Hip Hop Distribution » Web 2.0 Marketing

Using Google Trends for Global Music Friends

Mario Mendoza — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:33:00 +0000

I’ve been using Google Trends recently for expanding my reach. I was intrigued by meeting influential music bloggers all over the globe. Ultimately, there is no lost cause here in research as long as you work towards your sites promotion. These were some of the initial tasks I wanted to accomplish in this test:

Commenting on international blogs, increasing visibility
Seeking out international blog reviews of my music
Using Twitter and Facebook to build relationships with new friends

Why Use Google Trends?

Google Trends allows you to see the world’s interest in certain search terms tracked by Google over time. The nice thing you can see is georgraphic regions that showed increased search interest in your keyword. The accuracy of specific data may contain some inaccuracies due to data sampling issues and a variety of approximations, however, for our purposes the information will work.

In the image above I used the term “buy hip hop” as a general example to see any increasing or decreasing trends and also to find out what regions I could research to expand my music marketing efforts. I would recommend doing genre searches in relation to your music. What tags do you use to describe your style of music?

Regions Results

The image to your left shows some of the regions results where “buy hip hop” was being searched. You can see the different regions aside from the United States, such as South Africa, Canada,New Zealand, UK, and Australia.

Google trends is giving me an idea of some different places to reach out to globally where hip hop searches are flourishing. Now that I have a list of some countries to reach out to, I will do a Google search.

For instance, I will take UK as an example and search “Google UK” for their search engine listings. I will use the http://www.google.co.uk/ address to see search results that are UK specific and include world results.

I get a better chance to connect with bloggers in the UK by doing a variety of searches, such as “hip hop blogs” or “hip hop reviews”. I like to also refine the search and just select “pages from the UK” and resubmit

Positive Results

I was introduced to new hip hop bloggers in the UK and exchanged information over Twitter
I was able to ask what social networks are hot where they live
I can create a network slowly that can increase my online presence globally, exchanging promotion
I was able to find some blogs that review music from the UK and the US. Great for future free music initiatives and iTunes projects
I wouldn’t have found some of these friends if I didn’t try this, they didn’t show up in my regions’ search results. Worth the effort

The list is slowly building. It ties in with a recent article I wrote called “The Blogging Fan is My Publicist”. The plan is to develop future marketing partnerships, exchanging promotion as a possibility. I want to work on creating different channels where my music and content can be sent out to a relevant audience.

I want to reach out to overseas fans. Hip Hop overload in the US is very prevalent. Put your music in front of fans that want to hear it, just do some research. Write down a couple of search terms and search Google search results for that specific region. Get creative with your own searches. Your music dies when your promotion stops.

The Blogging Fan Is My Publicist

Mario Mendoza — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:11:28 +0000

Image provided by Danilo Rizzuti

More and more people are joining the blogging community and creating their own websites expressing their passions. It is very common to find a reader that leaves a comment who also has a blog. Why is this important for musicians?

I recently did a guest post and noticed some great opportunities.

Social networking makes it very important to acknowledge and help those that help you. Maybe that is not an approach that every musician wants to take, but from a small operation standpoint, I love the Idea.

While reading Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere 2009” I wanted to observe some blogging growth trends.

But as the 2009 State of the Blogosphere survey demonstrates, the growth of the blogosphere’s influence on subjects ranging from business to politics to the way information travels through communities continues to flourish. In a year when revolutions and elections were organized by blogs, bloggers are blogging more than ever, and the State of the Blogosphere is strong.- Jennifer McLean

The Blogging Fan provides an interesting aspect. I’m thinking about engaging with readers on my band site that also have blogs. If this aspect flourishes in internet marketing, why not music marketing?

This is not to neglect other fans, it is to explore who your fans are. How can you help each other? This is not a promotion that is done at random just to increase traffic, its to build relationships.

I see backlash on Twitter from fans disliking artists for their lack of engagement, or still pretending you are bigger than life and are too busy for your fans. I couldn’t agree with the fans more. I’ve even contacted artists with a similar fanbase as mine and was shocked to see how they viewed themselves as rockstars, when their follower size and website look proved otherwise.

What did I learn?

Reward those that show interest in you.

What Blogging Has Taught Me About Online Street Teams

I have always stressed how important gaining visitors is to your site, and even though sales can be sluggish, don’t give up your efforts to improve. One thing I think people overlook is how important of an asset your visitors are. Traffic is a good thing, the more the better. How can you make it work for you?

I was offered to do guest blog for a larger site and I was happy for the opportunity to be featured on a blog with such high visibility, seeing traffic trickle in and introducing a new form of visitors to my project.

In return, I wrote a review about the author and introduced my readers to his site and my article. I reciprocated because I wanted to, not because I had to. I appreciated the acknowledgement. I was more willing to promote his site in the future. I already enjoyed visiting the site, now I found myself talking about the site to others.

Create that feeling for your blogging fans. It doesn’t have to be a guest post. It’s about relationships and learning from one another.

The Blogging Fan Initiative

When your blog starts expanding, your fans start showing up in your comment section. Now it’s time to get to know some of your fans. Let them know you see them, and appreciate their time.

Let them share as your traffic rises. Traffic is what you can return to your fans. Bloggers love more eyeballs staring at their content.

The project is in the hands of the musician. How can you show love for your blogging fans?

“Fan of the Week”: find a fan that has a provided some good input to your music or has been a loyal reader. Highlight them in a post and introduce your listeners to them. Highlight who they are, what they do (their website) and where fans can learn more about them. Create a sense of community. Introduce fans to other fans.
Visit a Fan’s blog and participate: return the love if you actually enjoy their subject and comment on their blog. It doesn’t have to be music related, it just has to be genuine. Don’t fake it just to promote, genuinely get to know people. Build relationships.
Twitter Promotion: introduce your followers to your new friends and Retweet an article they wrote or a website they write for (only if you like it). Great way to show your love for new followers.
Social Bookmarking: If you like any aspect of their blog, Stumble or Digg an article. It takes less than a minute and helps their cause tremendously
Mention In Newsletter: some fans are producers, musicians or artists, they would probably love the promo

These are just some examples so get creative with some of your own techniques. You might find its easier than you think to build these bridges.

Blogging Fans Respect The Effort

For the independent band or musician, bloggers carry alot of weight. I even believe on a lower level, bloggers outweigh traditional press releases when established in the proper channels.

Don’t view it as a chance to get your music reviewed, view it as a way to increase your visibility with people who are more likely to return the favor in the future. It’s only selfish marketing when you don’t put in the effort to help others. Nobody owes you anything.

Practicing this allowed me to meet some generous souls out there that now I can call good friends. Without their help, I would not have the extra article Retweets, the new RSS subscribers, and the extra daily visitors that show increasing traffic. There is no right way to approach this, just get to it and get to know your fellow fans.

Improving Your Social Marketing Presence

Mario Mendoza — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:49:55 +0000

The goal of this initiative is not to find massive traffic, it’s to find relevant users and increase my content distribution. It is one thing to gauge your monthly visitors, but how active are you in resolving issues or continuing success in your online marketing campaign?

I was very pleased to see monthly stats rise, greater discussions and new social networks flourishing adding to my visibility. I got too comfortable in 2009 with just raw numbers, that my data analysis was lacking. You don’t have to be a scholar to make improvements: just show you care and improve.

Social Networking/Social Bookmarking/Search Engine

The title of this section describes the 3 facets of my marketing plan that I constantly try to improve. The stats below are provided by my favorite Wordpress plugin, Referrer Detector. This plugin allows me to see where my social and search engine traffic is coming from.

Referrer Detector is a Wordpress plugin that shows a greeting to users coming from various areas of the internet. For example, If someone found one of my articles on Digg and they click through to my site, the user finds a personalized message to vote up that article or become a friend on Digg.

Another example I see is if a user comes from finding me in search results in Google, I can customize the message to say “don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS”. Very helpful and provides a call to action to promote your efforts more.

The stats breakdown is very nice. I like to see the pie chart that comes out to gauge where all my efforts are going to. Break down the stats: daily/monthly/yearly/all time/ or specified dates.

Plan

I want to increase production and mainly my effectiveness. I feel like a fool because I was so focused on search engine marketing and the stats show it. I’m believing that the balance has to exist because social media networks are vital. Here are some stats for Hip Hop Distribution that I found interesting over this selected time period.

I’ve always felt strong about my search engine traffic. I’ve worked really hard doing research, and optimizing all my content, but even though the graph shows nice Google traffic, my Yahoo presence sucks. Analysis shows my efforts can still improve. Even a successful segment can be improved upon.

Stumbleupon and Digg provided nice referrals. Twitter showed improvement over last month and out did my Yahoo search engine referrals. How can I fix it?

Why not try using Yahoo Buzz to social bookmark some content and maybe it could gain a little momentum within that search engine. Will it work? Maybe. The proof lies in my test. Be creative with solutions, it’s always worth a shot if you are trying to improve your business.

Build your own stats and fix accordingly. The main thing here is what proof do YOU have that your social media campaign is effective or lacking?

Homework

The stats can be taken from your control panel if you are not using this plugin. Ask yourself these questions:

How many Social Bookmarking/Social Networking sites are you using?
Where is your content flourishing?
Where are you going to improve?

Don’t sit back and let your stats plateau, keep them rising. Analyze and think of ways to introduce your content into different channels. I am currently breaking down each social network and implementing some tasks to create engaging conversations, adding more followers, and spending time where it is most promising. The one troublesome fact of this analysis for me is my Facebook presence needs severe improvement. Live, Test and Learn.

Set a timetable where you want to monitor your activity. Blind promotion is over with in 2010. Stay active, your content distribution relies on it.

Feel free to Tweet and Stumble this article if you enjoy it.

9 Must Read Articles for DIY Musicians

Mario Mendoza — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:10:44 +0000

Staring at my old Eric B and Rakim cassette next to a CD and flash drive made me think of how prepared am I for the next fundamental changes that might occur to my music operation once I get settled. As independent musicians, we need to create, maintain, critique and improve our methods for online promotion, or get left in the trash. The main thing I like about music marketing is that you can customize a marketing plan according to your needs. Pick the brains of fellow musicans and marketing experts and create a strong plan that can survive.

Agree to disagree. Prove your marketing strategies with numbers, build upon small success and do what works for your wallet as well. I selected some articles I found very informative that cover topics very important to every evolving music operation: Search engine optimization, album release planning, focusing on small or large fan bases, and embracing imagination with releasing your music.

Audible Hype

Justin Boland sparks the importance of planning when it comes to your album release and also embeds the importance of knowing your genre’s demographics and how to use it to your advantage.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin breaks down the music industry and the fundamental shifts which created opportunities and threats. Social media and interaction is at the heart and soul of creating that “tribe”.

The Live Music Talk

Music Think Tank

Music Think Tank gets musicians in gear with focus on work ethic and building a solid fan base from the ground up. Independent success is closer than you think.

Gen Y Rockstars

Greg Rollet delivers some insight on affiliate marketing for musicians. Creating extra revenue streams for your music is necessary, and goes a long way in offsetting costs. You don’t have to be chessy with sales to make a little change.

Major League Affiliate Music Marketing

Flatacre

Peter Holmes discusses branding from the ground up for success. Too many musicians rely on gimmicks leading to short lived fame.

Want to learn about music marketing? Don’t listen to major record companies.

Plugola Inc

Erik Peterson explains the importance of search engine optimization and music blogging. Small steps lead to major improvements in search engine rankings and traffic. When search engine spiders crawl your site, make sure they know what your website is about

SEO Basics for Musicians

Digipendent

Great article that discusses why we should encourage fans to share our music through social media. Use the tools if we have them.

3 Methods to Encourage Music Sharing

The All Purpose Blogging Musician

Mario Mendoza — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:13:47 +0000

Tailor the Right Mixture

The ultimate goal is creating a music marketing plan that works. Music 2.0 has offered an amazing amount of options and tools for independent musicians. The one thing I have realized is that every music operation is unique in its own sense.

Finding the right mixture is dependent now on the expectations of the artist. I’ve put a big emphasis on blogging for my Label in hopes of reaching value in time to come. Maybe its my Finance degree yelling at me to keep investing in this stock that is bound to take off.

The reason I find value is monthly visitors keep increasing and digital sales are coming in slowly but surely. The key component is converting sales. It’s a common problem many internet marketers face with monetizing their blogs and its a big issue for musicians. How can we become creative and use successful principles in relation to our music?

I want to take a pro active approach and test out different ideas that will take time but will be worth the effort. The first experiments will involve building Mailing list exchanges and affiliate marketing opportunities.

Mailing List Exchanges

write down goals and specifics to achieve those goals

Every musician needs a mailing list. Nothing new here, but we have to think about what do we want to get from our mailing list?

The discouraging thing for many new bloggers is building a mailing list takes some time and then they neglect its importance. I want to plan networking with fellow bloggers and exchange mailing list opportunities and let the test begin.

Step 1 involves you getting to know fellow music bloggers and establishing relationships. The main reason I see this as a good move is we got to think like an artist on a tour. Most tours have several opening acts that are the warm ups for the big show. The opening acts generally are in related genres and the opening acts benefit from the exposure to the bigger fanbase.

Why not treat our mailing list with a Pandora mentality? “If you enjoyed this song then you might enjoy hearing this band”. The key here is not whoring it out. Work with artists whose music you enjoy and brainstorm with these musicians. Offer to promote their song/album, blog article in a newsletter in exchange for the same effort. The power here lies in the numbers: building stronger exposure and branding while establishing a fanbase and networking.

Your blog visitors are just as important as your mailing list subscribers. These assets were built from your hard effort, now its time to put them to work for you.

The plan now involves talking with hungry musicians like you who are willing to share exposure. Take time to find the right partnerships. Power in numbers.

Affiliate Marketing and Music

Affiliate marketing provides a great way for you to get some extra income for your music operation. You essentially promote other services or products and in exchange get a commission. Many bloggers use this to make some extra money to cover hosting costs and promotion. I promote only products I use, so I feel comfortable promoting it and relaying my experience with it.

I am looking to flip this script and have other people promote for me. Affiliate promotion is ready for the music arena. This is not new but I personally have never been offered the opportunity to promote a musician’s cd and am shocked. The incentives through Amazon and iTunes affiliates provides a low commission rate, thus low incentive for people to promote.

As my label emerges, I would love to reward faithful fans with a commission for promoting my album. You share some album sales but may gain long term customers and loyalty. Who knows, even promoting an affiliate in your newsletter. Earn a commission while rewarding someone who is helping you. Monetize where you can and do it in a Ron Burgundy manner, “Stay Classy San Diego”.

Giving away some money to affiliates is not a bad thing. You would have to hire a street team for that kind of promotion and pay some money anyway. Share the wealth and watch your sales expand. The one thing I will be looking for is finding how to set up your own affiliate program or better solutions to establish this plan.

Why Is This Important for My Band

Judge what fits right for you in your operation. Some musicians use multiple blogs to promote their band while others prefer traditional methods. Do what you feel comfortable with. Most musicians play multiple roles to increase chances for success. The important part is finding what you enjoy and working hard at that goal. Build a fundamental business, with strategies in place, and watch your expansion take place.

The planning now begins and building these relationships with fellow musicians to stimulate sales and exposure. Selling music is just one aspect of a music operation for many bands. Build equity through your blog and use that leverage to expand on your ideas.

Google Reader is My Music Marketing Apprentice

Mario Mendoza — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:45:24 +0000

Recently I’ve noticed alot of questions from musicians wanting to know how and why they should use Google Reader and I wanted to give a couple of reasons I find it so helpful. Google Reader is a great tool for organizing your music marketing campaigns. I began using it because it was recommended to help surf my favorite sites and keep updated to when they write new posts. If you have a Gmail account you can use that as your login to Google Reader. The set up is quick.

Visit Google Reader. Sign in or sign up if you don’t have a Gmail account. Now you can start importing your favorite websites and organizing them into their own folders.

Most browsers let you know if a site has a RSS feed so you can import that address into Google Reader. This is the blue button that is to the right of the address, in the picture above. I know Firefox and Safari display this Rss Feed Icon in their browser. You can click on that icon in your browswer and it will take you to a page where you can add this address to your account automatically.

Click and save

Once you add it to your account you can later organize them into specific folders. For instance, I have a some of my favorite music production sites in one folder and some of my favorite tech sites in another folder. The organization will allow you to absorb valuable information all in one place.

Why Do Musicians Need Google Reader

Discover the importance of a good Headline: when your blog is stripped down, how is your content going to grab your reader. What stands out? Do you need more pics?
Google Alerts: create a folder with your band name keywords or any keywords you want to track, delivered to your reader folder. Great way to monitor your brand and do research at the same time. I set some keyword alerts for my emcee name and one for “music supervisors” to keep informed on music licensing opportunities, getting closer contact to better music submissions. Job opportunities are always on the mind.
Keep Updated with Music Marketing Sites: learn FREE tips from music marketing bloggers around the web. Find sites you enjoy reading and keep updated with the latest marketing techniques for promoting online. I have at least 30 music marketing sites I enjoy reading. I go to articles I like and it makes my commenting increase while learning. Mix and match techniques from various blogs and keep your marketing vision active(feel free to sign up to my RSS feed).
Subscribe to some Blogging sites: Great way to rejuvenate your blog, learn from the pros. Discover free advice from professional bloggers helping your band gain more visitors, keeping your business alive by implementing techniques to increase your unique visitors. Learn from those who are good at what they do and keep teaching yourself. Sometimes we just need a little direction
Subscribe to Indie Music Blogs for your Genre:
Introduce yourself to these bloggers and let them know you have signed up to their RSS feed, might help opening lines of communication. Subscribing will keep you updated on new opportunities to submit your music for review, you will never miss an article. Build your press out, increase your band backlinks, find better ways to get your music reviewed and increase your monthly visitors

Use Google Reader to your advantage. Time is valuable and Google Reader keeps me informed every day by quickly visiting my favorite sites and keeping updated on news around me and my music operation.

DIY musicians are getting information overload on a daily basis, this way you can keep a hold on your favorite sites. With social bookmarking, social networking, and tons of valuable blogs out their, we can organize our thoughts and filter to relevant information we choose.

Their is an argument that some don’t like the fact that some RSS readers don’t visit your website, they just view your articles in the reader. I think these subscribers are very valuable because they have shown interest in your website and are looking forward to new content. I keep the faith alive that these users will eventually click links that we want to direct them to, such as Album landing pages and merchandise.

Comments Breathe Life Into Band Promotion

Mario Mendoza — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:03:53 +0000

While spending time writing for my band blog, I’ve been constantly monitoring whats been working with increasing our unique visitors. The weekly blog writing and social bookmarking has worked wonders seeing a continuous increase in monthly visitors and social networking is adding a great marketing attack. One key stat was seeing the number of external links bringing in visitors to the website, due to commenting. The mission is simple: share my opinion and give my blog an identity.

The more time I dedicated to commenting around the web, the better the results. The key here was breathing life into every article by promoting each individual article, not just the home address of my blog. Professional bloggers around the web have mentioned this technique as a way of keeping older articles in the mix and keeping them from reaching the search engine graveyard.

Little Step, Big Footprints

Since I dedicate time to writing articles and socially sharing them and bookmarking them, I owe it to my hard work to promote each article, it is a representation of your blog. Here are some important things to note about commenting:

Keeps music posts alive
You are actively pursuing Targeted Visitors and directing them to specific content
Open the door to networking: (bloggers love comments)
Creating more entry points to your blog

I am constantly adding sites to my Google Reader that would aid my efforts. Be picky and find sites you enjoy visiting. If you haven’t done so yet, get a Gravatar to make your comments stand out: This will associate an image with your comments, which is great for your branding.

Disqus is also a great service and tool for web comments. I use Disqus on this blog and it is great for making comments easier and more interactive, and its free. Its great for tracking and managing your comments and replies.

One useful feature from Disqus is you can import the RSS feed of your latest comments into other sites such as Friendfeed and have your comments spark more discussion. For example, the other day I received a comment on a post that was about 3 months old and I replied to it. This conversation was imported into my Friendfeed room showing both the comment and reply and the link to the old article. This way my Friendfeed subscribers can join the discussion and visit an article that was 3 months old.

Take an older article and promote it. Find other sites with relevant topics and leave your opinion. The days you are not writing like a newsreporter can become great days to leave comments and introduce the web to your blog. Make your articles work for you!

Steprep: Monitor Your Band Reputation

Mario Mendoza — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:51:14 +0000

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.

Musicians Need Friendfeed

Mario Mendoza — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:48:47 +0000

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.

Create a room and establish your brand

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.

Taking a Fried Detour: New Roads Ahead

Mario Mendoza — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:16:44 +0000

Even the monitors are listening

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:

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