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:
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
