Dr. Lawson's Bio Dr. Tonya Lawson is a musician, blogger, and SEO specialist whose mission is to empower musicians and other creatives to build out passive income streams so they have the financial freedom to live the life they want to live.
Dr. Lawson has been teaching woodwinds in Tennessee and Texas for the past 26 years, she runs 3 different blogs, a membership for creatives who want to get their website found on Google, and has multiple courses. Dr. Lawson holds a Bachelor of Music degree in education from Middle Tennessee State University, a Master of Music degree in clarinet performance, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Texas Tech University. Dr. Lawson currently teaches at Middle Tennessee State University, Father Ryan High School, and throughout Rutherford County, TN. Her students regularly earn college scholarships and participate in Mid-state, All-state, Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts, Sewanee Summer Music Festival, Interlochen, as well as various other honor bands. When not working, Dr. Lawson enjoys gardening, running, reading, and playing with her dog Buster.
Fascinated by the crossroads of creativity and entrepreneurship? We've got a treat for you! This episode features the immensely talented Dr. Tanya Lawson, a musician, blogger, and SEO specialist, who talks us through her fascinating journey from an English major to a successful music professional. Tanya doesn't stop there though. When faced with the threat of losing her school program, she sought solace in the power of blogging and SEO to build an additional income stream, exploring the realms of affiliate marketing and ad revenue generation. This episode is an absolute treasure trove of knowledge for those eager to chart their unique paths in the music industry.
In the second half of the episode, we plunge into the exciting world of Web 3 and its potential to change the music industry landscape. Dr. Lawson explains how artists can use platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to propel their growth and create new opportunities. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of fostering a sense of community in the music world, moving away from a competitive mindset, and embracing individuality. We round off the conversation with an invitation to Dr. Lawson's upcoming challenge on website optimization and SEO, an opportunity you wouldn't want to miss! Let's learn, let's grow, and let's make a difference in the music world together!
Dr. Lawson's Bio Dr. Tonya Lawson is a musician, blogger, and SEO specialist whose mission is to empower musicians and other creatives to build out passive income streams so they have the financial freedom to live the life they want to live.
Dr. Lawson has been teaching woodwinds in Tennessee and Texas for the past 26 years, she runs 3 different blogs, a membership for creatives who want to get their website found on Google, and has multiple courses. Dr. Lawson holds a Bachelor of Music degree in education from Middle Tennessee State University, a Master of Music degree in clarinet performance, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Texas Tech University. Dr. Lawson currently teaches at Middle Tennessee State University, Father Ryan High School, and throughout Rutherford County, TN. Her students regularly earn college scholarships and participate in Mid-state, All-state, Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts, Sewanee Summer Music Festival, Interlochen, as well as various other honor bands. When not working, Dr. Lawson enjoys gardening, running, reading, and playing with her dog Buster.
Fascinated by the crossroads of creativity and entrepreneurship? We've got a treat for you! This episode features the immensely talented Dr. Tanya Lawson, a musician, blogger, and SEO specialist, who talks us through her fascinating journey from an English major to a successful music professional. Tanya doesn't stop there though. When faced with the threat of losing her school program, she sought solace in the power of blogging and SEO to build an additional income stream, exploring the realms of affiliate marketing and ad revenue generation. This episode is an absolute treasure trove of knowledge for those eager to chart their unique paths in the music industry.
In the second half of the episode, we plunge into the exciting world of Web 3 and its potential to change the music industry landscape. Dr. Lawson explains how artists can use platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to propel their growth and create new opportunities. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of fostering a sense of community in the music world, moving away from a competitive mindset, and embracing individuality. We round off the conversation with an invitation to Dr. Lawson's upcoming challenge on website optimization and SEO, an opportunity you wouldn't want to miss! Let's learn, let's grow, and let's make a difference in the music world together!
Welcome to the community stage, where every voice matters, every experience teaches and every artist finds a home here. We believe in the power of unity, growth and shared knowledge amongst artists and musicians. It's more than just a podcast. It's a community dedicated to flourishing together in our artistic journeys. On the community stage, we're not just connecting with each other, we're learning from one another. Every episode is a new opportunity to share experiences, insights and lessons that can help light our paths in this dynamic world. I'm your guide, austin McFarland, bringing over a decade of experience in the arts industry, and a couple others to our conversations. But this isn't just about what I've learned over the years. It's about what we're all learning right here, right now. Together, let's dig in.
Austin McFarland:
Today's guest is Dr Tanya Lawson. I was so excited to get to sit down with Dr Lawson. I've been following her content for years on Instagram and I've always wanted to hear her story and see what else I could get from her experiences along the way. You'll hear more about her as she talks about her story and how she got to being the blogger and SEO specialist slash clarinet teacher that she is now. I'm so excited and can't wait to hear what you think of this episode. Alright, I am here with Dr Tanya Lawson. Tanya, why don't you tell us who you are, what you do and why you do it?
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Well, I'm Tanya Lawson. I am a musician, blogger, passive income and SEO specialist. I do a little bit of everything. I started out in college I didn't want to be a musician. Actually, I was an English major and somehow I transitioned into music. And three degrees later, here I am, and just to give you a little bit of my backstory on how things worked I went to graduate school to finish my doctorate when jobs were booming.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
I graduated with my doctorate and there were 50 clarinet positions open all over the United States and I made the shortlist for two of them and took interviews and in both instances they hired the more experienced candidate, which I totally understand. Unfortunately, the next year, there were only five clarinet positions open in the entire US, made the shortlist on one, interviewed and it was at HBCU. They hired someone who was a better fit for the position and I was like, okay, I have been teaching private music lessons in the meantime and I was like, okay, I've got to do something here, I've got to make my own job, I can't count on this. So I just started putting all my effort into building a private studio and fast forward. I now have a full private studio, 50 plus students, and I've been teaching. Let's see, I graduated in 2005. I started teaching private lessons in 1997 and I've been teaching full-time as my career since 2005. But as things went, I am lucky I live in the middle Tennessee area just south of Nashville. So the Nashville area and Tennessee and Texas are the two states I've taught in and they are, in my knowledge, the only two states that allow private music teachers to go into the school during the school day and teach music lessons. So I get to go into the schools and pull students out of their band class to take private lessons.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Well, they thought about ending this program where I teach and I panicked what am I going to do? And then I realized the mistake I was making by keeping all my eggs in my basket. So I started looking into blogging, just as a second income stream, and I already had TonyaLossoncom, but I wasn't really doing anything with it. So I started looking into blogging and I started writing blog posts, but still nobody was finding it. So I learned about SEO and I ended up taking a course on SEO. That's search engine optimization. Basically, it's how you get found on Google.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
And all in this course, none of it was geared towards musicians. It was about creating niche websites to make money and I was like, well, okay, I need another income stream. And I created a coffee website that started making a little money and I was like, okay, there's got to be a way I can figure out how to take these things I've learned and manipulate them to fit the creative space, because there was nothing out there like that at the time. So that's what I did. And then, all of a sudden, my TonyaLossoncom music business website started getting views, started making a little money, and then COVID hit and everything shut down.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
And I was so lucky. I was already kind of technologically inclined with all the blogging. Transitioning my studio online was not a problem and I had this extra time because I didn't have to go into schools and wait on class changes and everything. So what did I do? I started a third blog, so I have a garden blog now too, and kind of my mission is to help other people in the creative space musicians, bloggers, writers, artists build out passive income streams using their websites. That will really help give them financial security so that they can live the life they want to live instead of constantly having to take low paying gigs just to make ends meet.
Austin McFarland:
I love that the gig should be about having fun and making the art, not about I got to do this to survive. That takes all of the fun out of living this musician lifestyle and doing the things that we have so much access to do. So in that transition, like using the blog or using like affiliate marketing, like what is some of the dry and don't give all the secrets away, but like what is really the driving force- Well, I'll tell you exactly what I'm using, because it's not a secret.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
I talk about it on my Instagram all the time. Yes, I use affiliate marketing. I have affiliate marketing through Amazon, I have affiliate marketing through share sale, I have affiliate marketing through sheet music plus and I have affiliate marketing for some courses and stuff that other people done that I really believe in because I've taken them myself and in addition to that, I also have ad revenue on two of my websites and it brings in a fair amount just because people are finding it. I also have my own courses and masterclass and my membership on my website and people find those things through Google. They do. I sold one of my masterclass replays the other day because someone had come across on Google and bought it.
Austin McFarland:
That's awesome, that's so cool. So have you in all of this, like the transition and the course of your career, have you discovered that some of the traits that we use as musicians have benefited you? And then, so you're not totally losing everything that you gained in the three degrees and turned your back completely on music?
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Oh, totally, because, first of all, music is still a very big part of my life. I do play some still. I teach primarily because I love it. Frankly, I love it as a matter of fact. What made my heart totally happy the other day?
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
One of my students said Dr Lawson, I know that you do all this business stuff and I think it's so cool and I've decided I'm going to start my own business selling digital greeting cards so that I can save money to buy a new clarinet. I love it, maybe so, so happy. But OK, here's the deal If you can survive music school, you can do anything. Music school is by far the hardest, most cutthroat anything I've been through in my life Defending your dissertation, performing on a regular basis as musicians, you know, it's really one of the few fields or the creative space in general is one of the few fields where you are constantly told everything you're doing wrong and very seldomly told all the things you're doing well. So we develop this thick skin and that is so helpful in the online space where you have trolls coming at you and I always say you know, if I'm pissing somebody off, I'm probably doing something right.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
So that definitely prepared me the attention to the detail, the ability to pivot at a moment's notice. I remember in graduate school I was doing one of my doctoral recitals and it was in a in a hall. I went to Texas Tech and it was in a hall that had the organ loft up at the top upstairs. And I kid you not, in the middle of my recital two cleaning ladies walked out onto the organ loft and proceeded to have a conversation while I was performing. So just that ability to adapt and do just get through it anyway, helps so much in the business world.
Austin McFarland:
That's so funny. That's a great story. I can imagine that you probably know exactly where you were in what piece, exactly what was happening. As soon as that's. That's great, oh.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
I love it. It was the fourth movement of the back sonata and if you've ever played the back sonata you know that is not the movement you want people to interrupt you.
Austin McFarland:
I love it. That's great. So, as you've built all of these various businesses out and trying to think how to ask this, I'm sorry, thank you. Have you noticed that the free time and the flexibility in your schedule has allowed you to sort of pursue anything that comes your way, like you talked about a coffee website and a gardening website in addition, to talk about that, just chasing things you're interested in and how that sort of led to where you're at now?
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Oh, okay, great question.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
First of all, I think as musicians in general, we have a fair amount of flexibility within our schedule and what I do is perfect for filling in those holes.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
So say, I am teaching in a school and I have a free period, I can just pop on my computer and get a blog post written out or do my invoicing. It's about squeezing into those little periods because I have dedicated work hours. I refuse to work after 6pm and I refuse to work on weekends, so anything that I get done takes place between the hours of 8am and 6pm and as I become a little more successful, I also make sure to take an hour and a half to two hour break in the middle of the day for lunch and errands and that sort of thing. So it has really allowed me to take the free time I have and make it my own and empower me to set those strict work hours, because I don't feel like I have to be working 24-7 just so I can pay my rent. As a matter of fact, I don't pay rent as a working musician. I bought my own house and everybody's like oh, your husband helped.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
No, I don't have a husband, I bought my own house and a lot of people think that, and I once thought that this was just not possible for a freelance musician. But it totally is. You just have to take your career and make it your own.
Austin McFarland:
Absolutely, and I think the introduction to Web 3 that we've transitioned into and just the sort of almost unlimited ways we can create, whether that's a membership or a course or just even moving your studio online to broaden the students that you're reaching there's so many opportunities. Have you done any with? You're mainly in the blog space, but have you done much with social media and how did you tie those two together?
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Oh, absolutely. I am very active on Instagram and TikTok and I use those two platforms to promote my business side of things. In all honesty, as far as my private music studio is concerned, I have established myself in this area that I don't promote it anymore. As a matter of fact, I try to get my name out there less. I have so many students and I will have them contact me out of nowhere. Oh, can I do online lessons? We live an hour away. Oh, yes, absolutely. We can make that happen and, to be honest, I got to the point where I had so many I didn't want any more, so I tried to out-priced myself, and that didn't work either.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
So, people just paid more, so don't know that. No, you can charge more and it's okay. But so I'm not just in the blog space. Like I said, I'm very active on Instagram and I'm very active on TikTok as well. And, oh, youtube, I have a YouTube channel. That's new. I'm working on growing it.
Austin McFarland:
Nice, I'll have to check that one out. So your content strategy as you're producing content, do you let the large form blog work sort of influence everything, or do you find yourself sort of chasing some social media trends to boost the blog? Or is it more the blog just sort of feeds the content you're creating?
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
You know they're actually pretty separate. I will tell you this when I first started blogging, I was very keyword driven and motivated because that's what I had been taught, and anybody in the blogging space right now knows that Google has gone nuts with updates, and all of the content that I created before I had that strategy is starting to like surface, because it's all about user friendly content, satisfying user intent. What are people searching for? So, honestly, I use social media to get ideas for my blog post. I'm very active on social media. I get lots of questions in my DMs and then, as I start getting these questions, I will use those questions and turn into content, because if one person is asking me, then another person is gonna wanna know and another person is gonna wanna know.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
So what I do honestly is I take those questions and I turn it into a piece of long form blog content, and I'm about working smarter, not harder. So then I take that piece of blog content and I turn it into 10 Instagram posts and stories, I turn it into five YouTube videos, I turn it into 10 TikToks. All from that one piece of content that the idea was brought to me from someone on social media who asked me a question. I my business. It's obviously about making money, because we have to make money to survive, but I'm here to serve people, to help people with what they need, and I'm very serious about building community because I think that's so important. And I feel like sometimes in the music world, community is hard to come by because everybody is out for themselves trying to outdo one another. And I wanna break that barrier down and really build a sense of community where we all support each other.
Austin McFarland:
I was talking actually I think it's an episode that'll come up before yours, but Larkin Sanders in her from the clever clarinetists in her episode talks about how we graduate enough music students every year that the industry essentially doubles across all instruments and that, like in that conversation a couple of weeks ago, I was like okay, there is enough space for everybody. What we have to stop talking about competition, because it just doesn't exist in the music world it exists, but it doesn't exist, if that makes any sense.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Yes, we're graduating that many people, but there aren't jobs for those people. And here's my problem. In music school, I was taught how to play the clarinet very well. I was a women's specialist. I was also taught how to play the oboe, flute, saxophone. I was taught how to teach those instruments.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
I know more about clarinet history than anyone person ever needs to know, but what I wasn't taught was how to market myself, how to go out there and make things happen for myself. That's all stuff I had to learn on my own, and that is what I want to help other musicians do. I want to help other musicians figure out a way to carve out their own space, because we're all unique individuals and we need to embrace that uniqueness. When I first started on this journey, some of my older colleagues were like oh, you're selling out. You can't. This is just not music, this is not how it works. But those same colleagues, when COVID hit, were scrambling to try. Some of them were working in grocery stores because they didn't have jobs anymore. So I don't call this selling out. I call this carving out my own space in this world, and that's what I want other musicians to feel confident and comfortable doing as well.
Austin McFarland:
And I think we have a greater impact when we on the world whether that's our small, like local community or even the broader, larger music community by doing these things and talking about them and sharing that it is possible. I feel like students now that I'm out talking to at various conferences in my various different roles, are seeing that that need is still there and higher education is not catching up Absolutely. So it's good to see people talking about it, because there are times, even as somebody that lives in that space and talks to people that are doing it all over the place, I still feel siloed in some of the work that I do on a local level because other people view it as a competition or they don't see that there is a need everywhere and openings for everybody.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Yes, and I think it's our personal mission to bring that to people, to let them know that that is possible.
Austin McFarland:
Yeah, it's not as hard as everybody seems to think it is, and there are so many benefits to it too not having to worry about is rent going to get paid, Can I afford to stop at Starbucks because I'm really needing coffee as I drive to the third school for the day? That kind of thing.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Oh, absolutely, and. I take four vacations a year. I love to travel and I prioritize that.
Austin McFarland:
See musicians, it is possible. So we were talking before the show and you said you had some stuff coming up. I would love to hear what you're working on.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
Absolutely so. I have a New Year's challenge. It's going to be starting in January and the wait list, by the time you hear this, should already be open for it, and if you get on that VIP list to get into it early, this is actually free. So all you've got to do is go and sign up and get on the VIP list and you can have access to this challenge free. It's going to be a five day challenge that's going to help you get your website found on Google, because I think this is so important.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
We all need to know how to do it. You were taught how to build your website in music school, but you weren't taught how to optimize it so that people find it on Google without having to type in the exact web address. They can just do a Google search and find it. So that's what this challenge is all about. There's going to be five days and you're going to get tangible actions you can take each day. There will be homework and I've not yet decided on the platform. I'm actually going to start quizzing people on my Instagram stories today on the best platform to host it, but, like I said, it's going to be free for five days. After this challenge is over. I am going to charge full price for this, for $4.97. So a lot more than free. So this is a really great value and, honestly, all you have to do is go sign up on the VIP list.
Austin McFarland:
That's awesome. I'll make sure I get in the show notes and everything when this comes out so people can run straight to that and get access to it. That's awesome. Well, it's been great talking to you and I'm so excited to see your challenge I may have to sign up for myself and just talking to you about your space in the music world and the things that you're doing. How else can people connect with you? I know you've mentioned a lot of things, but let's give them one short, really quick how to connect with you.
Dr. Tonya Lawson:
One short, really quick On Instagram, tiktok and YouTube all three. I'm at drdrtonyalawson, and that's the best way. My website is tonyalawsoncom. I try to make it as easy as possible.
Austin McFarland:
That's awesome, so go check out Dr Tanya Lawson and everything she's working on. There's some great content on SEO and website optimization and hope to see you all in the challenge because I know I'll be participating myself.
