JD & I had a long cyber-board meeting last night to discuss the promotion of the station.

We feel we have all the peices in place right now to start trying to take the station to a new level. We will continue to have to operate on a shoe-string budget, but we've decided on a few things that will help.

PART ONE:

I have to say after spending about two hours checking out Myspace yesterday I realized that we are really missing the boat there.

MzHartz was kind enough to set up a homepage for us and we really never did anything with it.

I always assumed myspace was nothing more than a teeny bopper place to meet and get molested by older guys saying they were teeny boppers too.

In reality it is a major networking opportunity. Last night I signed us up as a friend to ASCAP, and realized there are thousands of bands on myspace, each of whom have thousands of friends.

By becoming these band's "Friends" we can get some of their friends to check us out and hopefully listen. We can also post comments on those band sites telling everyone that we play their music (if we do of course). For example, we just added a song by Will Hoge and he is on myspace and has thousands of fans as friends.

So anyway, long story short, JD & I decided that we need to pump up that pathetic friend list we have (only 20 people!) starting now! We're gonna spend as much time as we can just searching out and befriending fitting members of myspace.


PART II:

We are going to try a test run of something. It will only run for a week at first, and some of you may really get annoyed by it, but we feel we need to try it.

When we advertise on Google we may get 500 clicks from it, but only maybe 15 or 20 will tune into the station, and then only 2 or 3 at best become regular listeners.

For our test, we are going to set up our homepage so that as soon as you arrive at it the station starts playing automatically. This will mean if we get 500 visitors we will get 500 listeners.

Granted, most will immediately turn it off, but hopefully a few more than usual will stick around.

The only negative with this is that I think if you listen with the Live365 player it would restart every time you visit the main page. If you listen through Musicmatch, Itunes or Realplayer it might start a SECOND stream on the Live365 player.

We'll let you know before we start the test run so maybe you can bookmark the pages you visit the most like FORUM, NOW PLAYING, etc. to avoid the home page.


PART III

Right now we really have no advertising budget. So we've agreed that we are going to keep a coin jar in the studio and we'll both contribute all our coins to it (plus the occasssional spare dollar I'm sure) and every three months we'll get it counted up and decide between us how best to spend it on advertising. This will be solely an advertising fund.

PART IV

A very exciting idea we had to raise funds without asking anyone for money! We'll announce it later this year, but we're both really excited about it because it is an annual project that wiill last nearly 2 months but provide us with some great exposure!


We've always been committed to NOT being one of those stations that begs it's listeners for donations, and we always will be.

But right now we're caught in a real catch-22. We don't have enough listeners to keep throwing money at free slots that go unused, but if we don't have those free slots available then any advertising we do is wasted because when people try to tune in they're told we're full.

I think JD & I would both like to turn this into something much bigger than it is, and as we grow it it's important to us that we keep our most loyal listeners, the forum members, aware of what we're doing!

YOU GUYS ARE WHAT GET US THROUGH THE DOWN TIMES LIKE THE ONE WE WENT THROUGH THIS WINTER! THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOYALTY!