UserVoice survey of topic requests for this blog

I just discovered UserVoice and their great feature suggestion/survey tool.  I set up a free account to try it out to have readers suggest and vote on blog topics for Social Media Marketing in Music (this blog). You can find the link both in this post (below) and always find it from the right hand side navigation column directly under the author’s picture.

Suggest or vote on future topics

In order to tempt you into checking out the topic request survey, I’ve pre-populated it with a few topics I’ve been considering (but feel free to add your own suggestions):

Compare the new HD video services out there
YouTube now offers HD formats but YouTube is not the only game in town. What are the players? How do you embed a video in a blog, webpage , Facebook, or MySpace?

Creating a Musican/Band webpage on Ning
4000 new web sites are being created every day on Ning by ‘regular folks’ . It isn’t that hard to make a page … and it’s free.
http://bit.ly/16xW1
… and their Music Player can be embedded in both MySpace and Facebook
http://bit.ly/mnKuH

Music sites (the new ones)
http://mashable.com/2007/11/08/tools-independent-musician/
For this blog, I’d spend some time using Google trends to see which ones are registering traffic.

Digital Music startups
Check this list: http://musically.com/blog/2008/12/17/200-digital-music-startups-from-2008/
Any of these interest you ? If yes, don’t just vote for this topic… but rather create a “new idea” in this forum with this tool and suggest the one that interests you as a “New idea”… more

Mixcloud player
http://bit.ly/zg4He
I met Mixcloud founder at a Facebook Garage event. He offered some free user account codes.

Jamzee – create a playlist of YouTube videos
Jamzee is a service that allows you to create a playlist of YouTube videos that you can share on other websites like your own blog or MySpace.

How musicians/bands can use twitter … and why
By adding a twitter feed from this blog, I’m now getting views from other followers tweets. Might this work for you?

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Reminder, please don’t comment here, but rather use the survey tool to vote or add your topic preferences.

Suggest or vote on future topics

SEO for Musicians

You are a musician. Why should you care about SEO? Good question.  

 If you don’t have a web page or a blog yet, bookmark this page and come back when you do. 

What is SEO?  SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to make your web page or blog appear higher up in the list when someone does an Internet search.

 Assuming you are out in the world playing your music and someone likes what they hear and happens to vaguely remember your name (or your band’s name), they may try and look you up and find you. Will you show up on the 1st page of an Internet search and show up near the top?

First of all, your band name (or in some cases your name) is your brand. It should be easy to remember and easy to spell.  Search engines can probably help.  If a website is getting enough hits and I miss spell the search term, Google will usually help with a “Did you mean <search term spelled correctly goes here> “

I took the DM1 (Digital Music 1)  class at Mission College in 2008 to learn digital recording basics.  For our final project we recorded a music video. I really liked the music of the duo we recorded and wanted to look them up to see where they might be playing locally. Their name is “The Pernikoff Brothers“.  In fact, as I’m writing this I’m listening to  ”New Man” being played back as a HQ YouTube video.  Great song, great musicians, well recorded, a pleasure to listen to. I was there in the class when we recorded this and helped set up microphones for the session.  When I went to look them up a few weeks later, I had difficulty finding them. I was trying “Pernakov Brothers” and “Pernikov Brothers” with no luck. This was a few months ago. Now when I type in my miss spelled version of their name, I immediately come up with a link to their website, so Google can help all on it’s own if your site is getting enough hits and fans choose the link that gets you to their site.

However, if your name is hard to spell or is hard to  remember, you do not necessarily need to re-brand and change your name. All you really need is to have a song, YouTube video, or CD name that is unique and really easy to remember and your new fans can probably find you this way. This does not always work though. Again, Google will likely rout you to sites with the most traffic. For example, when I search on “YouTube New Man” to try and locate the Pernikoff Brothers YouTube video “New Man” , I’m finding numerous videos by people with the last name “Newman”. So in this case, Google’s spelling algorythm is misdirecting me elswhere to videos with numerous plays.

In terms of this blog, searching on “Social Media Marketing Music” did not intially display links to this blog. What really helped get me to a “page 1″ search result from a Google search was having my blog listed at blogcatalog. If you look over at the right hand side of my blog column (below the Tags), you will see several blog cataloging sites I have linked to. The effort expended to figure out how to do this is well worth it. Most of my site hits now come from blogcatalog where one reader who liked my blog gave it a “5 star” rating.  My blogcatalog listing shows up in a ”page 1″ search result from a Google search now.  Do I care that my actual website does not show up in the 1st page in Google search? No. People are finding me through the blogcatalog link and that’s what matters. People are finding me.

I should add that my previous post “Bigfoot’s Lookin’ for Bernie”  gives my blog a top Google rank on the search word combinations “Bigfoot Bernie”, “Bigfoot Madoff” and “Leaf Trombone Bigfoot” (… at least this is true for today). Again, unique words in a song title could give you similar results in fans locating one of your songs.

I won’t go into great detail about how to do SEO. There are numerous resources available. I would recommend looking at some of the “free sample lessons” available from the Lynda.com course  Search Engine Optimization with Richard Jenkins.  There is enough free playback content here to give you the basic idea of what SEO is about. Playing the topic “White Hat SEO”, Richard highlights some very usefull authority sites on the subject.

I’ll close this post with a video embed of “New Man” by the Pernikoff Brothers. Enjoy.

HD Video web services

If  you make a music video and link to it on your own MySpace page, will it reach many new viewers that are not already familiar with your Music ?
I recently read a CNET post on Which HD video Web service is the best? . Looking at some of the offerings, I wondered if bands/artists might be able to gain new viewers by creating videos and uploading to these sites rather than simply posting or linking to their videos from their MySpace page. For example, there is a Music and Entertainment category in blip.tv, but I found very few music videos there to watch. This allowed a few artists previously unknown to me to have me see their videos. Being an “early adopter” of a technology may have advantages. Here is a video on blip.tv of Padraig Rushe playing “Mo Bhréag Aisling” at The Zodiac Sessions open mic night, Dublin, Ireland.

http://blip.tv/file/1866260/

After seeing/hearing this video, I checked out Padraig Rushes MySpace page (which he provided in the description text of the video).

Update:  Padraig Rushe’s debut CD “Greyworld” is now available on iTunes.  I predict a “Best New Artist” Grammy nomination if some Saturday Night Live host picks him for the Music Act in 2009 and he gets the exposure he deserves.