Guide Covers Some Basic Areas on Online Marketing for the Musician and How to Take Advantage of the Web
The Music market landscape is changing on a daily basis. Much like other industries music is evolving with the fast paced online culture. Although it is easier for the musician to share their music with online technology, it has also made the music market very competitive. With hundreds of thousands of musicians struggling to get noticed it is helpful to know of some useful tools and tips that can bring in more listeners for your band. The guide below offers some basic tips for the musicians to best utilize internet resources.
How to Utilize Meta Descriptions to Improve your SEO Campaign
Meta Descriptions are the descriptions that a user will most likely see when they run a search on Google. The text copy in black on each of Google's search descriptions is where you find them. Although it is no guarantee that Google will index your meta descriptions, chances are almost sure that they will if you provide them with one for each of your web pages. Read the document below to learn how to take advantage of meta descriptions and how to use them to improve your search clicks and visibility.
How to use Linking to improve your Search Ranking - Fewsure Best Strategies SEO guide
Linking is quite possibly the most valuable asset when it comes to search engine optimization. However, many websites create linking structures that are unorganized and simply deconstructive. There is no strategy to link building and externally and internally links are just... links. There is a certain strategy that every website owner should put into play when handling link structure. Improve your SEO by learning how to manage and create links that matter. Read the Digital Fewsure beginners guide on linking strategies.
This guide will provide you with a basic understand of what ALT tags are for images, along with how and when to use them. It is part of Digital Fewsure's SEO Guide - Best Practices Series.
Take a look at the ALT Image Tags guide to gain a better understanding of how you can optimize the images on your web pages to improve your search marketing efforts.
ALT Tags Images SEO Guide - Best Practices
Facebook Social Ads Make it Easy for Advertisers to Create Ads, Target Ads, Analyze Audiences, and Manage Payment Options.
When Facebook decided to open its doors to outside advertisers, they knew it would be a big revenue stream for them. At first, the idea of advertising on Facebook was simple. You have profile data, you can target ads and operate the ad network much like a Google AdWords campaign. However, Google and search had caught on mainstream with business and this made it easy for advertisers to trust and operate the Google Ad network. Facebook was still a mystery, especially to new users in the business world. The social networking platform is still very new to most people and Facebook was smart enough to realize this before moving forward with their advertising service.
Facebook social ads make is very easy to create and manage your advertising campaign.
Design - The Facebook ad program allows you to design your Facebook ad on-site and you are allowed to insert a graphic and text copy. The ads look simple and clean cut. You area allowed up to 25 characters for your Title (blue at the top) and 135 characters for your ad body text (under the graphic). You can upload any picture that you want as long as you have the rights and it is appropriate in the eyes of Facebook.
photo courtesty of http://www.ballotrevolution.org/images/facebook-ad.jpg
Target Your Ad - You are allowed to target your audience by using demographic and psychographic filters such as:
Age
Sex
Relationship Status
Keywords
Employment
Education
Languages
Location
Interests and Hobbies
Pricing Management - You spending limit is set around a daily schedule. You have to spend at least $1 per day to maintain a Facebook Ad campaign. It is entirely up to you the amount of money that you want to spend per day. You set your own price cap during the ad setup. This price cap can be altered at any time throughout the campaign as long as it stay above the $1 minimum.
Now comes a big decision for your campaign - Do you use a Pay Per Click strategy (when a user clicks), or do you want to pay for impressions (displays).
A PPC strategy is you paying for every time a user clicks on your ad
Impression payment is for every certain amount of impressions or ad displays. You are not charged for any clicks
There are some best practice guides to decide. Read what Facebook has to say: Facebook Payment Guide
Review and Analyze your Ad
Once you put an ad into place, Facebook has an internal analytics tracker that you can use to track who is looking at your ad, who is clicking on your ad, what pages bring them to the ad, etc. It works much like a typical analytics tracker except it is somewhat dumbed down. The analyzing is very clean cut and doesn't go TOO far into details.
Facebook has done a great job of making the advertising process easy for businesses to use. I also think small businesses could really take advantage of a program like this because you could have a fixed cost if you wish.
LinkedIN Opens Up Their Network for Direct Ad Targeting and Now Businesses Can Place an Ad Right In Front of Their Targets Face
Linked is the largest business focused social network with over 50 million professionals that connect, share and network with other business professionals. In the past LinkedIn was somewhat limited when it came to advertising. In fact, I believe part of LInkedIn's growing success in the business demographic has been due to their lack of advertising. If there are limited ads, the website doesn't feel as SPAMMY. And since spam and privacy is the number one concern of older business executives when it comes to the internet, LInkedIn was a safe haven for them.
Recently however, LinkedIn has began to allow users to purchase ad space on the LInkedIn network. There are some qualifications that must be met in order for users to purchase ads, such as a certain amount of connections (friends). This is meant to keep the SPAMMING out.
Why this is HUGE!
If you think about how the LinkedIn platform is setup you will understand why allowing targeted ads is such a HUGE deal. Think about it: You are a business and you sell IT services to CIO's of large companies that have large revenues. If you don't already know, LinkedIn is a great way to locate these CIO's. Most of them have LinkedIn profiles and all it takes is a simple search to find them. Once you locate them you can learn quite a bit about them before ever connecting with them. So you study a certain CIO you are targeting.
Once you learn more about him you begin to formulate an ad that you believe is what will GRAB his attention. Now with the LinkedIn DirectAds you can target that AD specifically at that user and ensure that the ad ends up on his pages at some point.
How do you ensure this happens?
LinkedIn allows you to Target:
Company SIze
Seniority
Industry
Job Function
Geographical Location
All of your target market can be targeted in ONE place. Forget Google PPC, with LinkedIn you are almost guaranteed to have your ad put right in front of the market you want to reach out to. This may be the latest tool to drastically improve digital marketing to company executives. Executives trust LinkedIn and you now have the ability to build your brand with LinkedIn DirectAds.
Pricing
Pricing options vary with LinkedIn. The most common is Pay Per Click. Which means you pay a certain amount for each user click and every 1,000 impressions.
Send Personalized Messages to Your Internal Employees, Best Customers, and Anyone else with Pinger
Pinger is a great way to get personal with your customers. Let's say that you are a musician and you are playing an exclusive last minute show in Chicago, IL. You have a database of Chicago fans through your marketing program and you want to offer them tickets. With Pinger the artist can send a personalized message to all of his/her fans to encourage them to come out to the show!
Pinger is also known for allowing mobile phone users to crop images and send them off to their friends. They are very popular in the iPhone Appmosphere.
How it Works
You simply record a personalized voice message that you want to send out to fans, internal employees, etc.
Once you record the message you input the recipients and send the message on its way. The recipient will receive a text message that tells them they have a voicemail. Once they click listen, your message is played back. It's that easy.
Visit Pinger Voicemail to learn more about how Pinger can be used to help your business. One more thing------You can test the product for free if your recipient group is small.
Why Pinger is Effective
Pinger is personal - A text message can seem impersonal at times - if the phone user knows they have a voicemail that can feel more personal to them, therefore resulting in a more user participation
Star Power - For famous people trying to market products or themselves, this tool is fantastic. You are sending a personal voicemail in your voice to your fans. Think about getting a voicemail from your role model and imagine how effective that can be
There are still a lot of NON-SmartPhone users out there. Text messaging is still the giant marketing tool. Pinger uses text to power their message
You can store your voicemails forever!
Send the voicemails right from your computer
Works on EVERY Phone - No Flash or Java download required
Google Mapplets is a Free Web Gadget that ALL Business Owners Should Take Advantage of
Google Mapplets are mini applications that run within Google Maps. Basically they are small visual web pages that appear when a user puts their cursor over your business location. There is actually a lot that you can do with this Mapplet page. It sort of works much like a regular webpage. The code you can use allows you to include images, rich media like flash, and obviously body content text.
When a surfer is looking for a restaurant around their hotel, they can browse over the map results and come upon YOUR restaurant. When their cursor scrolls over your business a Mapplet will pop up and showcase your mini-webpage. This Mapplet for instance could have a picture of your restaurant, a short menu description, and possibly some reviews. Instead of the customer having to go directly to your website, you provided them with a brief content and visual overview which is convenient for them and easy for you.
As part of the Google Gadgets applications - of course this gadget is free. Google continues to offer excellent free services that are very helpful. The problem is, many businesses are not taking full advantage of these free tools.
Link Back to Your Website
The Mapplet tool also allows you to link back to your website which cannot hurt your search marketing campaign. It is just more visibility for your website and your business. Also Google provides the free hosting and the free bandwidth.
What Can Google Mapplets Do for your Business and Why should you us it?
Free visual listing of your business on one of the most popular map layouts in the world
Very simple setup and easy to write. Don't have to be a genius with the Google platform
iPaper from Scribd.com is a great way to display documents online without having to download. It can also make you money
iPaper is a service tool that should have came into existance a loooong time ago. Have you ever visited multiple sites looking for reports or research documents and been really annoyed when you had to download each one? Well I have. First and foremost, iPaper from Scribd.com solves that problem. iPaper allows you to display documents on a webpage in rich media format. It is a rich document format (adobe flash) built for the web.
Because iPaper documents are in rich media format, they can be viewed in multiple operating systems including Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc. Beforehand, certain word documents that were made with Microsoft were restricted from download with Mac users that didn't have the Microsoft software. Visit the website to learn more of the technical qualifiers - Scribd iPaper website
No More Annoying Downloads
For web visitors, this tool eliminates the annoying downloading processes and messages that they must encounter before reading a document. The document is placed in clear view on the website and the tool even allows you to turn pages, much like a PDF document...but without the PDF download.
What Doc. Formats can iPaper convert to Rich Format?
Adobe PDF (pdf)
Adobe Postscript (.ps)
Microsoft Word (.docx, .doc)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx)
Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
Open Office Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
Open Office Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
Open Office Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
Plain Text (.txt)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Make Money with iPaper
iPaper features a tool that you allows you to post your documents to the net on your own sites and others if they want to share your work. iPaper has the ability to input advertisements much like those seen in Google AdSense in between the pages of your document. Of course the ads featured are meant to be relevant and if the user were to click on the ads you would receive some of the royalties. Now iPaper can make you money just by you sharing your knowledge. If you build many how-to-guides, iPaper is a great tool to implement on your website. It will make the process for your users easier and can even make you some money along the way.
