January

Going Viral with your Pants on the Ground

Posted In: Band Management, Career Building, For Businesses, Marketing & Promotion, Uncategorized by claybutlermusic

Since “The General” performed on American Idol, the country has been obsessed with “Pants on the Ground”. The absurdly entertaining, yet socially relevant performance has spurred everything from hats and handbags, to shirts and skivvies. There are mixes, remixes, and acoustic covers. Literally overnight, the entire world was talking about Pants on the Ground. You can’t turn log onto the internet, especially Facebook, without hearing the phrase, seeing the posted video, or seeing a link to some apparel emblazoned with the phrase. Truly, this is what it means to Go Viral.

So, what can we learn from The General when it comes to our music and marketing? With the right blend of cheese, relevance, entertainment value, and a certain endearing quality, people will talk about you. Granted, being on the highest rated and most watched television show in history, American Idol, doesn’t hurt. But, nevertheless Viral is possible.

Quite simply, if everyone is talking about something, then people can profit from it. This is precisely what we see when we log onto the internet with “Pants on the Ground”. Countless people are using his idea to make money for themselves. While you don’t necessarily want others to profit from you, the real key is to make this principle work for YOU and your music, video, or product.

Although no one can really guarantee viral status, what can we do to help get noticed?

Make it really entertaining–keep the viewer engaged.
Make it original–do something fresh or unexpected for the viewer.
Make it mindless–don’t make the viewer think too hard.
Keep it relatively short–leave the viewer wanting more.
Get a reaction–shock the viewer or make it endearing.
Make it catchy–make it memorable for the viewer.

Once you get the viewers talking and sharing, you’re over the biggest hurdle. To make viral marketing really work for you, you must have them associate the content to you or your brand. So, make sure the video has your web address and/or branding visible at some point. They’ve found your content, now make sure they know who it belongs to and how to find YOU.

Again, no one can really guarantee that their content will go viral, but keep these tips in mind when you produce your next web video or publicity campaign. Here’s a great book titled The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which goes into great detail about “Going Viral”.

Good luck!

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July

SEO and Your Band

Posted In: Marketing & Promotion, Uncategorized by claybutlermusic

If you’ve created a web presence for your business or have done any research into online marketing, you’re probably familiar with the term SEO. If you’re an independent musician or a new band, however, SEO may be something you know nothing about. If you do your homework, it can help propel you or your band to “household name” status. If ignored, it can leave you in relative obscurity.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. At first thought, you may be wondering why a band would care about a search engine, but consider the following scenario. Someone types your band name or a related keyword into Google. Are they more likely to click a link on the first few results pages? Or will they wade through fifteen or twenty to find you? You can bet, given our instant-gratification society, the’ll move on if they don’t find what they’re looking for fairly quickly. That’s where SEO comes in. You try to guarantee that you’ll be at the top of the list when someone searches for you or something about you.

So, how does SEO work? Different search engines have different rules for rankings and placement. However, there are some tricks that help your rankings, and there are pitfalls to avoid that will hinder them.

Three Things to Do:

1.) Obtain as many outside links (i.e. on other sites) to your site as possible. Some ways to do this are by listing your band on directories, with reciprocal links, and by leaving legitimate comments on blogs and social media that contain a link to your site.

2.) Add keywords to your content. Use discriptive words that you think your fans might use to search for you…or someone like you.

3.) Update your site with fresh content often. Search engines prefer sites that requently display new content. Blogs are a great example of this concept, and search engines love blogs.

Three Things to Avoid:

1.) Sites built entirely of flash. Search engines make more sense of regular HTML. In flash, content can often be embedded deeply within the code, causing search engine spiders (programs that crawl the web looking for relevant content) to give up and move on.

2.) Sites built entirely of images. Spiders need text in order to determine if your content is relevant. While links within your site improve ranking somewhat, search engines prefer text links to links that are images. So, instead of having your band name or link as a graphic, consider having it as text, which can be read by search engine spiders.

3.) Spamming. We all know spam in the email variety. However, there are other forms of spam as well. Comment spamming is leaving a comment on a blog or forum solely so you can drop a link to your website. If you’re going to leave comment, make sure it’s relevant and not just “Great post!”. The practice of content spamming is an easy way to get blacklisted. There’s also Keyword Spamming, which is stuffing your site so full of keywords that there’s very little actual content. This practice can actually hurt you with search engines like Google, which penalize keyword spammers by lowering their search ranking.

In today’s music industry, a web presence is a must. Keep these SEO principles in mind as you build a site for you or your band and you will see your search ranking, and hopefully your popularity, improve!

These are just a few tips that I’ve found useful in my SEO endeavors. For more information on marketing yourself online, check out my friend Brandon Eley’s book, Online Marketing Inside and Out.

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