The Digital Learning Circle

Whenever we decide to develop a new skill, there’s a learning curve.  When that learning curve is steep, we can sometimes become demoralised and end up giving up altogether.

Although ‘digital music’ has been around for a while now, it’s still new enough that the landscape and the tools we use to navigate it are constantly changing.  It’s all too easy to look at this situation and think, “I’m never going to keep up with this, so why bother?”.

The important thing to realise is that there’s no point trying to reach the top of that curve because, by the time you get there, it will have moved.  Instead, think of it as a learning circle.  An endless circle that will allow you to never run out of new skills to master.  Forget about trying to satisfy that need inside of you to reach an ‘end goal’ and get excited about everything there is out there to learn!

Of course, no one can possibly learn everything.  If you tried, you’d very quickly start getting that sinking feeling again.  So the trick is to first ask yourself, “What skill would be most useful to me right now?”.  Then focus all your energy on learning that one skill.  When you’ve finished learning that skill, ask yourself again, “What skill would be most useful to me right now?”.  It’s important that you ask yourself this question every time, because your priorities may have changed since last time.  Something that you thought was important three months ago may be completely useless now.

So what skill would be most useful to you right now?  Maybe you’d like to learn some HTML so you know how to embed images, create links or even build simple web pages.  Maybe some Photoshop basics would be useful so you can create your own banner ads or even design the artwork for your next album.  Maybe you’d like to learn how to use WordPress to build yourself a shiny new website.  Whatever it is, ignore all the people telling you “you need to know x, y and z or you’re no good”.  Pick your skill and master it!

Broken Windows In A Super Club

There is a new Superclub  in town with a 10,000 capacity. Most of the clientèle are single and looking for someone to hook up with. You always used to just go out to the pub in town and see a small crowd of single people, which everyone was happy with, and the only people who ever got to be known by thousands of single people were celebrities, so this is something completely new.

With this new superclub, the opportunities to meet lots of single people have never been greater but there has also never been so much competition. (I hope it’s obvious that this alludes to digital promotion. Otherwise this will be a very confusing few paragraphs.)

The club will be filled with thousands of other people similar to you and in order to be successful and attract attention there, you cannot rely upon the luxury of having plenty of time to build relationships, afforded to you by small and therefore less competitive groups. Critical to initial success, therefore, is the ability to display yourself through appearance and in short bouts of conversation that are both equal to or above that of those that surround you. If there are ten people all of similar intelligence, looks and interests, it becomes the smaller details that differentiate you. Anything from unshined shoes to unkempt hair can mean the difference between sparking conversations and interest in yourself and being left sipping a beer by the fire exit.

Building relationships doesn’t occur on the first night you meet people at the Superclub though does it? First you meet people and talk briefly and get on, hopefully being memorable enough to then pick up and carry on the conversation next time, meeting as people return to the club regularly and remember you and then moving on to meeting away from the Superclub, eventually building a relationship through the greater understanding developed over time.

This is a pretty elaborate way of explaining the application to music of a theory from the brilliant “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell called ‘Broken Windows’, which he uses as part of his dissection of what fuels epidemics and explosions of popularity. The Broken Windows theory was first suggested in explanation of the sudden drop in crime in New York in the 1990s by James Q.Wilson and George Kelling,

“If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no-one cares and that non-one is in charge”

Despite there being a  large police force, a democratic political system, laws and courts protecting people and society, a few broken windows can give the overall impression that no one cares and no one is in charge. This relates to the marketing of music directly, as it reminds us that, as the internet creates a ‘superclub’ of both large scale audiences and large numbers of performers, it is the smaller things that  make a major difference in the success or failure of obtaining the relationships with fans that will create a career.

First and foremost remember that what is most important is that the web presence represents the artist as strongly as possible in image and message, then ensuring that there are no ‘broken windows’; the information is up-to-date, communication is replied to and care is taken in any and all forms of expression including design.

Ensuring that the presentation of an artist online is as professional, tidy and accessible as possible does not mean you will successfully create thousands of relationships. It does, however, give you the best chance of being afforded the opportunity of beginning the conversation in a crowded marketplace.

A guide to submitting singles for review

We’ve talked on this blog before about doing your own digital pr, getting music out to blogs and websites for reviews and features. Yesterday Wendy Roby who writes the ace singles review section for Drowned In Sound (www.drownedinsound.com) posted on her tumblr a guide to how to submit your music to her for review.

I highly recommend reading it even if you haven’t thought of sending a single to Drowned In Sound before http://wendyroby.tumblr.com/Singles

The general take-aways from the blog are as follows:

Only send music to websites/blogs who cover the music that you make. If you play in an awesome crossover metal band send your music to Thrash Hits, not Drowned In Sound or resident advisor (www.residentadvisor.net – electronic music). It’s a waste of both your time and that of the person you’ve sent it too.

Make your email is easy to both understand and also to search for in an inbox. Include release dates, label name and a short description of the band.

Include an mp3 if it’s a single review both as a download/attachment that the reviewer can put on their mp3 player but also as a youtube video or in a soundcloud player (www.soundcloud.com) so they can embed it as part of a review or news item etc.

Check out the article and drop any comments you have on success’s and failures you’ve had with doing ‘pr’ in the past below.

Get Your Numbers Up

A common request from labels, managers and artists is that we “need to get the numbers up on our social networks”. In essence, although not necessarily intentionally, this can be translated to mean “we need to be able to spam as many people as possible about product x in order for a small percentage to buy”. The thinking behind this is “the greater the numbers we have, the greater the small percentage that buy will amount to”.

If you were running a small sewing shop on a high street and a generous investor gave you the time and resources to market your shop, would you spend this on getting more people to walk past your store? As this is essentially what you are doing when you focus on numbers, and specifically the wrong numbers, to plan and analyse your ‘promotion’.

So let’s look briefly at Twitter and the ‘numbers’ there that really count:

Retweets
@replies
Link Clicks
Followers

Not necessarily in that order but definitely with follower numbers at the very end. The reason for using Twitter as an artist is to engage with people. Ultimately, the success of this can be measured by the amount of conversation you create, i.e. re-tweets and @replies to your account and, from a slightly more commercial angle, link clicks.

Concentrating on keeping an engaging, interesting and entertaining profile that generates lots of interest is far more valuable than increasing followers. The power of conversion is ultimately greater than the perceived value of promotion.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 3

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

So far in Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we’ve examined the differences between organic and paid search results, we’ve looked at optimizing your website’s pages, indexing/sitemaps, keywords, meta descriptions and inbound links.  If you haven’t already, make sure you read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this post.

As mentioned before, the algorithm used by Google is constantly changing and includes many unknown factors (most recently the load speed of a page is starting to affect ranking as well, encouraging developers to reduce the load time as much as possible). I will now list some unconventional techniques for trying to increase your site’s Google Search Engine Result page ranking or visitor number.

Where previously it used to take a huge amount of keywords in the header (some being completely irrelevant to the actually content of the site) to get loads of traffic to your site, things have become more complex. As search engines have evolved since the start of the internet, they have also become more intelligent, making it almost impossible to get irrelevant traffic to your website. At present unauthorised techniques, or Black Hat SEO, can even get your site penalised, making it totally disappear from any Search Engine Results Page (In the SEO world referred to as SERP).

A few examples of black Hat SEO techniques are spamdexing, link farming or keyword stuffing.

Spamdexing is a technique where you create pages especially for search engines, in an attempt to get a higher ranking for a particular key word phrase. It is a reverse engineering trick  where the webmaster thinks of key words and phrases a user might input into a search engine and try to build his page to include as many of those keyword phrases in the content as possible.

Keyword stuffing is similar to spamdexing, where a webmaster puts as many related keywords as possible onto a page, but where he doesn’t care how the page looks like and the main objective is to either redirect to an affiliate or to click on a sponsored ad.

Link farming is a group of websites where every website in the group links to every other website in that group, thus spamming the index of a search engine. However, when the linking is done from sites that are relevant to each other it is not considered a black hat technique.

Another definite don’t do is hiding texts or having titles shown in the same colour as the background (because title tags are more likely to get picked up by search engines as keywords).

Improving your Organic Search Engine ranking is something that takes more time compared to the paid Search Engine inclusion and is something that is influenced by not just one factor (highest bid per keyword click) but by a whole group of factors combined into the search engine algorithm. Do not expect your changes to have an overnight effect! Not all of the factors of the search engine algorithm are known and the importance of each factor varies.

The key to getting as high as possible for search terms RELATIVE to your site’s content is CONSTANT revision and monitoring using monitoring tools such as Google Analytics. Once you reach a high ranking, don’t believe you can sit on your laurels Organic Search Engine Optimization is an ONGOING process!

Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 2

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

In Part 1, we looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we examined the differences between organic and paid search results and we looked at how to make sure the pages of your website are optimized. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, do that first.

Now you think your site structure is acceptable, how do you get the indexing by a search engine started? The best way for this is to create a Google webmaster account (this is really easy if you already have a Gmail account) and register your website through the webmaster tools by placing a verification code in your website header. The webmaster tool will allow you to upload an XML sitemap into the system, helping your site to get indexed faster and easier. There are plenty of sites where you can enter your URL and those sites will create the XML sitemap. I’ve found that http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ works quite well.

In the Google webmaster tools you will also find a section for inserting / creating a robot.txt file. In this file you can specify which folders should be accessed by the search engine spider. Say you have a folder containing some images that you use for your website layout. The last thing you want is to have these images show up in a Google image search. That’s why you should protect this folder and disallow the spider access to it.

Now you know the structure of your site is good, but for which keywords and/or keyword phrases do you want to appear on the SERPs?

I found it best to always select a primary and secondary keyword phrase, and make sure these appear in the meta tags (keyword and description), page copy, title tags and file name / URL as much as possible. Remember, the higher in the page that your keyword phrases occur in your body text, the better.

In your HTML header section, you have the possibility to insert a meta-description and keywords. The meta-description has to describe in short what the visitor can find on this page. This will be displayed under the link on the SERP (see figure 1) and ideally should not contain over 160 characters. Make sure the primary and secondary keyword phrases are present in this description. In the keyword section you can enter as many keywords as desired, separated by commas, but ideally you do not want more than 7-8 keyword phrases in there. Make sure each page has a different set of keyword phrases and meta-descriptions, as each page clearly contains different information.

Figure 1: Meta description

Another effective step to directing relevant traffic to your site is linking. Having other websites with topics relevant to yours link to your website does half the work for you. Why? Simple, you already know that these visitors are relevant (they are coming from a site with a relevant topic remember?), thus increasing the chance for a goal conversion (either selling a product through your website or having people complete a contact form) dramatically. Having other sites link to your site also increases your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page, as your site will be associated with the keyword phrases displayed on the website linking to your site. Careful, make sure the link displays on relevant topic pages. If the Google spider decides this is not the case, this might negatively affect your ranking or might even result in your website not appearing at all in the search results (more on that later).

That’s it for Part 2.  In Part 3, we’ll be looking at some of the more unconventional techniques for increasing your search ranking.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 1

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

In this blog I will focus over the course of the coming weeks on increasing traffic coming from search engines, and then more precisely the traffic coming from organic Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP). I will try to shed some light onto how to easily improve your Organic Search Results Ranking, the process also known as Organic SEO. Did I lose you already? No worries, let’s just start from the top.

What is SEO? Wikipedia tells us the following about Organic SEO:

“the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”

Figure 1: Search Engine Market Share

Ok, unpaid search results, that sounds good. Now which search engine should I optimize for? Which ones are available on the market and does my target market play a role in this? The figure on the right gives you a good idea of the key players in the Search Engine market. Agreed, if you live in the UK you might be thinking to yourself “AOL…yeah right!”, but if you wish to target the US market as well, then the relevance of AOL certainly comes into play. Concentrating on the UK market here, it is fair to say that Google is the main player, so I will focus my attention on that particular search engine.

Now, when I do a search in Google, I get a page with many different sections. Which section am I aiming to get top rankings in? What is Paid search and what is Organic? In figure 2, organic search is shown in the green colour, and makes up the largest area in the search results. The other areas are called “Sponsored links” and the rankings are determined by bidding on keywords.

Figure 2: Organic vs. Paid Search Results

So what influences the ranking of your website for a certain search term? Google has never disclosed any exact algorithm that is used to prevent incorrect use of it, but besides tips listed hereunder, I would say the key in all of this is RELEVANCY.

A first step in achieving SEO is actually tracking your site performance. To do this, register on Google and go to the Analytics section to register your site. You will be asked to place some tracking code in your website, so you will need access to your website code. This tracking will make it possible to analyse your site and see where your visitors come from and through which source (direct, referring site or through a search engine).

Now then, let’s see some factors that influence the ranking of your site and how to optimise those.

A good starting point in my opinion is always to make sure your (X)HTML structure is good. This starts with validating your pages (not just the home page!) and CSS file. This can easily be done by using an online tool for XHTML or CSS validating. A quick search gave me this as a place where I can do this http://validator.w3.org/.  Validation can for instance tell you if you have an image in your site that does not have the ‘alt’ property set. A meaningful ‘alt’ and ‘title’ property on an image can aid your image in showing up in the Google image search results.

A validated XHTML file doesn’t necessarily mean its structure is correct. Make sure each page has a different title and make sure that the title is relevant to what that page displays. A proper header hierarchy is also a must (only 1 <h1> tag, following tags have to be h2 and subsections of that h3 etc).

Figure 3: Proper header hierarchy

Good formed links always improves the visitor experience and affects search engine spiders in a positive way. The same can be said for the URL’s to your pages. A lot of dynamic sites might use a URL structure such as http://www.example.com/index.php?pageid=8. Unfortunately this URL does not give the visitor any information on what he/she might find at this location. It is better to use user friendly URL’s such as http://www.example.com/what-we-do.php, where the URL clearly indicates what that page will be about. The trend is to replace any spaces in the URL name by dashes.

Ok, that’s it for today. In the next installment, we’ll be looking at how to get your pages indexed by the search engines and how to get your keywords right.

Digital Training Day in Derby

As some of you may be aware, we run a digital training day on behalf of AIM (Association of Independent Music) in London about once every three months.  Well, for those of you who live a bit too far north to make it to London, we will now be running a condensed version of this course in Derby, in association with AIM and CIN (Creative Industries Network).  So if you’re in the area you should definitely check it out.  Here’s a flyer with the details:

Twitter Profile Design

If you are an artist, or you represent an artist, you are probably using Twitter to communicate with fans.  If you’re not, give yourself a slap and then go and register.  Go on, we’ll wait…  Done it?  Ok.

While Twitter does not allow as much flexibility design-wise as, say, MySpace, you do have the option to upload your own background image.  You should be making the most of this by creating a background that mirrors the design of your website, MySpace profile, YouTube channel, etc, to ensure that you have a consistent design across all platforms through which people might discover your music.

So to get you started, here’s an article featuring some basic guidelines as well as plenty of inspiration in the form of examples of what other people have done with their Twitter backgrounds – http://bit.ly/dzCe4h

Also, here’s an article listing 10 great tools for creating Twitter backgrounds that you may find useful – http://bit.ly/a5fvqx

So now you have no excuse for sticking with that plain old standard Twitter background!

Digital Music Marketing Is Boring

Over the last few years digital campaigns for new albums and releases have had increased budgets, more time and a much bigger place in the overall marketing mix.

The work done by a digital department or independent company has come to be seen as crucial to driving sales and creating engagement. In fact the digital presence of an artist is now more sought-after than the actual quality of the music itself. A&R people will ask how many email addresses on the mailing list and if there has been a video that has ‘gone viral’. These are the stand-out indicators of the likely success of an album now.

Despite digital having this increased importance and there being a greater understanding of how to use it, campaigns are mostly dull and boring carbon-copies of the same idea.

If you walk into any marketing meeting at any mid to large record label you can guarantee to hear that the plan for ‘digital’ involves a free download, a remix competition and a stream of the album. The record will be pre-ordered with some sort of exclusive content and iTunes will have two bonus tracks that the artist didn’t deem good enough for the album itself.

It’s all perfectly well and good, but boy is it dull. With the opportunity to reach an unlimited audience, a starting point of great artwork, songs and lyrics to spark the creative juices and with pre-existing fans, why the heck is it like this?

Why do artists put up with having spent months in a studio tweaking every sound and laying down hours of different takes to get their musical expression correct and then have their marketing be a remix competition and giving away a free track.

I’m not saying that we have all the answers and can do this on every campaign, but it is up to us and the marketing departments at all labels to use digital creatively and not just go through the same motions on every record.