Back To Basics!

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the direction of Swollen Thumb Entertainment. I started this blog back in January as a way to further my mission, which is to start a network of artists who put out various forms of art. When I say “We’re Going To Stick Out”, I mean just that. When it comes to every facet of running a business, I want Swollen Thumb Entertainment to be better and different than the others. For starters, I don’t think many entertainment companies have fully utilized the blogging method for getting their product out there. This is the foundation that I’m building right now with this blog.

I decided upon five categories of articles for this blog:
Original Music, where I would offer my music to download for free, as well as music by other artists. I had hoped to launch a music career for myself, as well as experiment with a 21st century form of distribution by utilizing the power of blogging in a way that no other artist had, to my knowledge, done as of yet.
Original Video, which would be anything from video blogs, to short humorous videos. I have plans of launching online tv series, and to have an outlet to broadcast my strong desire to produce video. This way, I can put stuff out, directly to the audience, and get immediate feedback, as opposed to real life where TV shows are born and killed in board rooms.
Original Writing, where readers could download and read brand new short stories every week. The possibilities are endless here too. No genre will be off limits, and the stories could either be serials, or stand alone stories. The stories can intertwine, or lead up to bigger and better projects! There’s a lot of writers out there, and not nearly enough exposure for them. There’s so much untapped potential out there, that this section could very well become it’s own blog in the future.
Build Your Career, where I encourage other people to find their “inner artist” and give them tips on how they can integrate that into their life, and possibly create a career out of it. I feel that everyone has a calling to be artistic, and so many people have strayed from that aspect of themselves for various reasons. I had hoped to rejuvenate that in people through my writing.
Entertainment Commentary, where I discuss what I consider to be wrong with the current state of entertainment, and what I consider to be right with it. This was going to be the backbone of Swollen Thumb Entertainment, and would provide a general “philosophy” for why we artists are compelled to create.
Like I said, my original intention with this site was to have it revolve around entertainment in some way shape or form. In short, the site was built to host entertainment (Music, Video, and Writing) and to encourage people to create their own forms of entertainment (Build Your Career and Entertainment Commentary). In essence, everything would play off of each other.

Evolution…

After a while, I started to write about blogging a lot. It didn’t take long for me to have the desire to stretch the “Build Your Career” category to the very edge of what I could still consider it to be. At first, I adopted the attitude of “Well, blogging IS a career, so I can write about that”. However the more articles that I wrote about blogging, the more I came to realize that I was getting way off topic from what I had intended. Sure, any good blog will evolve over time, but I had a dilemma. My most popular posts were about blogging, and the subject was starting to become the main focus of my writing, which wasn’t what I wanted.

So my solution? Like I said, I’ve been mulling over this for a few weeks now, and I’ve decided that I’m going back to my roots with the “Build Your Career” category, and I’m going to make it about finding your “inner artist” again. The simple fact is that I have become very comfortable writing about blogging. That is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good, because it allows me to write what I consider to be interesting articles with relative ease. The bad part is that it’s stifling my evolution and progression as an artist, and getting me off track from my mission.

My original intention was that I would only have five categories for this blog, and eventually there would be one update per week for each category for each day of the work week. After thinking about this, I have decided that my blogging articles have been too successful for me to get rid of them, and I happen to think that the blogging world is a very interesting subject. So starting immediately, I will write about it every week in a brand new category called “Blogging World”. I don’t plan on replacing it with any of the other topics, so the plan is to eventually build up to six updates a week.

This Is Truly A Relief!

I’m really excited about this, because it allows me to clear my head and focus my energy into a new topic that is obviously going over well with my readers. I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that I needed a new topic. I was just driving to work the other day when it hit me like a hammer. So a lot of my previous articles are going to be moved over to this new category, and I’m going to start using the “Build Your Career” category for it’s original purpose again.

The morale of the story? Always take a step back and analyze your business strategy. Sometimes you may come to realize that your plan isn’t working. That’s okay, because every successful entrepreneur has had to adapt their plans in order to achieve success. You won’t have all of the answers from the beginning, and if you think that you do, then you’re wrong. And don’t overthink it! Sometimes, the solution will come to you when you least expect it. Just keep an open mind to what’s happening, and always remain critical of what you’re doing.