Music Success in Nine Weeks: Irish fiddler starts the Ariel Publicity blog contest

Today I'm starting the "Music Success in Nine Weeks" Blog Challenge. The book is written by Ariel Hyatt, who is a Cyber PR expert (Arielpublicity.com) and the challenge is to complete each chapter in the book and blog about it (the winner receives a publicity campaign from her company).I decided to take the challenge because I knew having deadlines and making a public statement would get me to actually do everything in the book, which is really the point (if any of you like to sit on the couch eating chips and watching programs on healthy eating, you know what I mean). 
So here goes...

Chapter one is all about Getting Mentally Prepared. Setting goals!
I've read just about all the literature out there on goal setting, so I'm familiar with the stats (writing them down means your 10x more likely to achieve them/give dates and write them as if they're already happening etc. ).

So today I started on my list of 6 focus areas (the book offers several suggestions) and I went to Staples to get a notebook and colored pens so I can write them in pretty colors and post them all over. That was the fun part, especially because Staples has finally added a deep purple (my favorite color) to their color palette. Somehow writing in purple gives me confidence that my goals are reachable!

I did get a little overwhelmed on the lifetime goals - thinking about what you'd like to do in your whole life really brings up some complicated questions (why are we here, what is my purpose in life? how long am I going to live?), but luckily there are also short-term goals to balance those. When I started making my lifetime list (play music in Africa, hear Dolly Parton in concert, to name a few), I realized that it does help you see if your daily actions are going anywhere near that direction.

As far as the short-term goals, one of the things as an artist that we all need to do is "build a fanbase" (How many times have we heard that!), and my other more personal goal is to balance the music business work with the being-an artist/creating-part so I'll just start by announcing two of my goals...To be done by August 6th)

1. It is August 6th 2010 and I have 1,000 contacts on my reverbnation page (those come from everywhere - facebook, twitter, myspace etc. ) Notice I finally figured out how to put the reverb widget on my sidebar so you can sign up there...
and 100 subscribers to my Fanreach newsletter which goes out once a month.

2. It is August 6th 2010 and I have written 2 more tunes to be licensed and scheduled a recording session to record them.
There it is, DID IT! I now have two of my goals officially in the universe for everyone to see.

The last thing I wanted to say about Chapter One of the book is that you're supposed to write down 5 positive things you do every day and keep them in a notebook. Two of them need to be career related, but you can include other things like exercising, etc. Not sure if getting up in the morning counts...

The day has only just started, but my first success is that I started the contest and am feeling hopeful and inspired to navigate that complicated creature called the music business.