Audio

Audio files aren’t limited to just songs. Yes, you can post songs, but this also can include podcasts, short audio snippets of songs, and short audio cuts from gigs, backstage, on the stage, in rehearsal, or anywhere else. You can also share samples of songs that will be recorded soon as well as bloopers from the studio and stage.

Blooper audios and mixes of a number of bloopers mashed together can make for excellent down-to-earth content. You may have been frustrated in the studio when you were trying to get a certain take just right, but a compilation of bloopers shows your humorous side and can attract listeners to the final version of the song. In a world where everyone is always trying to showcase perfection, show them that no one is perfect and give them a laugh.

All samples that you post should be copyrighted, and you should have your copyrights in order before you post any music online. It’s true that as soon as you create it, it’s technically copyrighted to you, but in the world of stealing and sampling, it makes it worlds harder to prove it’s yours if you don’t have your material correctly copyrighted.

Keep those audios short. Don’t give away full songs, or if you post a full song for free, realize that it’s hard to remove it and make money from it down the line. Audio shorts under three minutes, just like videos, get more listens and completed listens all the way through over longer audios. Mix up the audios, create themes, and have fun. These don’t have to be perfectly mixed either. You can record audio right into Garage Band or any recording software on your computer, or even into a smartphone for use as solid content.

Upload that audio to SoundCloud, Spreaker, or another audio sharing site, and use that page as the link to all your other social media pages when you have an audio posting day.

Video

Short videos are amazing for engagement and optimization on your website and across social media. This is one time where quantity can trump quality. Don’t get me wrong — you still want quality in each video you post with strong, engaging content. But having only one high-cost, heavily produced music video is nowhere near as effective as having ten short videos shot on iPhones. With ten short videos, you deliver lots of new content that markets you, your music, and your merchandise.

Add videos to YouTube that show how a song was written and include a short profile on each band member. You can also include a review for another band, talk about products or equipment you use, make pop culture references, tell who influences your band, show fan video profiles — use your imagination and you’ll be amazed at how many other creative videos you can post for your fans.

Shorter videos, such as those under three minutes, have that much better a click-through rate. Videos four minutes and longer lose viewers much faster than videos under three minutes.

Videos also have a higher level of optimization. Correctly formatting a video can help it to jump up in all search engines that much faster. Later in this chapter, I explain the basic steps to video formatting.

Pictures

Pictures and images are great additions to social media. Unfortunately, too many artists upload only an image and do not even post a headline for it. Pictures, like videos, that are formatted correctly can help the image jump up in optimization and be found in more searches.

Audiences engage with relatable pictures. In other words, don’t send just shots from the studio, rehearsals, band shots, or audience shots. Add fun pictures that have nothing to do with music but are helpful to market back to you. You audience would likely enjoy images or views that have a Flat Stanley addition to them, like a CD cover, piece of merchandise, or a picture of someone wearing your logo that can add that extra touch.

From landscapes to food to cars, old toys, animals, and more, your expansion of photos can draw a great deal of views and interest. Why not show your dog biting down on a CD cover and give it a headline that says “This one reviewer chewed us up and spit us out.”

Not all pictures have to be humorous, but that little step outside of the box can make for better pictures and more available content. Add in fun headlines to gather even greater interest, especially on sites like Instagram, Flickr, and Pinterest. (For more info on social media sites, check out Chapter 10.)

Adding hashtags and a call to action on sites like Instagram can cross reference you, the picture, and the contents of the picture to a wider audience, helping to give you that much better a chance at a larger conversion to fans and sales.

Quotes or jokes

Quotes can be anything you like, pertaining to music or not. They can also be funny, shorter posts that aren’t as expanded as a blog format. Add pictures sometimes; other times, don’t add pictures. This allows for another form of content that can draw in and engage people looking for short tidbits.

The following is an example of a quote post I used a number of months back:

“Romeo & Juliet isn’t a love story. It’s a 3-day #relationship between a 13 & 17 year old that caused 6 deaths. Sincerely, those who read it.” – Unknown

This was posted on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and a number of my other social media sites as a joke that engaged people, caused shares, and kept ongoing and consistent content to be posted.

It wasn’t directly marketing me, my book, my speaking, or my services, but it continued to maintain engagement.

If the quote or joke isn’t yours, do what you can to add the author of it. Give credit where credit is due. Adding a link to the person’s Facebook or Twitter page is also a great way to give credit and connect with that many more people.

Again, it doesn’t have to be all about music. Of course, your fans love music, but may want to know more about you. Allow for the connection outside of music in a vicarious or relatable way and you draw people to click-through to your pages.

Reviews

Reviews and testimonials are great cross-marketing draws and pieces of content that should be added on a weekly basis. Highlighting another band, a product, or instrument you use, a restaurant where your band ate, an attraction you checked out on the road, a hotel you stayed at, a place you played, or a service you used helps give you a wider reach to people who may like the other band, the restaurant, hotel, service, and so on.

Adding these reviews to sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google can further optimize your name, review, and you to others who are interested in that place or service.

You want reviews for your recordings, so look for people to add positive comments to your social media pages, iTunes store, Amazon listings, and everywhere else. Reviews and testimonials can put you in front of others who might never otherwise see you.

Make time each day (outside of a weekly review of a band, product, place, and so on) to add a simple review to a different site. Once a week, put a focus on a given person, place, or thing to review, and share through all your networks.

Blogs

A blog can be the most challenging to create, but it can also become the best long-term optimizer of content that gets picked up by the search engines and helps get you connected with more fans.

Blogs can and should contain pictures; if you’re hosting your website with WordPress, you can share it through all your social media sites via your website.

With all the different topics that you can cover, think of your blog as a headline or keyword that people search on to find your music and you; then, work off the title to draw in those fans not only for the day you post it, but also for the search engines to grab months and even years later.

Have fun with titles and the content in a blog. Talk about a variety of topics to get reads and wider-spread opportunities to reach a larger audience. Top ten lists, discussing your favorite things, asking why the sky is blue, and so on attracts more readers than:

Kitty Likes Avocado Band Blog 6-14-15 Entry

The following list is an example of five titles that can draw interest from people searching for music as well as searching for other topics:

• Top Ten Pick-Up Lines Our Drummer Has Used at Shows
• Why Mary Poppins is the Greatest Movie of All Time
• Favorite Restaurants on the West Coast We Visited on Tour
• How to Win a Free T-Shirt from Kitty Likes Avocado
• What Our Superhero Alter Egos Would be for Every Band Member

You can also add blogs that discuss why you use only a specific guitar, drumhead, or drumstick. These types of blogs have multiple benefits that can include optimizing the brand, which you can use to solicit sponsorships or endorsement assistance down the line.

All the content you post helps you more over time as your optimization and formatting compounds. The more content you have going up on a regular basis, the more it optimizes for that single post as well as all the other posts that came before and those that will come after.

By hosting the blog on your website and sharing the blog link on social media, you’re directing people back to your content as it brings them to the website where they can find out where to buy your music, your products, or come to see you.

Link or pitch

Sharing links and having content that is an all-out sales pitch to one of your stores, one of your products or one of your other sites to connect or engage with is not a bad thing, but it should show up no more than once a week or even once every ten days.

With all the branding, content, and information in place, your call to action on your social media sites and in your videos help with a solid pitch and sell.

Your pitch for someone to click a link and then buy a song, connect on another social media site, subscribe to a blog, buy a hat, and so on has to contain something that draws them in and makes them want to find out more.

Don’t tell your fans or audience how they’ll feel after they hear a song, see you live, or experience something you deliver. Allow them to feel it for themselves. The overly dominant approach of telling people what they feel is assumptive and pushy. By giving them the chance and the offer to decide, you engage your fan base and potential new fans that much better.

Considering other content ideas

Maybe you have an idea for a regular content concept or a mixture of two or three. Go with it. Your creativity, continuity, and uniformity dramatically increase your views, networking, engagements, and conversions. As you create a theme or concept, go with it for a while. Test the waters, and keep an eye on the results and interactions.

Good content connects you with those looking for the content but not necessarily looking for you. Topics and posts about events outside of music that people are searching on can help draw them to your post on that topic and then, in turn, they can find out more about you.

Easter eggs

An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in a work such as a computer program, video game, movie, book, or crossword puzzle. Whether in a video, blog, audio file, or any type of content, add those Easter eggs now and then. For example, in a blog, you can use different colors or different fonts for certain letters, and over a series of days or weeks, spell out a word. Let readers know that there’s a secret word or phrase spread out across a series of blogs and if they figure it out, they get some kind of prize.

Using your editorial calendar to track what you put up and when, it’s easy to create those hidden messages, images, or elements across a wider spread of time.

By offering the prize, you re-engage the fans who have already seen the content or skimmed through it to read that much closer and look that much deeper. They also spend that much more time on your site.

Then those who skipped certain content or didn’t see those posts at all, will go through them with a fine-tooth comb. Although their main goal may be to win something, they get more engaged with you and the posted content. This can help with the conversions to purchases you’re looking for.

Make sure the prize is something pretty good. In a sense, you’re asking a fan, follower, or potential fan to dig through a whole bunch of material, so make it worth their while.

Prizes don’t always have to tie in to you or your music or your products. While a CD, a T-shirt, a coffee cup, and a hat might entice some, offering something like a $50 gas card, a free oil change gift certificate, or another useful item may be that much more of an enticer to connect with you, join your mailing list, or whatever is required of them to be able to be entered in the contest.

Keeping sites and content public

Don’t force fans to like you, your pages, or to sign up for a mailing list before they can decide if they actually like you, your music, and your content. Forcing them to do so is a bad idea and can make people move on very quickly to another artist or band.

Give each page the sense that it offers something exclusive to draw people in. Have a single video on YouTube that isn’t shared on your other pages, photos on Instagram available only on Instagram, and certain posts just for Facebook.

Don’t make your social media pages private. Give people the ability to see you as soon as they click through to you.

Whereas most of the time it’s easier and faster to share content across social media sites, have a little bit of exclusivity here and there for people to look around. With your monthly email newsletter, be sure to offer more than just a recap of the posts and content of that month. There should be a couple articles that are shared only for those who signed up for your list; otherwise, they have no reason to be added to your mailing list.

Comments and commenting on other pages and posts

Just as you look for positive engagement, negative posts, critics, and flat out jerks can also comment on your walls. Anything too graphic or really mean should be deleted, but leave some of the negative posts on and engage with a thicker skin, being the better person and taking the high road. Being able to handle a few blows to the ego can be good for your marketing as well as life in the music business as a whole.

When you comment on other pages or posts, you’re representing yourself to your fans and others in the industry when using your artist or band pages. Post accordingly, play nice, and project professionalism, even when the other person might not be acting all that mature.

Sharing other people’s posts to promote you

Sharing other bands’ posts or posts from those you’re cross-promoting is a helpful way to connect with a different audience, and you may see the same actions reciprocated. Don’t get caught up in quid pro quo, and expect because you share a post that they will share one of your posts.

If a post resonates with you and you want to share it, give the post a headline that leads your viewers to it and offer a basic reason why you’re sharing it.

The potential for viral down the road

That post from a few months ago or a few years ago might just get a second wind stronger than the first. Realize that everything you post could serve as additional marketing and promotion far down the line or in some of those cases, even go viral when you least expect it.

Your primary keyword phrase

The primary keyword phrase is the main phrase your blog and content is built on. This is what you want to show up when people are searching for that specific phrase. The more you change up the phrase in different ways to get into as many different searches as possible, the more people will be able to find you. More about keyword choosing and keyword phrases in Chapter 8.

For example, your primary keyword phrase needs to show up in the URL for the page. So if your blog is titled:

Fruity Funk Scratching at the Drapes of Rock and Roll — Meet KLA

and your primary keyword phrase is Fruity Funk, this should show up in the URL like this: http:///kittylikesavocado.com/2015/01/01/fruity-funk/

Keep that phrase interesting as you tie it into the title of your blog. Think news story; think read all about it; think excitement and how you can best draw the interest for someone to click through. Combining a strong primary keyword phrase with a solid title under 70 characters gives you a headline that people want to click and read more about.

With blogs, make sure your primary keyword phrase is broken up by dashes between the words.

Besides the URL, your primary keyword phrase needs to be

• In your article heading.
• In your meta description.
• In at least one sub heading (an H1, H2, or H3 heading).
• In the first paragraph of your blog content.
• At least 1 percent of your total word count. For example: If you have a blog with 500 words, the keyword phrase needs to be inside the content at least five times.
• If you add photos or videos to the blog, the primary keyword phrase should be included in their filenames.

Again, never repeat primary keyword phrases for titles. Always change up the primary keyword phrase for each title. That phrase can be used again as a secondary phrase, but should not be used again for any other primary keyword phrases.

Outbound links or crosstown traffic

Adding outbound links to your blog to connect it to pertinent or relatable materials will also help build up the SEO and help to create links to other sites and pages. An outbound link is a link to another page, website, or social media that’s not yours. Linking to products you use, other bands you play with, social media sites for venues where you’re playing, and anything else helps to connect that post and content to other web and social media pages.

Minimum and maximum lengths

Make sure your blogs contain at least 300 words. This shows the search engines it’s a real article and not something too short that could be overlooked. Stay under or top out at no more than 900 words, because you have to follow all those previously mentioned primary keyword phrase rules with more words in a blog, the more times you have to add that primary keyword over and over.

Each title should be at least 40 but under 70 characters, including spaces. And your meta description of the blog or blog summary should be over 100 characters but under 150.

Readability is key, too. Trying to construct a blog with the sole focus on building up SEO is a bad idea and can get your blog and website flagged by search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Make your blogs readable, and don’t overdo it with the use of keywords.

Don’t forget the call to action

Sign off your blogs with that call to action. If you create a great piece of content that gets shared by numerous people who read it, but you don’t give them the basics on you, your music, and your links, you could be losing a very large potential audience.

Even if the blog is hosted on your website, don’t assume readers will scroll up and click through to read your bio, check out your other links, or connect with you. Make sure you close your blogs with a call-to-action signature that delivers your tagline, tells people where to find out more information, and offers them links to click right through to find out more and connect. Make it as easy as possible for people to connect over expecting them to dig that much deeper.

Using stacked blogs

A stacked blog includes a video, photo, audio, or any combination thereof, whereas a simple blog might contain only content and a couple images. Get creative and let your blog work for you. Stay in the mindset of how content or a blog can work on the day you put it up, but how months later that primary keyword phrase can show up in search engines and still be effective.

Don’t repeat a primary keyword phrase

Do not repeat a primary keyword phrase on YouTube, your blog, or anywhere else and avoid repeating them in your blog, too. Keep track of the primary keyword phrases you use and don’t use them again as primary keyword phrases. They can be used as secondary keyword phrases in other videos and content. Overusing a phrase gets that phrase cancelled out for you when it comes to optimization and hurts the search results over time.

Body of the video content

After the two links, repeat the title of the video and give a description about the video. Close with your call to action and some more links at the bottom to create the most effective video upload possible. You can also add six to eight other tags besides your primary tag, and you’re good to go.

Here’s an example of it all put together for the best video content (description of the video adding fruity funk a few more times and then closing with your call to action):

• Primary keyword phrase: Fruity Funk
• Video name: fruityfunk.MOV
• Video title: Fruity Funk Scratching at the Drapes of Rock and Roll – Meet KLA
• Video tags or secondary keyword phrases: fruity funk, kitty likes avocado, rock and roll, alternative funk, pop infused, kitten on catnip, scratching post
• Video description:
• http://kittylikesavocado.com/
• https://facebook.com/kittylikesavocado/
• Fruity Funk Scratching at the Drapes of Rock and Roll – Meet KLA.

This video formatting helps to move you up higher in the rankings of YouTube as well as on other search engine sites. Take the time to set up your format, and keep a template that enables you to create the format that much easier.

You can create a number of video descriptions and formats first, then simply shoot the video and put it and the formatted description in a file with your editorial calendar. Sometimes, creating a number of videos in advance to be used over time can save you both time and hassle, making it easier to upload on those days when you’re busy but still need top-notch content.

While there are issues with YouTube regarding payments and streaming for music for larger-scale artists, it doesn’t mean you should avoid it all together. Using YouTube for content videos that cover you, the band, interviews, and other forms of content is the best for optimization. You don’t need to post full videos of your music, but make those content videos on YouTube for your promotion, the promotion of your music, and for viewers to learn more about you.

Audio lead-ins and lead-outs

Using Garage Band or another recording software can enable you to put a nice lead-in and lead-out to your audio blog or podcast. Keep it short and simple, and consider asking a friend to do that lead-in. Using a different voice can add an additional professional touch to it all.

Deliver that clear lead-in to what the audio or podcast is, and on the lead-out, make sure to reiterate your website, social media, and the rest of your call to action. Some may have access only to your audio, so make sure you give them the information to lead them to more.

Make sure all posts, whether audio, video, blog, and so on, have a clear beginning, middle, climax, and end. It helps to maintain, retain, and sustain your fans ongoing interest as you reach out to new people.

Avoid rambling on, laughing at private jokes, or jumping all over the place. It can be a major turn-off to listeners. See every audio or podcast as if it’s the first time someone is hearing it or hearing about you, whereas at the same time keeping a certain consideration for those who might already be fans and have heard you before.

Keeping up with the content and filling in the blanks

On sites like SoundCloud you have the capability to use different hashtags as well as add a description. Take advantage of that space and fill in that content. Stay with the basic blog rules (see “Blog Formats” earlier in this chapter) as you repeat that primary keyword phrase a good number of times in that piece of content.

Just like video, audio doesn’t automatically optimize; it’s how the track is uploaded, named, hashtagged, and how content is added. Rename the URLs accordingly to make the topics, primary keyword phrase, and information crystal clear.

Overall lengths and times

Like videos, shorter audios have a better chance to be heard, and using more, shorter audios gives you more content, optimization, and share over long podcasts and audios.

Taking an audio and splitting it into a number of parts is a great idea and allows for that much more content. It also can entice someone that begins to listen to Part 3 of 3 to search for the other two parts and become that much more involved with you.

With the ability for people to download and collect podcasts, if the listener downloads a six-part episode that are ten minutes each, it still gives the listener the same content as if they had downloaded an hour podcast. All they are doing is listening through a few extra tracks. Breaking up those tracks can also build anticipation for those who are listening already while using each episode to capture that many more people and build up your online presence that much more.

Reviewing in full blog format

Give the same review as you would for that band, product, person, or service, but add that extra touch of optimization by following the blog formats. These reviews in blog format can be a great deal easier in many ways because you can gather most of the content from the band, product, or service you’re reviewing.

Adding your personal review and then adding their photo, video, audio, or links can create an amazing piece of cross-marketing content that also more than likely gets the favor returned.