If you are just beginning your band blogging mission, this list will help give you an idea of things to monitor and improve your marketing attack.

If you have been blogging for a while, this list is great to make sure your focus is on point. I have been doing recent band consultations and found it necessary to create this PDF. Blogging is one aspect of a music operation but can open up endless networking and promotion opportunities.

This list has made it possible for me to reach a wider audience with my band blog and with Hip Hop Distribution. These 5 factors made my monthly visits increase.

Benchmark your Progress

When I first began it was hard for me to get a steady stream of traffic to my music. I started with getting a couple hundred visitors for the month, wondering what the hell I needed to do to.

When I would check out my stats all I would see is this “roller coaster” graph, watching monthly visits go up and down. I have been a big Search Engine Marketing nut, to say the least, and had been trying different techniques to implement into my operation.

The hard part was finding information that was relevant to music marketing. My initial concerns were how to keep traffic improving, without paying for advertisements, mainly focusing on search engine traffic, organically.

The website’s purpose doesn’t change whether you are a full time artist or a nighttime musician, creating tunes from your home. The website is your mouthpiece, your business card, your storefront, and your forum to connect with people.

The amount of money you want to make is really dependent on your effort and consistency. It’s really easy to create a revenue stream for your music, and offset costs of domain purchases, and web hosting. I did it and all it took was understanding your goals, setting a plan and executing.

The big thing to avoid initially is getting overwhelmed with too much promotion. This led to burnout and at the time I wasn’t grading how good my promotion was and what was working. This was an important step.

Don’t waste time; it will catch up with you in the long run. I created this sheet to evaluate what was working and what showed potential. From here I could create a solid foundation and add to the list different solutions to positive promotion.

These five factors were huge for my increasing visitors and counting.

Blogging
Social Bookmarking
Commenting Around the Web
Keyword Research
Free Music Strategy

The crazy thing I realized is these 5 factors are dependent on one another. For example, Keyword research will improve your search engine rankings for your articles. Writing an article needs social bookmarking and commenting around social networks for best reach, they don’t market themselves. A free music strategy creates incentive for fans to interact with your website or mailing list.

When these clicked on all cylinders, my visitors and comments started increasing. I was getting help from people on social networks, because I interacted with them. My keyword searches started increasing and I had data to evaluate how people could find me better.

This is just one checklist I created for my Internet marketing campaign and have stuck by it with nice results. Do it yourself doesn’t mean you cant make a huge impact. Feel free to download here. Evaluate Your Band Blog (84)

Hindsight

“Do It Yourself” is not to be taken literally. For success to be achieved you have to be able to delegate responsibility to your strong points. Some band members may enjoy writing more, while others enjoy social networking on Twitter and Facebook. Once you have a list of areas you feel need to be built on, fill in the blanks with team members that can execute.

Simplicity dominated this project. After years worth of work, fading trends and social networks, this PDF is a constant for my websites. Create your own list, and evaluate your effort, and strategy. DIY operations can survive, but the importance of team work and active promotion can never be underestimated.

Download Free Chart Here

Evaluate Your Band Blog (84)

Keep working at your goals, but you have to set them to achieve them. Let me know what kind of things you as a musician use to benchmark your progress and failures.

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.

• The Template: Planning Your First Album
• Hip Hop 2009: 5 Big Open Questions

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.

• What happened? A rant about the work ethic of many musicians
• In Defense Of 1,000 True Fans – Part I – The Mountain Goats

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

Search volume in my research is very important. While I focus on my optimization for search engines, am I really covering all the ground I could?

When I think of search queries I automatically think about Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. The one thing that strikes me is how people are using social media sites such as Youtube, Myspace, and Facebook for searches.

I came across a press release by comScore that displays some interesting search volume stats. To read more from the actual press release follow this link: comScore Releases August 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

The numbers don’t lie and those sites are all in the Top 20 for search volume. Youtube actually ranked 2nd after Google which definitely makes me want to add more videos about my band, and provide content and tags that optimize my chances of being seen. Create an entry point for your website.

Here is a summary of stats that were presented as an analysis of the U.S marketplace from July to August 2009.

1. Google sites own the search market with 13 billion search queries
2. Youtube is the 2nd most popular search engine after Google and Google sites with 3.5 billion searches
3. Yahoo sites are next with 2.8 billion queries
4. Microsoft makes up for 1.3 billion searches, 6% gain from July
5. Craigslist followed with 682 million searches
6. Facebook saw the biggest percentage in change with a 20% increase in search volume leading to 324 million searches
7. Withing the top 20 sites in the US, there is Youtube, Myspace, Facebook
8. Social Media sites become search engine portals for users

With Facebook also seeing that 20% jump, which was the largest jump in search queries percent change for that month, I think its time to put aside some of my distaste for Facebook as a music marketing tool. A band page is a must. If someone is mainly using just Facebook for searches, will they be able to find you?

Maybe you may use some of these sites as landing pages or just display your RSS feed to create entry points. The key is maximizing your visibility where people are searching.

Part of our mission as Do It Yourself marketing musicians involves making educated guesses for planning our next moves. Find stats, analyze them and make moves according to what you conclude.

This is where the importance of keyword research lies. We know where a majority of our search volume for the U.S is located and who is hot or what social network we need to keep on our radar.

I want to place my content in front of a growing audience instead of a dying one. I want to make sure I can do my best to optimize my visibility online. I want to optimize my distribution channels and bridge that gap between my website and social network profiles.

These stats are very promising because they show the importance of social media sites, being used for more than their initial mission. Optimizing for search engines is only part of the attack.

Search engine optimization is a very critical part of your music marketing campaign. What active efforts are you taking to strengthen your keywords? I asked myself this same question and tried different ways to keep a continuous effort towards improvement. Keyword research involves planning for future stability in blog traffic.

With Bing gaining ground on Google’s search domination, I began to think about how my website structure is being interpreted by the search engine spiders. I do have a good amount of articles but are they optimized to my benefit?

Automatic SEO links is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to take control of your keyword promotion.

Automatic SEO Links

Automatic SEO links is a WordPress plugin that is a great time saver and efficient promoter. When blogging, you don’t have to manually enter your links, you just choose a keyword and a URL and this plugin will find the keyword mentioned on your blog and add a link of your choice.

For example, I want to promote a “free music” page on my website. I go to the WordPress settings for Automatic SEO Links and add the keyword “free music” with a link to my free music post. Anytime I mention “free music” in future posts, it will go to the desired link I set. No more needing to remember URL’s and inserting links manually.

Hip Hop Distribution Homework

You don’t need this plugin specifically to practice keyword strengthening. The important thing to ask is how can I improve my blog’s keyword visibility, internal link structure and readability?

Here are some examples of how I will use this plugin:

• Find 5 Keywords to Promote: Choose five articles you currently have that are getting visitors. Assign each article a strong keyword and use some of those keywords in future articles. Promoting old articles and increasing reader relevance. Use your new keywords stats to give your readers what they want and add hot new keywords to build on traffic.
• Push a Call to Action: Your posts are your greatest asset. If you have a album landing page or music store, create some keywords that can direct your fans to those places. For example: “download our music”, “buy our album” or “free instrumentals” could link to your storefront or whatever desired posts. Great way to keep readers on your site and build out your pages as information resources. Don’t forget the important one: subscribe here
• Affiliate Promotion: promoting affiliate links is easy now. Add your selected keywords and have them automatically link to your referral service. Nice way to make a little extra change without having to enter all the affiliate tags and id’s.

The main reason that I was impressed with this plugin is because it created a process of improvement in multiple areas.

While thinking about keywords, I began thinking about which articles to promote, or which ones needed the most help. The thought process also led me to think about how good was my call to action and my blog organization. Creating a better reader experience by increasing the relevance of your keywords to your title will lead to traffic improvements and better rankings.

Please feel free to leave some of your suggestions for keyword research and improvement: Musicians are always listening.

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

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.