Every band needs to pay attention to their online reputation. I created a post about a month ago that was called “Set Up Alerts for Music Promotion Campaign” that talked about using services like Google Alerts or Monitter for Twitter where you can see what is being talked about online, in particular your band and music. These tools allow you to find out what is being said and if positive, you can join in conversations around the web. If negative, you could start your clean up campaign and work on creating better press.

I received a comment from recent visitor Sexymathematics and he had a great recommendation to check out Steprep as another alternative to Google Alerts with better features. This is the demo video for the free service:

The key slogan here is “Monitor, Manage and Build”. This process gives musicians an active role in their positive promotion. This service allows you to rate the comments found around the web and taking the positive comments and placing them in a widget. This is a very nice feature for artists.

You can use this widget to let fans be introduced to other places people can talk about your music while promoting real opinions. The claim of this service is that if you place this widget with positive comments on your social profiles around the web, the links pointing back to the stories of your choice will show up higher in the search results. The end result, positive comments get more visibility.

I will definitely give Steprep a shot and add it to the arsenal of brand monitoring for musicians.

Technorati Tags: steprep

When I first installed Wordpress, I was on an endless quest for the perfect free theme out there for our band blog. The deciding factor for me came when I decided what I wanted from my layout. Any free theme out there can be a Wordpress theme for musicians.

The key is obtaining a layout that will display your message and vision. Create some mock layouts on scratch paper, visit some artist websites you like and observe what attracts you to some of your favorite sites. The quest now begins with your concept. I created a list of free Wordpress themes I found online that contain different layouts and endless possibilities.

Examine different layouts. Check out how some themes accentuate the header image better. This might be useful if you have some nice artwork to display on your site. Some themes have wider columns and can allow you to put your social network links, album display, and ads if you choose. Find themes also that have fonts and color schemes you like. These are customizable but when I first started. I tried to find one that didn’t require as much customization so I could focus on my message as soon as possible.

I will be adding some random themes here for musicians that want to get thinking on what kind of layouts fit their scheme. There is no right answer to this quest. Focus on a clean theme that is SEO friendly, easy to navigate, pleasing to your eyes, and is not too noisy looking. Remember, your search engine visibility relies on your message and not on your display: Your display should complement your content.

Technorati Tags: free wordpress themes, wordpress themes for musicians

My recent marketing quests had me organizing my time according to different tasks to address. The main thing was promoting Fried Roots with a consistent social media approach. Writing articles for our band and giving away free music has been helping increase our unique visitors. We found our way back on to Youtube and updated with a video for “Calling Lost Angels“. With so many updates, Friendfeed always keeps my marketing working for me.

Friendfeed acts as a aggregator for your social media profiles and imports your activity on those networks. If you are familiar with Twitter, it definitely has a similar feel. Your friends can comment on the things you share and you will see their replies in real time.
It’s great not hitting the refresh button.

You can create your own profile and import blog feeds and many social networks like Youtube, Digg, Twitter and the list goes on. Once your profile is setup you can subscribe to other users and vice versa.

People now can see your activity on various networks. This is great. For instance, you create a group around your band name, import your blog rss feed, your Youtube videos, your Last.fm feed, and your Twitter. Customize your group with useful information, don’t flood rooms with useless, unrelated activity. Let people know more about you, and let them know where they can find you. Remember, some people only use specific networks, so you can cover your ground in reaching more fans.

The main reasons I like Friendfeed are its viral possibilities. For instance, someone is subscribed to you and they comment on an article link you submitted about your blog. That comment is now on that user’s profile and being shown to his/her subscriber list. Great way to get more free promotion and exposure. Secondly, I like the fact that you can create a group and let users submit their thoughts and content into your group. It gives me the feel of a real time forum.

Friendfeed is also great for your search engine ranking. When I do a search for this blog in Google for “hip hop distribution”, the Hip Hop Distribution Friendfeed room shows up at #9, complementing my other top articles listed. That is great news for musicians. Imagine a fan does a search for your band name and finds your Friendfeed group on the first page of results. It can give them a great summary of where to find you in this social confusion called Web 2.0.

Feel free to share some music marketing ideas, thoughts, articles or even music in the Hip Hop Distribution group Introduce yourself and lets begin the real networking.

There is a great article on Mashable describing ways to optimize your Friendfeed experience, if that is of interest to you. Organize your social media campaign and see what needs to be addressed.

Technorati Tags: Friendfeed

Devising a music marketing plan for Fried Roots requires strategy, planning and implementation. The lack of recent articles here has been due to the fact that I’ve been working with my label partner, Shifty J, on increasing our monthly visitors to our blog and increasing our music production. Hip Hop Distribution is our blog to keep us honest and follow through with all that we attempt. The concept here is simple: create a plan and complete it.

We realized we were due to sit down and start from scratch, breathing in some new marketing life. Shifty J began the talks first with our production schedule. We have multiple projects that we want to release, so we listed the projects and order of importance.

Secondly, I decided to discuss web promotion. We needed to talk about how often we as partners were going to update our content. We began to delegate tasks of what needed to be done. Writing articles is just one step. There are other factors such as:

1. Promoting each individual article, not just the website
2. Commenting: Even as little as 1 comment a day can go a long way
3. Creating a better internal linking strategy on our blog, Google likes it
4. Social Media Aggregation through Friendfeed and Social Bookmarking
5. Keyword research: High traffic keywords with lower competition
6. Web calendar: Delegate specific tasks to complete throughout the week
7. Free Music

Creating accountability is a big factor. You can accomplish more in less time if you just set goals, track progress and find your groove. I will be posting more SEO related articles soon and describe what techniques show a lot of promise.

What we have learned from this process is organization can save your sanity. We had a tendency to doing a lot of these tasks. There was no way to track how much work each of us put into the business. We took care of separate tasks and we could have had a bigger impact as a team. Aside from the business talk, check out one of our tracks, “How You Play” by Lost Thought, Shifty J and Jwoods. It always comes down to the music.

Technorati Tags: Fried Roots, Lost Thought, Shifty J

It’s time to grade the effectiveness of my marketing efforts over the last month. The key for me has been trying to weed out the weak parts of my music marketing plan and sub in new and possibly more effective methods. Discuss what is working and what doesn’t. Areas I want to evaluate are:

1. Time Management Through Planning
2. Social Networking
3. Writing/Content Efforts
4. Having Others Promote My Music

Time Management Through Planning

Time management has been a big issue for me. The main thing is keeping a consistent plan of attack. My effort was there in terms of my marketing. I was using social networks to promote, writing on my band blog and participating in discussions around the web. The main problem was keeping track of what I had to do in the future and also remembering what I did.

I needed to schedule better, to spend more of my time on what is working and I also need to analyze what I did on specific days and use this information to my advantage.

Solution: Google Calendar. I will use a calendar program to address these issues:

1. Plan Out Days for Writing Content
2. Plan Out Days for Commenting on Other Blogs
3. Schedule Times To Work On Linking Strategy
4. Scheduling Studio Time to Work on Music
5. Spread My Time, Lessen My Daily Workload

Social Networking

Which Social Networks am I using? Twitter has been great as a social network but I need to see which other ones are effective as well. First thing I want to do is make sure I update all my current profiles to reflect my current mission. Make sure all my information is consistent with what I am currently promoting.

The main thing I want to do is:

1. Schedule Hours to work on Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook
2. Start using Friendfeed more to create Discussions around My Blog
3. Add New Social Networks and Gradually Integrate Them
4. Use Each Social Network for Conversation not Promotion

Writing or Content Production

I want to keep a consistent writing formula for my blogs. Your planning and then writing are critical to your monthly visitors. Step 1 with getting a calendar setup is going to be key here.

Brainstorm on article topics and set up a schedule over the next couple of weeks when you want to post them. One good tip I read online I found at ProBlogger. Generate article ideas off of your last couple of posts. Most readers want you to expand on your recent articles into more areas. Take your last article and think of a couple of other article topics related to it.

If you don’t have a lot of articles, then use your main categories and think of a couple of article topics to fill in your categories. Build an information resource around your writing and music.

Having Others Promote My Music

Are you prepared to have others promote your music? This is an important question. I’ve had people ask me, “I’d love to help promote your music, how could I help?” Looking back at it, I should have had definitive answers on how to help promote my music. For instance here are some things you could ask the willing friends and fans to do:

1. “Sign up for my mailing list and recommend a song to a friend, We’d really appreciate it!”
2. “Are you on Twitter? You could tweet some articles from my site to your friends”
3. “If you use social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, You could bookmark and share some posts with your fans”
4. “Since we both have music blogs, let’s discuss writing some articles on our blogs promoting both of our sites”

This is just an example of creating a list of specific tasks that can increase your online visibility and build your marketing team. You can ask certain friends to complete one task while having other friends complete another task. This is important so you don’t wear out your welcome when friends are willing to help. Little by little, you can have a small group of friends turn into a powerful marketing attack. Be prepared to have others promote your music.

Technorati Tags: music marketing, music promotion