Where God Wants Us

Estimated reading time: 5 minute(s)

There’s a strange thing that seems to happen to us. Especially regarding our music. No matter how good the circumstances may seem, God always provides the same amount of money. The same amount of sales. Whether it’s 2 people or 2000. Whether our product advertisements reach hundreds or tens of thousands. It’s always the same.

A slow trickle, that’s just enough to keep us interested.

It’s really interesting, and has been brought to the forefront again by a scheme a friend of ours worked up just this week. Our friend, Jeff, runs the site StudyLight.org. It’s a great reference tool for Bible study and just life as a Christian in general. Good stuff.

So, often he will IM me and have me check certain features for him as a Mac user. Often, the sessions are somewhat frustrating as his code displays just fine on a Windows machine, but not correctly on my Mac. (I understand the frustration, just the other way around.) But, Jeff always solves it. He’s great.

This week, I guess he got tired of waiting for me to check it, cause he offered to give me thousands of dollars of advertisement space on his site in exchange for me buying him a Mac mini. 🙂 Haha. It’s still pretty funny. I told him, while a fine idea, in theory, we’d never sell enough to cover the cost of a mac mini. (they start at $499) He said he was offering more value than that, and if we only sold about 75 CDs, we’d break even. I maintained my position (based on my past experience with how God provides for us) that we would not sell even that many.

Jeff’s website gets 2 million hits per month. That’s a lot. And, they all might be interested in new Christmas music. So, he was up to the challenge.

He changed his offer to, 3 free banners, and a text link ad, and a tiered price scale. If we sell 100 CDs, we get him the standard mac mini. If we sell 120, the next one, and so on. We worked out a deal that is incredibly in our favor, and would theoretically (with such exposure) surely land him a Mac mini.

Still, I told him, that’s not how God has done it for us so far…

So today, with over 10,000 impressions (times that the ad has been displayed) and about 150 click-throughs to our page… and yet NO SALES… Jeff continues to improve the “chances”. He posted a message to the forum, letting over 18,000 people know that they could support StudyLight by simply buying a CD. So, now he is also endorsing the product to these 2 million hits per month. Seems good, right?

That just isn’t how God does things for us. 🙂

I told Jen today, Jeff is fighting God on this one. We’ll see who wins. 🙂

Here are some other fun examples of our amazing track record:

• We are featured on TheGodJourney.com. They use our music for their show intro, bumper music, and outro. They have talked about the music on a couple shows, and a link to our site is posted on their home page.

  SALES SO FAR: none that I know of…

• This week our song, Joy To The World was featured on The MacCast. Great endorsement of the song by the host, 11,000 plus listeners, links straight to our song in iTunes and our webpage.

  SALES SO FAR: Two.

• Last Christmas, we did a show for 6000 to 10000 people in a sports arena, where the theme was Christmas, and we had a brand new Christmas CD, lots of help selling them, AND we played Christmas music LIVE for 45 min of EVERY HOUR that weekend, and played our CD when we weren’t actually playing live, and they piped the sound through the arena’s sound system! Great set up!

  SALES SO FAR: About 50 CDs (including all four of our CDs.)

• I have been advertising our CD again to the basic mailing list, just to remind them we have that. About 300 addresses or so. Messages sent about once a week during December.

  SALES SO FAR: 2 CDs.

• StudyLight.org features our CD with free giant banners, text link, forum post and an email sent to almost 20,000 addresses. AND, for a reduced price! (Only $11.95).

  SALES SO FAR: None.

OK. I am sure you get the point.

And at concerts it’s the same! Whether 10 or 100 people show up, we sell between 2 and 7 CDs. 🙂 It’s just too funny! (Sometimes it’s not funny at the moment… but as I type this… it’s funny.)

I’ll have to let you know what happens with the studylight thing by the end of our month of advertising. I hope I can tell you about huge orders, paying for some great Apple equipment for my friend Jeff… but I am not counting on that. Based on our experiences so far, for whatever reason, it seems like God would like us to stay at this level of income. 🙂

We’ll keep you updated.

Till then, if you’d like to help Jeff out, you can. And get yourself some cheaper Christmas music: basicmm.com/studylight.

(of course, you can get our CD for full price at our e-store or, you can download it at iTunes also, if you are so inclined. The full price option helps us out more… if you’re into that sort of thing.) 🙂

(I am not certain why I wrote those last two paragraphs, in light of the rest of this post…) 🙂