Musicians, Social Media Alone Is Not Enough To Promote Your Music

You have a band or you might be a singer/songwriter, you have seen the success a few other musicians have had after being discovered online and getting signed by a record label. Your band has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, you’re on YouTube and you even have a Google+ page but so far just a few gigs down at your local pub.

There is just one thing missing you haven’t got a website, social media is great for promoting your self or your band but to convert all of the enthusiasm you generate into action you need a website. A website can showcase what your doing and the music you are producing as well as collect email addresses for marketing, it can even help you increase sales of gig tickets or your music if you have had any CD’s produced or your music is ready to download. The sort of things you should have on your website are:

• Contact information
• Links to all of your social media platforms
• Gig listings and where to buy tickets
• An online store for your downloads, CD’s and merchandise
• Links to any positive reviews
• A newsletter sign up form of some sort to gather email addresses

I can’t afford a website I hear you say, after all your an unemployed musician, well here are three website platforms you can use for free, or for a very small cost dependent on which version of WordPress you use.

1. WordPress, I’ve already mention it so I’ll start with it. There are two versions, WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The first gives you far more flexibility in terms of template choice and custom design, there are also thousand of plugins available for just about any functionality you can think of, if you can code you can create the plugins or customise existing themes any way you wish. With this WordPress option you will need to find a host which of course has a cost attached, if you want it to be completely free go for WordPress.com which this blog is on. You have less choice as far as templates are concerned and the number of options to customise are much lower but you can still have a pretty decent looking website. There are some very big acts using WordPress such as Arcade Fire and Tom Jones.
2. Music Glue is a great solution that includes everything you or your band need including a great looking online store so if you want to sell your music directly through your website this is probably the best option. The advantage with this platform is that you can offer your fan base everything they want without ever leaving your website, downloads, merchandise and tickets, you even have the option of print on demand t-shirts. So no more boxes of t-shirts in your dad’s garage as the t-shirts aren’t printed until somebody orders one, cooked to order so to speak. There are no monthly charges as you just pay a commission on all sales generated so no up front costs at all. There are some pretty big acts using Music Glue such as Bryan Ferry so you will be in good company if you choose this option.
3. Tumblr, this is probably the easiest option but it also offers you the least in terms of what you can do with your website although its great if you want to be part of an already established community as its sort of a blend of a social media platform, a blog and a website rolled into one. It has no costs attached and its very simple to use, just sign up, choose a theme and start posting and that’s it although as I mention your options are pretty limited.

Well that’s it, if you are an aspiring musician good luck and of you are still struggling to set up a website feel free to get in touch.

 

By Chris Jones

7 Tips For Marketing Your Business On Facebook

In my role as an Internet Marketing Consultant I often speak to business owners that have struggled to achieve any measurable gains from using Facebook, more often than not it is because they are not using it to the full, they just post the odd update and maybe the odd link to a blog post they have written.

Facebook launched 10 years ago, wow where does the time go, and in that time it has grown to the point where it now has 1.8 billion users so you would be foolish not to try and take advantage of it.

Here are 7 quick tips to help you improve the gains you get from marketing on Facebook:

1. Create great content, no Facebook page can be successful without it, establish what sort of content your audience likes with a bit of trial and error.
2. Buy Facebook ads and promote your posts. Ads and promoted posts can potentially reach a huge audience, they are also very flexible and can fit into almost any budget and you can target a specific audience based on a number of different factors, such as gender, age, parents or not, interests, type of job, the list goes on. You have all seen ads on your own Facebook account, well the ads you see are based on you and your interests.
3. Custom tabs, these are the little buttons that appear below your cover picture and can be used for a number of different purposes such as contests, product promotions or discount codes to name a few.
4. Competitions, who doesn’t like something for nothing. Freebies are a really useful way of growing your following and it gives a genuine reason for people to click that “Like” button. Its also great  for your brand  to be seen as rewarding your customer base.
5. Engagement, this is vital you must reply to your audience. Facebook is all about engagement and communication so its important to show you care enough to bother to reply to all messages and comments. Its probably even more important if its criticism that you respond to so your audience can see you are responding and trying to correct any problems.
6. Partnership, lets say you have relatively few likes and followers but one of your suppliers, clients or some other form of business partner has ten thousand, does it not make sense to make use of that partnership to promote your page, competition or offer completely free of charge.
7. Social buttons and QR codes. How can you expect to grow you Facebook audience if nobody knows you have a presence on it. Ensure you have ” follow us on Facebook” buttons on your website and use QR codes on any print such as brochures and flyers.

If you are struggling with Facebook marketing or social media marketing generally and how you can make the most of it for your business feel free to get in touch.

 

By Chris Jones

Link Building Is Dead, Time To Start Earning Your Links

I know, with “is dead” in the title you might start to think this is yet another post talking about the death of SEO and inbound links but I promise you its not. Its just link building which is dead and if you haven’t already you should stop trying to build inbound links to your website.

Now I am not saying that inbound links aren’t important as they are very important but if you are link building with Google’s determination to rid the internet of all link spam you are playing with fire, and risking receiving a penalty from the Google gods, and if you rely on organic traffic to your website for your business can you afford to risk traffic numbers falling of a cliff.

Another thing to bear in mind is there is a good chance that there will be a lot of moaning from SEO’s and website owners later this month if the widely expected Penguin update actually happens this month, no doubt there will be many websites that get hit. The previous 5 Penguin updates, including launch, have happened in April/May or October.

So if you are using any techniques such as low quality guest blogging or even asking for a link then you need to stop. The only kind of inbound link that you are safe from being penalised for is a naturally earned link.

How do you get naturally earned links I hear you ask, well in theory it’s simple. Create a great informative website  and create fantastic content on that website that people will want to link to. Sounds easy doesn’t it but what sort of content should you create, what if your industry or niche is a bit dull. Well to start with do not create content just for the sake of it make sure you actually have something to share and it doesn’t just have to be textual content. Think about videos, images, infographics etc. Look into creating content about things like how to guides, case studies, how people use your product, top 10 lists always seem to go down well.

Here is an example for you, flat pack wardrobes, not exactly an exciting product to write about but if you have ever tried to build one you know what a pain they can be. If you were to create a video on how to put one together and did the same for the chest of draws and the coffee table etc that would make you stand out and no doubt if done well would attract inbound links to your site.

So whether its a video, an image, an infographic or a piece of textual content just make sure that it’s high quality, informative, useful to others and don’t forget to make it easily share-able on social media, also once you have published the content tell the world about it and share it on Twitter and Facebook etc.

 

By Chris Jones

Yahoo Search Updates Its Local Search Results

In a recent post on its blog Yahoo announced an update to its local search results. Very much like the local results from Google the Yahoo local search results will now give detailed information about a business when the listing is clicked.

Here is what Yahoo had to say in its announcement:

“When it comes to searching for local content, we know you want to take action. If you’re checking out a restaurant, you want to peruse the menu, see if it’s open, and maybe make a reservation. If you’re looking for a new dentist, you want to know whether the office near you is accepting new patients, and if they take your insurance.”

“Whether you’re searching for the nearest open restaurant or your local coffee shop, you’ll see a snapshot of the business alongside our refreshed Yahoo Maps experience – information like a company overview, photos, hours of operation, parking availability and more. With a noticeably larger map that stays put on the sidebar, it’s easier to find the location closest to you.”

Here is an examples of what the new local search results look like:

These updated local search results have only been rolled out in the US for now but will be rolling out globally soon so there is another reason to make sure you are on the right track with your local SEO campaign.

By Chris Jones

Interests, A New Tool From Pinterest

A new tool has been launched by Pinterest which they call “Interests”. With this tool you can explore topics of interest to you to help you find pins which you are most interested in.

To try “Interests” visit Pinterest from your desktop browser  and click on “Preview! Explore Interests” in the categories menu. Its not available on mobile yet but Pinterest say they will be rolling it out for mobiles worldwide soon.

This new feature should make it much easier to find pins which are if interest to you, here is what Pinterest has to say about it on their blog “Before today, all the billions of Pins on Pinterest were organized into just a handful of broad categories. So if you were browsing for ideas for your yard, you had to go somewhere like“Gardening” and sift through all the Pins. If you’ve collected lots of Pins that show climbing plants and wall ferns, your interests page might recommend vertical gardens for you to check out.”

This looks like a great new tool and the more you use Pinterest the better it will become for you as your interests will obviously change over time, but as Pinterest state “Keep in mind that this is still just a preview. You may see a few interests here and there that aren’t quite your thing, but rest assured that improvements are already in the works.”

Pinterest continues to improve and its popularity is growing, it is now the 3rd most popular way to share content online after Facebook and Twitter having overtaken email.

By Chris Jones

How Page Load Times Effect Your Google Search Rankings

Did you know that the time it takes your website to load can have a direct impact on your search rankings on Google? Yes that’s correct, a slow load time can negatively impact on where your site pages will rank on Google SERP’s making it an important SEO factor.

How slow is to slow I hear you ask, well Google state that if your site is slower than 95% of websites then it is recommended that you improve your page load speed.

You can check how quickly your site loads on both desktop PC’s and mobiles by using the Google Page Speed insights tool which you can find here. It will show the speed of any individual page of your site, you just need to enter the page URL, it will also detail any factors that are slowing your site down and how to correct them.

I came across this infographic from Quicksprout which details some interesting fact about page load speed and the positive effects that can be achieved if you improve it.

If your page speed is too slow then speak with your web developer and/or SEO company and speed things up. The visitors to your website will like it as well.

By Chris Jones

Poor Grammar Within Comments Left On Your Blog, Should You Correct Them?

In a video published today by Matt Cutts he answers the following question:

“Should I correct the grammar on comments to my WordPress blog? Should I not approve comments with poor grammar? Will approving comments with grammar issues affect my page’s quality ratings?”

Matt goes onto to say that you shouldn’t worry about poor grammar in the comments section of your blog, as long as the content on your page is high quality with good grammar then it will not cause any issues.

What you need to do is ensure that they are genuine comments and not spam as many bots leaving thousand of spam comments will have poor grammar but if its a genuine person then poor grammar reflects badly on them rather than you.

Here is the video from the Google Webmaster Help Channel with the answer from Matt in full:

Well that’s it for this post, hopefully with no examples of poor grammar.

By Chris Jones

The End Of Keywords As We Know Them

For as long as there has been SEO there has been keywords but much to the annoyance of many SEO’s, (it’s amusing how many of us SEO practitioners panic when something changes), the exact match keyword has disappeared from the SEO check list in 2014.

This is due to a number of things, firstly the free keyword tool from Google disappeared on the 27th August 2013, then just a week later Google went 100% secure search and no keyword data was provided via Google Analytics or anywhere else for that matter, then Google announced the Hummingbird Algorithm at the end of September, although it had been running for a month by then but nobody noticed because it wasn’t targeting rankings but rather the search query itself.

The combination of all this caused consternation among SEO’s, where were we to get keyword data from now to determine what to target? More on that later in this post as first I need to cover why the exact match keyword is not what you should be targeting.

Up until recently it was relatively easy to figure out what keywords to optimise your website for, if you’re a plumber in Lancaster the keywords you wanted to rank well for would have been along the line of “plumber Lancaster” or ” emergency plumber Lancaster” but that is no longer the case.

Why you may ask, well its due to a little bird that flaps its wings very rapidly, that’s right the Hummingbird, the name of Google’s latest algorithm, its not an update but a replacement for the core algorithm. So whats behind this change from Google, well its so they can understand the search query better which they need to do due to the fact that the way we search is changing. With the ever increasing popularity of smart phones many of us now search with voice search, we simply say what we need into our phones and up pops the results and even get spoken to us. As an example i’ll go back to using the plumber in Lancaster, in the past we would have typed something along the lines of “plumber in Lancaster” into the Google search box and clicked enter. Now with voice search or conversational search we change the way we think as we are actually speaking rather than typing, its a subconscious thing that we aren’t even aware of, now we are likely to say into our phones (or even voice search on Google Chrome on our laptops) “I need a phone number for an emergency plumber”. Google Hummingbird will change that query into something along the lines of “emergency plumber Lancaster contact details” (Google of course knows your location so you don’t have to say it or type it anymore), another example to illustrate this could be ” Where do I find a good Italian food?”, Hummingbird will change this to something like “Italian restaurant Lancaster Lancashire UK”

Now it won’t be long before Hummingbird starts looking at your website pages content so now is the time to start thinking about key phrases and looking at ways to get all the words in the phrases into your content naturally, also think about an keyword indexes rather than individual key words and phrases and implementing them when creating the textual content on the pages of your website. As an example, in the past you would have targeted “Italian restaurant Lancaster” as a keyword, now you should think of that as the title of keyword index and think about the different ways that query may be spoken and bear that in mind when creating your site content.

So back to the question, where do I get keyword data from now? Well there is still plenty of tools you can use, you can even just listen to the way people speak about your business and its products and services as this will give you plenty of clues on keywords.

The first tool you should probably use is the Adwords Keyword planner from Google which replaced the previous keyword tool, now this is a pretty good tool, in fact its better than the old one we all moaned about Google getting rid of, the only slight problem is you need an Adwords account to use it although you don’t need to have any ads running or even a campaign built, just open an account and you’ll have free access to the Keyword planner tool.

Of course there are other tools you can use such as Wordtracker which as probably been around as long as the keywords themselves, and don’t forget that everyday conversation by other about your business as these spoken words are what people will use when using voice search.

In conclusion keywords are not dead but we need to change the way we think about them.

So what are your thoughts on keywords for SEO in 2014 and beyond, let me know in the comments box below.

By Chris Jones

Twitter & Facebook Social Signals Are Not Part Of Google’s Ranking Algorithms

In a recent video published on Google’s Webmaster Help Channel on YouTube Matt Cutts discusses whether or not social signals from Twitter and Facebook are part of what Google’s ranking algorithms take notice of. The video was in response to the following question “Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm? How much do they matter?”

In short Matts answer was no, Twitter and Facebook pages get treated just like any other web page. This is an interesting subject as there has been much speculation about this in recent times. Here is what Matt had to say:

“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.”

This is different to what Matt said on the matter a coupe of years ago but that was before Google was blocked from seeing data about numbers of likes and followers etc.

“We have to crawl the web in order to find pages on those two web properties and we’ve had at least one experience where we were blocked from crawling for about a month and a half. And so the idea of doing a lot of special engineering work to try to extract some data from web pages when we might get blocked from being able to crawl those web pages in the future, is something where the engineers would to be a little bit leery about doing that.”

So should you stop worrying about building a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter? Of course you shouldn’t, although there is no direct SEO benefit these two social platforms will drive traffic to your site from people who are interested in what you have to say. Also from an SEO point of view, if you share good useful content from your website on Facebook and Twitter more people will see it, more people will visit your website and to help with SEO some of those people might link to it from their own site. So there you go an SEO benefit, although indirectly.

This is what Matt said about the use of Twitter and Facebook:

“So I’m not saying not to use Twitter or Facebook, I love to tweet, there’s a ton of people who get a ton of value from both Facebook and Twitter. I think both of those services represent a fantastic avenue, it’s a way to drive visitors and traffic to your site, it’s a way to let people know about news related to you or your company or website, so I think they’re great ways to build up your personal brand. But don’t necessarily assume that just because there is a signal on Facebook or Twitter that Google is able to access that. A lot of pages might be blocked or there might be nofollow on links or something along those lines.”

Anyway here is Matts’ answer on full:

Did you notice that there was no mention of Google+? I think that is a topic for discussion at another time.

By Chris Jones

Google Require Some Businesses To Re-Verify Google Maps Listings

Google are sending out emails to some businesses asking them to verify their Google Maps or Google Places listing, if you receive one of these emails you have 3 weeks to re-verify your listing or it will be removed from Google Maps and Google Plus Local.

It is not known how many businesses may be affected by this but I suggest that if you have a Google Places listing make sure you keep an eye on your email and don’t forget your junk/spam folder. The subject line to watch out for is “Action Required: You have 3 weeks to save your Google Places Listing.” The content of the email is as follows:

“Hello,

Due to changes in Google Maps, we’d like to inform you that unless you review and confirm the information in your Google Places account, we will no longer be able to keep and show it to Google users after February 21, 2014.

As a result, on this date your listing “Pet Friends” may be deleted.

If you wish to keep your listing active, follow these three easy steps:

1.        Log in to your Google Places account
2.        Review and update your information
3.        Click the “Submit” button

Sincerely,
The Google Places Team”

Jade Wang from Google stated on the Google Products forum that it is a genuine email and you shouldn’t ignore it or pass it off as spam.

So if you receive one of these emails make sure you action it straight away, don’t put it off as you may forget and the next thing you know your business website will have been removed for Google Local results.

By Chris Jones