Launching

Launching tomorrow: www.incorporationforartists.com

It's really truly amazing how long it takes to put up a simple website. Or at least, how long it takes to put up a simple commercial website. Because as much time as we spent creating the site itself, we spent more time doing the invisible behind-the-scenes stuff that will allow us to actually sell a product online.

A lot of that time, for example, was spent putting together bonuses, like an email series that will be sent on the first day of each month to everyone who buys the book, reminding them of what documents are due that month. Had to compile the information, write twelve emails, set up an auto-responder, and schedule each "broadcast" individually. An enormous amount of very tedious, repetitive work--but the goal of it is to have everything automated. So I spent a lot of time up front, but now I shouldn't need to spend too much time at all. Once a year I'll have to update the emails, looking for changed due dates and new documents and so forth, but that should be it--otherwise, everything now just kinda happens by itself. (In fact my October email just arrived this morning, and for a moment I looked at it, thinking "Incorporation for Artists? Who are they and why are they sending me email? Oh, wait--yeah, it's me. Well whattaya know.")

The harder part was getting testimonials from people. I'm lousy at asking for something for nothing--I have no trouble asking for things when I've got something to offer in return, but here I really could offer nothing except my enormous gratitude and an unspecifiable "huge favor" back, someday. And yet a lot of people took the time to read the whole book, and some even were able to offer really useful comments that have helped the book a lot. (A friend of mine from college, Melissa Klein, who I haven't actually seen in something like twenty years--we say howdy on MySpace from time to time--lives in New York and was really helpful on the sections that deal with the requirements in that state. How nice is that?)

So it's all ready now, finally. We'll take just a little time today to test all the links and processes, then we'll swap out the "Coming Soon!" page with the real thing and see what happens. Upon which we immediately turn our attention to doing exactly the same stuff with Marc's internet-marketing online course, which we hope will move along a little faster since we've now been through the process so recently.

Next--actual progress is made on the guitar.