No, I’m not talking about the bassist playing bass. Sure that is important, but your bass player needs to get up off his lazy butt and do a little more if he wants to play that bass for a job. There are many social networking tools I have featured in this blog. Way too many for one person to really use to there fullest extent. So if a band is really hungry they need to work together on this. You people are a small army and you need to look at this like a war. Don’t be the private that just sits back in the barracks eating up the rations. Have each band member can take on one or two social networking tasks. Then you can focus on it and push it to it’s limits. You can even make it an inner band competition. These social networks are ranked. Each user is ranked by either the site themselves or by an outside service that crawls the data. So which band member can climb the highest on the chart for the social networking site they took on. It will soon be very clear if the bassist is actually the laziest band member or if it’s that drummer.
Now most bands have that one band member that really knows their way around a computer and that band member always ends up being the one to take on all these promotional tools. Instead have that one band member be in charge of teaching all the other band members how to use these tools. This way the band as a whole can work together to take over the world. Each band member already has their specialty, so why not get the most out of that knowledge? These social networking tools like Twitter, Plurk, and FriendFeed are just waiting to be used to get your band’s music out to more people. So why not use them, abuse them, and suck them dry of their venture capitol while the money is still there. And of course make sure and add me to all of them. I tend to work really hard to give away cool stuff.
Ok, so maybe not Leo Laporte specifically, but getting plugs from higher profile people on the internet can help drive traffic to your band’s website. Now that you are all hooked up with Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, FriendFeed, and your band’s official blog, you need to drive traffic to it. However, be very careful on how you do this. It can hurt your reputation if you are too pushy or make yourself look like a spammer.
Now many of you may know that my wife does a blog about really cheesy b grade movies called QueenOfCheese.com. Well, she has been having a heck of a time trying to get her Webalizer stats to line up with her Google Analytics stats. It was driving us both nuts that Google was saying she had half the traffic that the internal server stats were claiming. We have called Leo’s live show The Tech Guy twice and both times we were able to narrow down the problem a little more. We now are pretty sure that no matter what anyone tells you, Google Analytics should be taken with a massively huge grain of salt. Always trust the internal server stats more. Keep both, but don’t be discouraged by what Google Analytics claims. It’s pretty buggy. Now let me make this very clear, the main goal was to get a question answered. However, we had a bonus prize. When the website was mentioned my wife had hundreds of extra visitors that day. On a weekend no less, which is normally one of the slowest days of the week!
Now the key thing to remember is that no matter if you are going on a tech show like The Tech Guy, a metal show like Talking Metal, or a morning talk show like The Howard Stern Show, don’t be a massive plug machine. You better not come off like the plug is the main reason you are there or you might not be invited back. It also might make people not take the bait if they think you are just a low life spammer. You must respect the goal of the show and what their listeners expect to hear. When I call Leo Laporte I take weeks to make sure my question is something that will help tons of his listeners. My wife’s site uses a CMS called Word Press. It is one of the most popular content management systems available. So I am pretty sure that my question was able to help, inform, and entertain hundreds of other people. So Leo shouldn’t block me next time I come on. That’s the goal at least to show him and his fans the respect they deserve.
How to get on these shows? Well, Leo is a call in show. So you just call in like anyone else. It’s a long wait and will take up several hours of your Saturday or Sunday. Talking Metal is on Twitter, they have email, and even have forums. Try them all, but make sure and include links where they can find your music easy. Those two don’t have a ton of time these days. Most morning talk shows have call in segments all the time and there is nothing like a local band giving a plug on a local morning talk show. If done right this can be a major help to your band. Again, respect their show and the show will respect you.
I hope to get my live show back on the air again soon too. If you ever want to come on my show please by all means contact me! I am all about helping others. That’s the whole point. Isn’t it?
So yesterday I talked about why search tags are so important and why you should never be lazy about them, but how often should you update your site? Well, first off you need to know one thing. Google loves blogs. Don’t think of a blog in the standard way. Think of it as a content management system. Now I must beg you to not use the crappy MySpace Blogs. They are not search engine friendly, don’t have good RSS feeds, and just suck overall. They are the worst blog systems on the Internet. If you are going to blog from MySpace then you don’t care enough to even read my articles. Just give up and enjoy your burger job you lazy piece of crap!
So what bog should you use for your band updates? Well, this site is done with Word Press and it is very search engine friendly. Google owns Blogger, so you know that is going to be logged into their search engine. Those are the two best for what a band needs. Now I must mention some advice I currently do not follow yet myself. I was recently informed by Pamela Weir that I was not using “search engine friendly urls”. At first I didn’t get it to be honest. It seems that in the control panel of Word Press you have the option of having either nice short url’s or search engine friendly urls. I picked the wrong one when setting this thing up, so now when I switch I have to set up a bunch of re-directs so links back to these articles work. So I will be fixing that this weekend I hope. So make sure you have search engine friendly urls. This would mean that the headline is part of the web address.
Now how often to post? Well, this is all about new people finding your band. Post often. In fact post as often as you can. If you can get into the habit of posting at least once a day it would be a good habit. Why? Because Google loves blogs. The more pages, the more words for the Google bot to log in. The more words Google has loggged into their search engine that are connected to your site the better the chances a search result will link to your bands website.
So it can do amazing things for your search engine results to run a daily blog. I know you think most will not care that the band didn’t practice today but instead just hit the local Taco Bell, grabbed some brews, and hung out and watched the football game together. However, think of all the key words I had in that one sentence alone! If you can post 300-400 words a day it will get your band a ton more traffic. More trafic means more fans. More fans equals pure awesomeness…right? So get blogging already!
Why is Google calling me names and how can it help your band? If you pull up the search terms “how do you know if your a poser” on Google about halfway down the second page of results you will see this…
I'm a Google Poser!
Why is Google calling me a poser? Well actually what happened is more my fault. On this site you can search for articles with specific “tags”. Each tag basically is given it’s own page. I was lazy on one article and only gave it one tag. That tag was “poser“. Google works by sending a bot around the web to collect data to base it’s searches on. That bot found the page of results on the tag poser for this site. So a search engine found a results page for the internal search feature for MarkCarras.com. Yes, that makes it a search result of a search result.
So why is this important to your band? Well, if you use modern website software (known as CMS or content management system) you will be asked to give tags to each update your band does on your site. Don’t be lazy about your tags like I was for this article or Google might start calling you names. Worse yet, people might not find your band’s website when they are looking for something your band sings about, does, or cares about. New people finding your band is important right? Your tags should be just as important.
FriendFeed is a service that let’s you combine all your social network profiles into one place and discuss them with people. It’s all about networking and Friend Feed is like networking on a big bag of crack. So if you are on Twitter & Plurk, why be on Friend Feed as well? Well FriendFeed has a ton of automation to it. You can be active on FriendFeed without even going to the site!
Now of course you have to go through the annoying process of setting everything up, but once you do you can be done with it. Yes it is a “Set it and forget it” situation if you want. You can have it post the RSS feeds from your band’s news site, your Twitter messages, and tons more. It puts all of them in one place, then streams it in a live real time feed, then let’s people comment on the link. So it’s like Plurk, but the threads are started by the stuff you do elsewhere on other websites.
So although you can just let it do it’s automated thing, you will get more out of it if you are active. You can follow those who offer content you care about, comment on things that interest you, press the “like” link if you want to share others links into your feed, and basically network with others with interests in the type of music your band provides.
There are also “rooms” you can join to help find people that might be interested in your band. Music isn’t currently a major subject on Friend Feed, but it is growing fast. So don’t dismiss a room just because it only has one or two members. You may start the ball rolling for the room and will have established yourself when it does take off. Plus it doesn’t take any of your time if the room goes dead. Rooms only take up your time if they are active.
So Friend Feed is a way to just funnel all your social media activity in one place, but could also be another place to find and interact with potential fans. It is real easy to dismiss FriendFeed at first. In fact I wasn’t active at all for the first several months after signing up. I set everything and never really looked back. I’m not sure what happened, but I think one of my tech friends Robert Scoble is to blame. He talks to everyone and anyone who isn’t a retard. Because he has an insane amount of followers I ended up with tons of new connections just from following him on the site. Now Scoble is not a music industry person. He is a tech industry person, so he may not help bands or music industry types directly. He is just my example of how your account can suddenly take off and take you by surprise if you put a little time into it.
Now FriendFeed has become my favorite new social website lately. With it being so live, it can almost become like a chat room. I can ignore 75% of the stuff that flows by because I either have nothing to say or just don’t care. You don’t have to reply to everything. Be your own filter. Only pay attention to the things you think will help your band. So set it up to be just an automated archive or dive in with both feet and go nuts. But by all means follow me so I can help you through it all.
What the hell is RSS? It is a way for you to get your band news out to more people. It will make your band’s website ten times more powerful. Trust me on this. There are some major label bands that have RSS feeds but are making some horrid mistakes.
Many people are starting to use RSS readers to put all of their online content on one page they can check in the morning. No one has time to check a few hundred websites before they go to that job they hate so much. RSS readers solve that problem by routing all the content into one place. Do you really care if they visit your site? Or is it more important that you get the information out? Make sure to use an RSS feed so people can get information about your band with as little hassle as possible. Now RSS is something that most bands do not understand at all. They always make one of three mistakes.
The first mistake is not giving up all the content in the RSS feed. Remember that it is more important for a band to get out the info than it is to get a website visit. Whatever software you use to run your site should have a section in the admin panel for RSS that will ask you if you want to give the RSS feed the entire article or just a sample. Give the entire article if you are a band that wants to get their information out to as many as possible.
The second mistake is not giving each article it’s own unique website address in the RSS feed. When going down the RSS feed, people will open up a tab of the articles they want to read later. If it just opens up to the main “News” section then people will not be able to find the information they want and will get frustrated. What if someone wants to email the article to a friend? Link to it on another website? Does your RSS feed give them a direct website address to the specific article? It really needs to!
The third mistake is that the RSS is not formated the same as the actual article. This will take a good content management system. The easiest one to work with is Word Press. It is the most common and so you will be able to get help with it pretty easy.
Now of course the most common mistake is to not have any RSS feed at all, but I won’t count that because any band smart enough to be reading this article would not be making that mistake. Of course if all you have is a MySpace page none of my articles will help you. So I’ll assume you didn’t make that mistake either. Some signed bands are even making that mistake. So very sad. Get a real site and get a good RSS feed.
