT ONES! No one is going to click on your Christian Music Banner on a completely unrelated web site; but, they might click on your Christian Music Banner on another Christian or Music related site. Use your favorite search engine to find pages that do this. You give them a banner to display on their site... they give you a banner to display on your site. It's pretty simple once you get the hang of it. A couple that I use are ultimatetopsites.com and fishthe.net/top1000. You can also email someone with a related web site and ask to exchange links. People email me requests all the time.

Message Boards / Blogs - Join message boards... Start a blog... Comment on blogs... once again... RELEVANT ONES! And be sincere. I don't know too many people that like SPAM. For example, don't sign up to every message board possible and post things like, "Buy Our New CD... On Tour Now!... Come to Our Web Site... etc." Instead, actually read through older posts. Find out what people are talking about and, if you have real things to add, post something. Here's the great thing about this... most message boards allow you to put a signature to all your posts. That's where you put the URL to your site and maybe your mission statement. Before you know it, you have dozens of real links back to your page. Here is what I usually attach to my signatures:


People will click on that! And they'll respect you for not SPAM-ing. And the same goes for blogs. Read through blogs that you are interested in and that relate to your site in some way. Although, usually when you comment on someone's blog, you don't leave a signature, but you can simply put your URL. It's not saying, "Hey Come to My Site!... etc." but it lets people know where (on the web) you are.

Linking to Other Sites - How does linking to other people's site get people to come to my site? One way is like this: Tracking. I use a couple of different tracking tools on my web site. One is extremetracking.com. What happens is, when you use a tracking tool, you want to know how people are getting to your site. The tracking tool will show the site that linked someone to your site. For example, I login at extremetracking.com and look up the referrers that link to my web site today. I'll get a list (sort of) like this:


These are sites that link to my site and where my visitors came from today. If I don't recognize one, I'll click it! I have found a few web sites who have simply linked to me without me even knowing. That's (kind of) how it works. They can also be used to tell you what search term someone used to get to your site, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly averages of how many people usually visit your site, what state and town they live in and much more. So if I've confused you on this one, just remember this... Link to relevant sites and don't worry about the details!

MySpace.com - Yes, MySpace. It's not just for teeny-boppers, but tons of bands, solo artists and comedians use it. It is a great way to build a fan base. We've just started using it in the beginning of 2006 and we've made a couple of potential contacts for getting gigs and a couple of hundred "fans". And, I know that not everyone who is your MySpace friend is going to buy your albums or go to all of your concerts, but some will. And one more time... make friends with relevant MySpacers. We try not to connect with cecular bands or people who have a lot of @#&*%$@ on their MySpace page (if you know what I mean).

WHAT DOES NOT WORK:

Traffic Exchange Sites - In my experience with these kind of sites, there are very few "real" sites on the traffic exchange. It basically works like this: You "surf" as many sites as you can and accumulate credits for each site you visit. Your credits are then cashed in to get people to visit your site. It's mostly people looking to increase their hit counters and people who don't care about what sites they are surfing. Yes, I got tons of new "hits" to our site, but this method has never had any real impact on our web presence.

** Traffic exchanges for blogs tend to work quite a bit better though. People who are surfing blogs are actually looking for good things to read about since blogs are generally updated frequently. Most blog traffic exchange web sites will not accept SPAM sites and will only accept your site if it is a blog. We happen to have a blog within our site so it works for us!

SPAM!! - This is how I deal with SPAM, and if I deal with it this way, you can bet that many, many more people do the same thing: If I get any kind of SPAM in my inbox or as a comment, I DELETE IT! That's pretty much it :-)

You can check your web site's ranking by visiting widexl.com or marketleap.com. I've seen our site's ranking go from a range of about 0-10 to a range of about 800-1400 in a few months after applying these few things... and yes, it will take time, but it's worth it. Remember to keep the term "Targeted Marketing" in mind when getting the word out. It's much more effective. And good content, keywords and updating your web site regularly won't hurt either! Yes, there are other methods, and one method alone won't really work that well, but the combination of all of these will work great. And it all depends on how hard you try at all of these methods which will determine it's effectivness.

Charlie

Labels: Tips

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Posted by Charlie on Thursday, September 14, 2006

(Note, I am nowhere near being an expert on this subject, but I though it would be a good idea to share my own knowledge on it)

I've noticed that this is a subject that many new Christian Artists want to find out about, so I figured that I'll share my own experiences with this subject. I am still learning, and know that there is a lot more that I still have to learn about this, but there are also some things that I have learned so far that may be valuable information to someone! I'll probably break this discussion up into a few entries.

How?
The number one thing that I have always wondered is how. How do you get signed? Well, from what I have learned, this might not even be the road that you want to pursue as a Christian Artist. But don't let that discourage you. I have heard from very credible sources that there are artists that are signed to record labels that don't make as much money as some independent artists. I won't even try to get into the details of that right now. But what I do want to get into is how to start a music ministry / business.

Pick up the phone book!
This is the number one answer I keep getting. The number two answer is Get referrals. The bottom line is that you have to do a lot of work for yourself. Luckily, I have Heather to do the "cold calls". She's pretty good at it. And, to tell you the truth, we've just started getting a good amount of bookings this year because of cold calls. For years we've expected people to come knocking on our door asking us to come and sing and pay us lots of money to sing for them. It just doesn't happen that way. We've learned that the hard way.

As for referrals... ask people, friends, pastors, etc. A church is more willing to have you come and share your music with them by way of a referral from someone that they know rather than having no connection to you at all. For example, the first referrals that we got were from our pastor. We asked him for the names and phone numbers of churches that he knew or had previously preached at before. He gave us a list of about thirty churches. This was a great start for us! If we booked half of them, we're ahead of where we were just last year. Then you build your referral list. For every new place that you sing at, ask for at least one referral. Eventually you'll have many times more contacts than you ever have had. It will take time though. And like I said, we're just starting out ourselve. We haven't even reached that point yet.

Don't waste time.
What I'm going to leave off with today is, don't waste years waiting for people to come knocking at your door. Go out and knock on their doors. We have been waiting around for about fifteen years, doing aproximitely three or four gigs a year. That's no where near where we want to be with our music. I know it sounds hard, but like I said, you probably will have to build the ministry yourself at first. But eventually you'll get heard, and as someone once told me, build it and they will come! I'm just starting to believe that now.

Charlie

Labels: Music, Tips

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Posted by Charlie on Sunday, May 07, 2006