Kyria's journal

 I went down the rabbit hole and dug into the world of selling online workshops and books. Learned a lot, and I thought these observations might be handy.

When you have an online product, everything on your website is aimed at having people buy it. the book, the course, the online workshop, the online class. Doesn't really matter what it is, everything is focussed on getting as many people on your website (traffic), to have as many people as you can sign up for your newsletter (Opt-in) in order to draw them to your special sales page (Landing page), filled with ten elements that will convince them to buy (funnel).

I understand why they build sites this way. But when I tried to adjust my website it just made me sad. Because:

1. This focus on selling makes ugly websites. Like the ugly MOFO kind. I like pretty things. And my focus audience (women between 16-106) can appreciate some prettiness as well. It feels like this whole selling technique is invented by men and aimed at a mainly male target audience.

2. As a dancer, I have to sell my image in order to atract gigs and students. But online selling aims at selling a product. Those two don't work well together. A website can do one of those things, but not both at the same time with the same intensity.

3. This whole landing page thing.... I have multiple products that I want to display on my website. But according to the internet sales guru's I also have to make landing pages for each. Plus opt-in forms, and floating loghtboxes, and add testimonials and a 100% money back guarantee.That's an awful lot of work for a relative target market. There are 18 million Dutch people, and I suspect 0.01% is interested in belly dance,  That's roughly 2000 people.

Now that I do the math, I am amazed that I sold 200 copies of my costuming book. Or sold it at all!

After working on the site for a couple of hours yesterday I gave up. usually creating new stuff on my website makes me happy, but this just made me very, very sad. The straw that broke the camel's back was when someone wrote 'sliders and carrousels suck because they don't lead to conversions'.  I like sliders and carrousels (the images on the front page of a website that can change, like a small slideshow). I love sliders. I think they are awesome. And I believe other dancers or students looking for classes appreciate them as well.

Go away, evil internet sales gurus!

I have been swayed to renewing the website of www.buikdansopleiding.nl. This is the website for the two year training for bellydancers, I took it between 2005-2007. Two of the curriculum teachers are friends/colleagues: Laudie is my dance mom (can't say no to her) and Peter was my second teacher and fellow article writer for the Dutch BD magazine.

Their webmaster died about half a year ago and since then, the website has been neglected. The webmaster build his own CMS which is now seriously compromised and they need to make it easier to update and maintain the website. Laudie asked me for advice, and when we got to talking we ended up with 'I might as well do it myself'. Yep. Bad, bad, bad decision on my side. We all know how webdesign can go seriously off track, with people requesting animated kittens and glitter. I have faith that we can work it out though, and we're going to work on it together next Friday.

My system to prevent major communication breakdown is that I am going to sit in a room with two of the members, and they are going to do part of the work. The genius plan is:

1. If they are tired, we'll stop. Thus tey understand how I am not spending many hours on getting the last pixel juuuuuust right, because I am not letting them go until they say they are satisfied.
2. I take care of installing Wordpress and fiddling with templates. They prepare the content, add, edit and create pages. Thus they will be busy with their own work, leaving less room to nag about my work.

I tried it a couple of years ago with making costumes for Sense of Bellydance, and it worked. At the end of the sewing maraton they understood how much work it was, and how I would not want to do that all by myself. Nobody asked me to make costumes since the sewing marathon, they rather noodle around by themselves because when I get involved, I make them work. I wrote a short document for them to set the assignment and scope the subject. I am not a designer and I will not change fonts or edit pictures though we all know that I will be resizing and cutting a bit during the proces. I gave them a list of content to prepare and questions to ponder, we'll see how far we get.

This is what it looks like now:


I think I can top this with a day of work. And if this goes well, I also have the Dalla Dream Dancer's website to take care of. I care too much about too many things and other peopla re lazy and won't google to solve their own problem.

Remember that one time that I hired a graphic designer to make me a logo and she sold the concept to a fellow dancer in my area? After firing her by email and never hearing from her again, I played around with photoshop and came up with this (sorry for the low resolution):

I am considering moving the dancer completely to the left to make it a cleaner design. This will get me through the next year or so, until I redesign my website. I have been playing around with photoshop and learned some interesting things about plugins and filters.For example, that using HDR filters will instantly turn your regular photo into a intense and colorful artwork. Then I started noticing how many images are edited with an HDR filter: pretty much every surreal looking picture of landscapes, architecture and people outside. All the links on facebook about 'amazing places around the world'. HDR filter. Pictures of cities with light gleamingoff buildings: HDR.

I am looking forward to experimenting with the filter myself, this gives me some new options for webdesign and (digital) flyers

I am making a pdf handout for my beginners, including answers to common questions, top ten benefits of bellydance, exercises to improve balance and coordination, overview of styles, etc. The visualization that I talked about yesterday is part of the hand out. It'll be a thirty page booklet with pictures and drawings that I made/own. In addition, several dancers in the past couple of years asked me for business advice. Creating a pdf download that answers questions about taxes, how to set up promotion, that kind of thing. The third idea was to reedit the costuming book that I made in 2007 and offer it as a digital download instead of print. I want to make it a paid download but have trouble with finding a technical solution for the payment that would work.

Most Dutch people pay with debetcards and in order to have the online payment option iDeal, I have to pay 25 euro per motnh to the bank, plus a small amount per transaction. I expect that the sales will (at most!) be 120 items over a two year course, which would not be cost effective. In short, I adjusted my belly dance strategy towards doing things I like and I am good at and I want to charge a small amount of money. For example, I've been writing for several bellydance magazines for over 8 years and though it is a labor of love, most of my work is gone because magazines went out of print/stopped existing. My own website with articles went under because I didn't spend time on the technical platform. Creating downloadable pdf's seems like an affordable way to tap into the e-reader market, spread the information that I want to share and get a little bit paid in return. By little bit, I was thinking about 7 euro (10usd) for a 100 page pdf (costuming book, book for professionals) and a couple of other products like t-shirts and posters, probably through a  third party like cafepress.

Anyway, I want to give kuddo's to Autumn Ward. She never really caught my attention through her instructional dvds, but I found out that she has accompanying pdf downloads for her dvds and they are amazingly detailed and well thought out. I have to revisit her dvds soon!

I tried to update my plugins and my wordpress website decided to break down on me. Something with insufficient php memory, tracked it down to the nextgen plugin. I tried to fix the plugin but the error was persitent, so I killed it. And then I noticed that I lost my customized theme...

I put a bandaid on it, meaning that I installed the Customizr theme, added an integrated responsive slider (you know, those moving images on the top that you can click on) and did a quick rewriting of my text and images. It is not as good as I want it to be, but it could pass for now.

I tried several (free) slider themes but this was the best that I could come up with in short notice. I cross checked the website on my iphone, ipad and pc, but next week I'll ask the guys if I can use our testroom to test the website across all platforms. I am happy that this theme works well on mobile devices, ran into trouble with some of the other themes that didn't work as well on phones. Tons of people use their phones to quickly find a dancer so that is one of my priorities.

It is a good reminder that I wanted/needed to update my website thouroughly this year. I have wanted a responsive slider for a while now and after trying several plugins first, I feel that an integrated slider works best for my current needs. It also means that I have to get back behind my home pc, get photoshop up and running and create killer images for the sliders, as it will be the most important feature of my website.

I also want to get some good videomaterial so I can make a promo clip for performances, one for classes and one for workshops. That should do the trick into dragging my website into this century and making sure I stand out from the other dancers in my area.

I've added the language files and made the website www.buikdansereskyria.com multi language. Weehee!! The strong point of the plugin is that you can provide your own text/translation per page, so you won't get weird translations. The bad thing about wordpress is that some plugins don't work when I try to configure them in explorer, but they work if I try in Safari or firefox. Weird!

Using Firefox or Safari is a relieve, very clean browser windows and now annoying extra buttons along the top.

Today was the yearly arrival of St. Nic (Sinterklaas) in the Netherlands. A big event with a four hour report on the public TV channel. The scenario is precariously plotted out and slowely unfolds during the newsreport. A lot of adults watch the welcoming of Sinterklaas too because some of his helpers (black Pete/Zwarte Piet) are famous Dutch people in disguise, adding a touch of adult inside jokes in the mix. And yes, they are all white people with very badly done make-up pretending to be black people.

A lot of the trademarks of SInterklaas lend themselve to make inside jokes of:

- He is always carrying or holding a big staf with a nob on the end
- There's a lot of anxiety wether he'll come or not
- His helpers are carrying bags filled with presents
- Insinuations about being sweet or bad and wether you'll get candy or a beating with a roe (Don't know the English term but it bares a close ressemblance to the InonesianSappoelidi. Scroll down to fourth image)

We watched a short bit before I ewnt upstairs to work on my website. I finally managed to add a decent picture gallery to my website. AFter trying the simpleviewer plugin, photobucket plugin AND flickr plugin, I settled for NextGEn plugin. A plugin in this case is a bit of software that you plug into your CMS and adds extra features. Check out my new and shiny gallery on this page. I had to search my external harddrive for suitable pictures and I"m glad that I now have enough promo pictures and live shots to fill a page. I made the arbitrary decision to add the pictures taken while I was dancing that are low quality or more amateur like to the performance pictures instead of the photoshoot pictures. To me, photoshoot says nice, clean and high quality pictures.

I'm hoping to receive the edited pictures of the last shoot soon so I can add them to my website. Then I'll be done for a while, at least with getting decent photoshoot shots. Live shots are of course always appreciated and needed.

I need to update my Kyria- Bellydancer website and I decided to give wordpress a try. Sofar it's okay to work with, not as easy as Joomla! for me, but maybe my mind works better with that CMS system. See my testpage for the current lay-out.

I'm uploading a couple of plugins to create forms and contact information. I doubt that there will be a whole lot of people who want to follow me around through social networking sites, but I think it might help to discern my website form all the other sites. I'm not sure about this lay-out, will fiddle some more next weekend.

It's been a while since I updated the English part of my website. I've been translating and editing stuff in the evening and things are coming along. The new CMS system disagrees with me: after editing 15-20 pages, it refuses to refresh *sigh*. Ah well, at least I got to upload a whole bunch of new belly dance diy tutorials and I have 5 new tutorials waiting in line for the gothic/rest part of the website.

Will continue next week, have to finish my CIO essay first!