Search Engine Optimization

SEO 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  is basically the optimization of your website so that the search engine’s like you enough to rank you up high on the search engines.  Search engines like google utilize “robots” to scan just about every website and rate them bases on a variety of factors.

If you are ranked high for competitive keywords you will get an unbelievable amount of traffic to your site.  However, you should not expect to get on the first page of google any time soon for a competitive term such as “rock music” which has over 306 million results.  But it shouldn’t be a stretch to get a high rank for less general keywords if you just know the ins an outs of SEO. There are a variety of ways to optimize your sites so they are search engine friendly and I’ll list them below:

1. Page Title – The title of your page is very important.  The search engines really pick up on this.  Your title should include your keywords or key phrases and provide a description of your site. They want to know what your site is about so tell them that. But do not repeat your keywords or phrases.  You will probably get penalized and it just looks bad.
2. Copywriting - This is the text on the page that your visitors see. This is an extremely important factor in search engine optimization because both the search engines and your visitors rely on the text on the page to understand what the page is about.
3. Backlinks- Links that link to your website.  Write articles about your music and post links to your website.  The more links there are the more likely your site will be “crawled” by the search engine spiders.  One way to do this is to have multiple blogs about your music that link to your site.  Make sure to ping your blogs after every post (you can use pingoat.com or if you have wordpress it just does it for you I believe).
4. Update – Update your site as frequently as you can.  The “search engine spiders” like this and will rank you higher if you consistently add content.
5. Navigation - Keep the navigation tabs to the left.  The search engine robots usually begin reading pages from the top left, also it makes it more convenient for the user.
6. What to Avoid- Avoid Javascript, Frames, and Flash.  These all increase the load time of your website which the search engine robots don’t like, plus most robots do not read Javascript. Also stay away from horizontal scrolling, it’s just annoying.

Sorry this is the my first post for a few days but keep posted I have a lot more stuff on the way.

 PEAAACE

Where to sell?

If you’re at the point where you are looking for online music stores to sell you tunes at, then you’re reading the right post.  In the online music scene, the more sites you are selling your site through the better.  Most are free, therefore you are just make sweet profit.  I’ve composed a list of a few sites that I have had a good experience with.

JnT Music Store

 I recently posted about this music store.  If you visit the site you will notice that it is very new.  But I definitely suggest you check it out and at least send the owner an email.  The creator of the site has countless other websites with a lot of success.  If anyone can bring you sales this guy can.  Right now, you will probably notice, there are only a few genres listed, but don’t let this deter you, more will be added as needed.  If you decided you would like to sell through the JnT Music Store just drop an email at tarview@gmail.com with the following information:

Your band/artist name

The Cd title

The amount you want out of it

Either a graphic or a URL to a graphic for the Cd

A small bio about your band

A small write up about your Cd

Note: I’ve recently been working with the the site creator and have offered some advice.  The site incorporates all that makes the other sites beneficial and does not include just about any of the drawbacks.  You will make more profit, have your money delivered to you faster, and sell more Cd’s.  Also, if you are one of the first 50 artists to sell through the JnT Music Store, you will gain free promotional services through me once my site launches.

 www.jntmusicstore.com

CD Baby

 An online record store that sells CD’s by independent artists.  Here’s an summary of CD Baby:

They only sell CDs that come directly from the musicians. No distributors. Musicians send us CDs. They warehouse them, sell them to you, and pay the musicians directly.

Cool thing: in a regular record deal or distribution deal, musicians only make $1-$2 per CD, if they ever get paid by their label. When selling through CD Baby, musicians make $6-$12 per CD, and get paid weekly.

In business since March 1998. They’re the 2nd-largest seller of independent CDs on the web, 2nd only to Amazon.

Cd Baby is a great service.  It is the #2 service to only Amazon. They have a lot to offer and provide pretty good customer service.  I would definitely suggest you sell through this site.  It does have $35 dollar fee involved, but if you check out their site they explain why there is a fee and in my opinion it is completely justified.  For more information you can check out there site through the following link… http://cdbaby.net/

MP3.com

With over 1 million visitors accessing the site daily, Mp3.com offers a great opportunity for any artist to generate exposure and ultimately build profits.  Here is what Mp3 has to offer you:

• Non-exclusive agreement
• Increase exposure
• Free artist web page and unlimited disk space
• Feature compilations in each genre
• Cd program
• Payback for playback
• Premium artist service
• Track your success daily
• Music licensing
• Promo auctions
• Event calenders
• And more…

Mp3.com is definitely worth a peak.  You should have a page on there by now, if you don’t then I suggest you get to that.  They can really help you out so sign up for a free artist account already.

 www.mp3.com

Amazon

Amazon.com is the Internets No. 1 retailer and has customers in all 50 U.S. states and more than 160 countries around the world. The name Amazon.com is immediately recognized for service, reliability, and security.  With so many people searching for music on Amazon, your music is bound to be found by some new customers. 

There is also absolutely no cost in joining Amazon.com.  The only fee’s you will have to pay is the cost of shipping your Cd’s when they reorder. Plus there is no exclusive agreement, so you are not limited to how or where you market and sell you music.

Amazon has a lot to offer:

• Get your own Amazon.com web page
• Upload mp3’s to help sell Cd’s
• Quick shipping and fulfillment
• Cover art, track listings, and liner notes
• Ease for customers to discover you
• Online sales and inventory reports
• Automated reordering
• Easy restocking
• Quick payment terms
• Access to market resource center

www.amazon.com/music

P.S. To recieve updates on my blog you can subscribe to my RSS feed which can be found up at the top rightish.  Also if you’d like learn a bunch of information that I’m yet to post on the site and may never then I suggest you sign up for my 4 day music promo crash course by clicking on the orange box below the blue text up on the right or emailing me at musicpromote@gmail.com.  Good luck to all of you out there, and stick with your music!

Best Regards, 

Jon

Free Hugs

A great way to promote yourself can be through a video.  You have probably heard about the video on youtube called “Free Hugs”.  If you haven’t, or would just like to check it out again, I’ve posted it below.  Well anyway, what happened with this video is pretty phenomenal.  It was created by the lead singer of the band “Sick Puppies”, an Australian rock band.  The lead singer filmed his friend, Juan Mann on his ‘free hugs’ campaign.  They then added the Sick Puppies song All the Same to it and posted it on youtube.  A good friend of mine showed me this video a while back, but since then the video has gone viral.  When I first heard of it, it had been viewed just over 35,000 times.  Now it’s been viewed 19,617,068 times and going up every minute.  The Sick Puppies have gone from relative nobodies, to huge fame.  At the moment they are touring with Evanescence.

 There is a lot that you can take out of this.  As you can see, these guys really did not have to do much to make this video.  I’m not saying to do the same thing, that would probably not be looked at too favorably by a lot of people.  But be creative, have fun, and create something that people will be touched by. 

The Sick Puppies video has caused a “free hugs” movement worldwide.  Thousands of people can be found all over doing just the same thing.  I can’t tell you how many people had “free hug” signs at warped tour this year.  This is a fairly easy way to promote and all you have to do is a create a video, post it, expose it to some people, then just wait and see.  Creating a video can be a blast, let your viewers see how passionate you are about your music and in turn you will see yourself on the receiving end of other peoples passions.

Happy Belated Halloween

Sup guys,

Sorry I didn’t post yesterday I was having some Internet troubles.  All is good today though so far.  Crossing my fingers.  Anyway, I have some candy for you that I recieved recently.

A buddy of mine launched a website the other day.  It’s a music store where you can sell your tunes to the public.  It’s not too much right now, but it is open for business and a lot is going to be added to it.  This guys main job is Internet marketing and he’s a master of optimizing sites so he will get you a ton of traffic.  If you’re interested just email him at tarview@gmail.com with the following information:

• Your band/artist name
• The Cd title
• The amount you want out of it
• Either a graphic or a URL to a graphic for the Cd
• A small bio about your band
• A small write up about your Cd

If you’d like to check out the site you can find it through the following link: http://www.jntmusicstore.com

Effective Music Marketing Video

Hello all,

I was looking through youtube and I came across this vid and thought it may be of some help to you guys.  It’s a good video and he really explains the main points of music marketing in a very easy to understand way. He doesn’t really talk about anything important until about a minute and half into the video so you can skip ahead to that point if you don’t feel like watching it all. Hope this helps you out, I posted the link below: 

Effective Music Marketing

 To sign up for my newsletter and to receive my 4 day music promotion crash course click Here

“Indie Contact Newsletter”

Howdy all,

I subscribed to a newsletter awhile back called the “Indie Contact Newsletter” but didn’t receive anything until today.  It linked me to a site that should prove really pretty helpful for a lot of you whether your Indie or not. So I’d at least give it a peak, it has a list of a ton of sources that can really help with your music promotion. Hope this helps ya out:

 Indie Contact Newsletter

P.S. Towards the bottom it lists of “20 Steps to Creating a Successful Blog For Your Band” which can really benefit you if you’re working with blog.

My Music Promo Crash Course

Hey guys,

 I’ve recently created a 4 day crash course on music promotion.  It will be sent to you via email over four days.  It contains a lot of information on many different approaches to music promotion and in depth explanations on how you can promote your music using each approach.  I have a lot of experience with every single approach and they all have their own benefits.  It’s a lot of information so I decided to split it up over a four day span so you could digest it one day at a time and practice it before you learned the next step.  And in case you were wondering, it does not cost anything.

If you’re interested in receiving my 4 day email crash course, you can sign up for it by clicking on the box below:

A Couple Cheap Ways to Promote

This is directed more at the new emerging bands and artists. By doing these two things you will look more professional and it will give you an advantage over your other local bands, because chances are, they aren’t.

1. Business Cards - Cheap and very easy to circulate.  Hand them out after shows, to new people you meet, etc.  A couple business cards can go a long way and it makes your band look as if you are serious about what you’re doing.  A site that a few bands that I know have used is ooprint. Right now you can you get 100 for free and I think you only have to pay a few dollars for shipping and handling.

2. Stationary - Having letters and such with your bands name or logo on it real gives of a sense of professionalism.  People will respect your band more and know that you aren’t just another local band.

Quick Tip

Now this isn’t necessarily an easy way to promote your music but it can be extremely effective.  The basic idea is that you create a website (about anything) that is going to attract a lot of visitors.  You don’t have to be selling anything.  Just supply the reader with information on something that a lot of people will be interested in coming to your site to read.  Then you add your song to the site, so whenever somebody visits they hear the song and see what the name of the song is and the band.  A friend of mine did this with a site just on birthday gift ideas.  He posted ideas for gifts for different ages and genders. He received over a 1000 visitors a day and every time they checked out the site they heard his band playing in the background.  It took a couple months for the site to gain popularity but once it did his band almost almost doubled their cd sales.  An easier way to do this is to just contact various sites and see if they would like to play your song on it.  Either way it’s a great way to expose your music to a lot of people.  Hope this helps.  Thanks for reading.

Music Promotion Tips 6-10 (Your Website)

6. Know What You’re Doing – Take the time learn how to set up and manage your website.  If you don’t want to set it up yourself you can pay somebody to do it for you.  You should at least know how to update it and manage it yourself once you get it up and running.  Paying someone to make a website for you can be costly so be prepared.  Just take your online business seriously and in turn your fans will as well.

7. Reviews - Ask people write reviews of your music.  Post them on your site.  Sometimes all a new potential fan needs is a little confirmation that other people enjoy your music as well.  It’s also helpful if you can get people to write reviews about your music in forums, review sites, etc.

8. Background - Create an “About” section or something along those lines.  Let people know who you are, your history, why you are different from every other band or artist out there.  I can’t tell you how many times I have come across bands website and found myself reading about their band and their background until I finished.  It gives a sense of a connection with the band and makes the music that much more personal.

 9. Build a Community - Add forums or message boards to your site where your fans can communicate and keep them returning to your site.  If they feel like they have friends on your site they will feel an even larger connection.

10. Shows - Inform people of when you are performing, where, and what benefits there are of attending.  Most likely these people will spread the word and bring friends.  And if these friends like your music, then they will spread the word to more people.  It can snowball pretty quickly.  So many times I have been invited to random concerts by buddies of mine and left with a cd and t-shirt in hand.  Advertising for your shows can be easy and the benefits can be huge. (I’ll soon make a post on how you can better advertise for your shows).