Student Spotlight: Kean alumnus shares experience launching own music site
By Dominique Vinas
After graduation, all students are terrified about finding a job, especially if you are journalism major. Nick Mojica, 24-year-old alumni of Kean University, had experienced that exact scare after his graduation in August 2013.
While he was an undergraduate, he was a reporter for The Tower writing for the sports and arts and entertainment sections, doing mostly music or video game stories. When his graduation started slowly creeping up on him, he decided to get an internship.
In looking for internships he was very proactive because he knew he needed the experience. He went to the Cablevision website and applied for jobs. Three weeks later he got a call saying to come in and he practically got the job right there on the spot. His Newsday internship started in June and ended in July, then for the next month he interned at News 12 through the end of August.
During his Newsday internship in Manhattan, he was a web production assistant and gained experience working directly with the web editors.
“I made galleries for the site, as well as gather stories from the Associated Press and package them for the site,” said Mojica.
During his internship, Newsday New York was shut down. However, they were able to move him to News 12 where he did almost the same type of work.
“In addition I also got to take the script from the hourly news broadcast and turn them into stories for the website,” said Mojica. Even though these internships ended when he finally graduated in August, he was pleased with all he had learned.
“I learned a lot at both internships about how a news room works and S.E.O [search engine optimization], which is helping me tremendously now,” said Mojica.
After graduation, Mojica had a rough time finding a writing job, so he decided to start his own free music blog, since music has always been one of his passions. This was his clutch, his only hope. He called it “themusicstash.wordpress.com” and used it to post new songs, videos, reviews, etc. He soon noticed that traffic was slow, so he wanted to buy the domain name. It is now called “themusicstash.com.”
After that was accomplished, he noticed his friend was running his own blog as well, so he asked him if he wanted to join him to help him increase traffic on the site.
“He has a strong presence on twitter, so I figured with his social media following and writing skills, we could actually run a good site,” said Mojica.
His friend mostly posts songs and videos and Mojica edits what he posts. This is where the skills he learned at his two internships really come into play. Mojica likes to post more stories about music.
“One recent post made it to the front page of Google’s search results,” said Mojica. It was a post entitled “Are Critics overreacting to Jay-Z’s Anne Mae line in Beyoncé’s new Drunk in Love song?” The post has over 3,500 views, and Mojica was overwhelmed with amazement when he saw this and it was pure motivation to keep exceling in his career.
He knew he needed to make it a legit website so he moved to Blue Host. They now host his server, and “themusicstash.com” is a full-fledged website owned by Nick himself.
“Traffic has steadily been increasing and I am now able to have ads on my site so I can make money off of doing this,” said Mojica.
His ultimate goal is to become a website that people know and want to visit.
“When people want new music or want to read reviews, I want them to go to ‘themusicstash’,” said Mojica.
The hardest part in this whole experience is getting the name out there. To get to the first page of google search results, you have to be a site that gets traffic. Promoting is what he’s all about.
“There’s a link on my twitter profile, google+, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, pretty much all over the internet!” said Mojica.
He hopes can expand his website using all the knowledge and skill he acquired as an undergraduate and through his internships.