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.

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

1. 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?
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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
5. 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.