Date: August 2010 - Subject: NOSPAM - Band Promotion

Joanna: Hi, I’m in a London based rock band and I’m interested in your ‘Band Promotion Project’. I was wondering if you could help us with promoting our myspace page, i.e. increasing number of plays/hits and expanding our fan base.

UBP: Hi, I am sorry but I do not help bands to promote their MySpace pages (even though I’m #1 in Google for: MySpace Band Promotion), I only help bands to promote their Websites. I see you have a website, I would be happy to take a look and offer some practical promotional help and suggestions - maybe you would like to swap links? Join me on Twitter and I’ll re-tweet your gig dates. Let me know what you want.

Joanna: That’s cool, as you know most people go to myspace nowadays because it’s easier as it’s got all the info in one page. Also record labels and management look at myspace to see number of plays, friends, comments etc. We only got the website so we had a band email and because it looks more professional to have one. Having said that feel free to have a look and tell us what you think, but bare in mind most of it is referring people back to myspace! I’m not very good at twitter I just got updates from myspace, facebook, etc…

UBP: Dear Joanna, Well, you have obviously visited my website Unsigned Band Promotion, but (and I quite understand why) you haven’t quite grasped what I am trying to say to you, so here it is again:

I am NOT a band promoter in the traditional sense (I do not arrange gigs/bookings), I am "Website Promotion" for bands! I help musicians and artists to get their websites noticed by fans, search engines and the music industry in half the time they could do it on their own, PLUS: UnsignedBandPromotion is the worlds best free website promotion resource and service for independent bands. I do not get hands-on and help bands to promote MySpace, PureVolume and profiles in general, or FreeWebs, Yahoo! (GeoCities is dead) LYCOS.tripod and other free webhosting type of pages - *I am all about the real Website*. The Band Promotion Project is a practical approach to promoting your band’s website (it is: - This website. My way of helping bands with website promotion. About experimentation and discovery). I aim to increase the number of visitors to your website, find missed promotional opportunities and ultimately, increase your fan base. I do not aim to change your band’s image, your sound or the look and feel of your website. I am simply experimenting with a number of website promotion and SEO methods for independent bands - it is free and there is no sign-up - and that’s it! Get it?

Anyway, even though bands use MySpace, all your fans have moved over to Facebook and/or Twitter - for some strange reason, that I can’t explain, I’m not very keen on Facebook, I prefer twitter!! I do realize though that Myspace is an important erogenous zone for independent bands because it has a reasonably reliable and easy to operate music player. Apart from that, the interface is shit and Friends aren’t Fans - nb: if you are a band that wants to attract young teenagers, Myspace might still be a good place to be. Gig Promoters, Venues, Labels, Press, Online Radio and DJs all want to hear quality music, so if you are a band who has genuine talent, you’ll do O.K. (where ever you are on the ‘net), but if you’re not and you’re having trouble getting your music noticed by the ‘music industry’, then it’s probably shyte, give it up, or do it just for fun in private.

And there is nothing professional about a band having a website, everyone has got one. And there is especially nothing professional about a band having a website and directing all the visitors to MySpace - unless you’re a band of professional tossers! It is the way a band uses it’s website that makes it look professional. And I would go further and say, that it is very possible for an ordinary, mediocre band to succeed because of the way they make use of their website. Wow! that’s a big statement. BTW Andrea/Joanna, whatever your fucking name is, your landing page (website) is absolute rubbish.

I wish I’d replied with that!

Time to get lazy and sit in the garden and watch the world go by with a beer, September’s here at last.

Helping Indie Bands With Website Promotion,
Unsigned Band Promotion
UnsignedBandPromotion.com
Helping musicians and artists get their websites noticed by fans, search engines
and the music industry in half the time they could do it on their own.

Nick from Lucid Online contacted me regarding NME Breakthrough - the new space for artists and fans who want to be at the heart of the most exciting new music around - and the pessimistic cynic in me said, "Oh God, not another fucking networking community for bands to create a profile and replicate their dross that is doomed to mediocrity and irrelevancy and promises the world but delivers shyte while gaining a ton of ‘brand’ exposure at the same time, all to rekindle a declining readership and boost NME’s strained Internet presence, …Mmmmmn… I don’t know". The point is, there are almost too many communities to: network and publish your profile with a bio, upload and/or sell your mp3s, publish your latest news and post a press release, shout-out your gigs dates, get some radio air-time, chat on the friendly forum, post on your own blog or message board - call it what you will. and best of all, get discovered - there is always that tantalizing, teasing lure to draw you in!

And if you don’t believe me that there are loads of ’social media channels’, here are just a few: Artistopia, BandMix, Bandwagon, Bebo, Beta Records, BroadJam, CDFuse, Facebook, GarageBand, Grooveshark, Hi5, HXC mp3, iLike, IMeem, IMPNow, Indie Charts, Indie Music, ISound, JukeboxAlive, LastMinuteMusicians, MP3.com, Music Gorilla, Music Lives Beyond, MySpace, NME Breakthrough, NumberOneMusic, OurStage, PureVolume, ReverbNation, SlashMusic Channel 4, Sonicbids, SoundClick, TalentMatch, Tunited, Unsigned Band Web, Unsigned, VIRB

I won’t post or re-write the meagre blurb Nick emailed me because it’s the same as the blurb on the NME Breakthrough site - read it for yourself there!

WOW it sounds like I’m being harsh and more than a little depressingly negative, and maybe I am?! But I really do like the NME, honest, I’ve grown up with it, in the ’70s and ’80s I used to buy (and looked forward to buying) "The New Musical Express" every week along with the "Melody Maker" - happy days. What I think I’m trying say is, I feel the NME is part of the "establishment" and just like Midge Ure’s Tunited (another new website that offers to help up-and-coming independent artists and labels gain increased exposure to the industry experts etc.) there’s a hint of a hidden agenda that involves self-interest, namely promotion. However, I’d LOVE to be involved with NME Breakthrough’s and Tunited’s website promotion for bands aspect of their communities. And I wish them all the very best of luck. Follow them on Twitter: @NMEbreakthrough & @tunited

TURN UP THE VOLUME
Unsigned Band Promotion
UnsignedBandPromotion.com
Helping musicians and artists get their websites noticed by fans, search engines
and the music industry in half the time they could do it on their own.

SYRUSS the rock band from Plymouth, Devon (Southwest England) have got themselves a shiny new website - have a gander.

They’ve got the usual profiles where you can check out the tunes and videos and help yourself to any of the free downloads - MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Micro-Site

Bandonkers is a relatively new website that gives musicians a way of searching for other musicians in their local area. It’s a good idea, a user can either post their own advert, or search through existing advertisements posted by other musicians. It’s all about connecting musicians and bands in your local area. Looking for a drummer? Or are you a drummer looking for a band? You get my drift, it’s a simple concept.

As you have probably guessed, Bandonkers is yet another one of those sites like Unsigned Band Promotion, Band Directory and London Gigs, that needs your support if you want to benefit from it - tell your friends and give them all a try.

The Bandonkers website seems very easy to use and there are no charges whatsoever - it’s free!

The name Black Hat comes to us from the hacking community, he’s the baddy, the bad man, the villain dressed in black with a black hat like "Angel Eyes" in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, "Harry Lime" in The Third Man, he’ll send you down a blind-ally, shoot you between the running lights or fuck you up by injecting you with a virus - just for the fun of it. Black Hat SEO is using unethical methods to gain a top search engine ranking. A typical Black Hat SEO tactic is spamdexing: Keyword stuffing/spamming - filling every available URL, meta tag, tag, attribute, title, link and textual space with duplicated keywords and key phrases that maybe irrelevant and unrelated to the website’s actual topic. Using hidden or disguised text and links. Using link spamming/farms… there’s a long list of dirty little tricks, the one I hate is where the villainous bastard copies a high-performing webpage and implements a sneaky redirect on it so the visitor is sent to another webpage without their knowledge, or they hotlink to images and copy well written content to blur the boundaries between two websites, so they can gain a sort of disguised recognition and look legitimate and ply their scurrilous trade - phishing, or installing a virus, trojan or some other shitty badware onto the HD of the poor innocent victims who visit their swindling websites.

A note about inline linking (hotlinking), a while ago I was looking through my website statistics and I found that a band had hotlinked directly to one of my images - the image was only a one pixel by one pixel transparent spacer gif @ 85 bytes, odd, but not really a problem - of course there is a serious side to hotlinking as the perpetrator is steeling bandwidth - in the case of the spacer gif not much, but if the object file was large and the perpetrator’s website was popular, then it might be a different story. Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, inline linking is where webpage B links directly to a file, usually an image, video or mp3, that is hosted and owned by webpage A. Webpage B is also said to be using/stealing the bandwidth of webpage A - which is bloody annoying if the monthly bandwidth allowance is exceeded - doubly annoying because they are probably committing a copyright violation!

If a webmaster catches you stealing their content or bandwidth that they’ve paid for, without their permission, they will always think of something nasty and the sword of Damocles will soon fall upon your band! Obviously the consequences of being caught by a search engine for using black hat SEO tactics are equally harsh, websites are often blocked and/or removed.

White Hat SEO is the opposite to black hat, he is The Lone Ranger, a web standards hero, a content and linking star, and it is the way to go for all music and art related websites. Here are five ways to make your music website a hit using white hat SEO:

1. Concentrate on your visitor, not the search engines, your website is for people, not some mindless computer - unique and relevant content are key words of great importance.
2. Make each page within your website relevant to your theme, don’t go off-message or be disjointed, stay focused and keep adding value by creating more interesting content.
3. Use textual content, actual words, not images, to deliver your message. Humans type words to find you. Web crawlers don’t see words contained within images. I know images are very important for website design and visitor experience - use descriptive title elements and img alt attributes to include some extra and much needed text. SEO is a word thing!
4. Don’t become a slave to PageRank and go down the "I must get a link from everyone" road, it’s bollocks. Link with friendly and like-minded websites.
5. Make sure your website loads quickly:
   • Keep HTTP/image/JavaScript requests to external websites i.e. Google and affiliate ads, free hit counters and stats. etc. to an absolute minimum.
   • Try not to use JavaScript and Style expressions within the page, create external scripts instead.
   • Don’t use frames (which could mean loading four pages) redirects or cloaking.

   How quickly your website loads can also be seen as a green, carbon sensitive issue because it helps to reduce bandwidth and costs, which is why Google is now looking kindly on speedy websites.

Why should an artist care about SEO? Because SEO is a part of branding, and branding is a part of the ‘big idea’, has your band got a big idea, an aim, a goal, a commitment? I bet it hasn’t, it’s why most bands fail (apart from the fact they can’t stay together for more than ten minutes), they don’t have a plan, strategy or any ideas, they don’t even know the difference between a Myspace page and a website (bands attach their URL to their MySpace page, really, I’m not joking).

Helping musicians and artists to get their websites noticed by fans, search engines and the music industry is what I love doing. Actually, most bands aren’t interested in SEO at all, they are more interested in branding, which is OK by me, I wish I had a pound for every time a band asked me to help them get their name out there, however, many bands don’t even have a website, they only have a MySpace, Facebook and a few of the other usual networking suspects like ReverNation, and when I do visit their profile pages, they’ve got the same egotistical self-indulgent mind numbing shit daubed everywhere and this isn’t helped by the social networking sites who actively encourage synchronization and therefore taedium vitae big time, tip: use different content on different social networking sites so when people ‘click around’ they don’t feel the need to stick a vacuum up their nose and suck out their spongy frustrated brains, anyway, bands shouldn’t be getting bogged down with worrying about SEO, it’s not that difficult and employing an SEO professional will not make that much of a difference to your band’s website - only to your pocket, and if you do go for an SEO consultation it won’t be long before the consultant is trying to baffle you with science and talking about ‘the long tail’ and ‘pay per click advertising management’ and ‘conversion ratios’ and ‘channelising traffic for transactional websites’ and ‘integrated search marketing strategy’ and ‘brand exposure’ and ‘keyword science linguistics research relevancy & themed saturation’ and ‘consumer business fan base profiling’ and ‘web analytics’ and bloody ‘bounce rates’ until you’re holding your hands up in defeat and saying "It’s OK, you do it for me", and if you don’t, the clever highwayman (they’re not all crooks) will still find a way of lifting your wallet. Don’t be lazy by leaving SEO to the professionals, do-it-yourself (sounds like I’m contradicting myself), most band’s websites would only take two or three hours to sort out once you know what to do and if you don’t know what to do, Ask Me.

I’ll help you for free.

And then your band’s website will appear in the first ten search results, for your band’s name and ’something else’, I’m not talking about misdirection and being found for bollocks or difficult keywords like ’sex’, ‘mp3′ or ‘MySpace Rock Bands’, I’m talking about targeting people who don’t know you, but who share your band’s lifestyle choices, potential fans. SEO can also be about second guessing, attempting to predict or anticipate what people are going search for to find your website, it’s an odd topic with loads of scope for error and success! And yes, forget about going viral, the tantalizing teasing lure that draws in hundreds of thousands of bands to overloaded social networking sites (like: YouTube and MySpace), with its promise of fame and fortune, it’s a dream, it ain’t gonna happen.

Blow SEO, spend your time with your music and getting to know your fans.

Helping Indie Bands With Website Promotion,
Unsigned Band Promotion
UnsignedBandPromotion.com
Helping musicians and artists get their websites noticed by fans, search engines
and the music industry in half the time they could do it on their own.

Music Worxz Are Plagiarists

Music Worxz are plagiarists, they’ve copied: 101 Reasons Why Your Band Needs A Website. Why? Are Music Worxz stupid tossers? If Music Worxz made you a website, would Music Worxz copy someone else’s work and get You into trouble? YES, I bet they would. I wouldn’t trust Music Worxz because they do not respect other people’s copyright.

UnsignedBandPromotion’s work is offered to you under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which means, it’s yours to use as long as you Attribute the work to Unsigned Band Promotion and Link Back.

Protected by Copyscape

There have been a couple of incidents recently when I have looked for a band’s website and have discovered that they do not have one. Then I find out that they do not even own their own domain name! Odd. Buy your band’s domain name now, before I do. I like Network Solutions - use the search box above. I am an affiliate, so I will get a small commission, but don’t be put off by that as Network Solutions are excellent value for money.

Spring has sprung the grass is ris, I wonders where the birdies is… so says Charlie Brown, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash or was it E.E. Cummings? I suppose if you’re a fair-weather band you might be thinking of getting out into the fresh, Spring air and going busking? No? Worried about volcanic ash getting into your equipment or lungs?

Over the last week or so, I’ve noticed a GoogleAd for Busking Cancer, which is an event in aid of Cancer Research UK and sponsored by Fender® that You can get involved with. I’m interested because it is a website promotion opportunity. Your local media are often looking for ways to appear philanthropic (without actually really doing anything!), so it’s quite easy for bands to promote themselves while supporting (and on the back of) a local charity.

Out of curiosity for what bands I might find who have Busked for Cancer, I search Google Web and Google Images and the band that stands out from the crowd are Radfax. Radfax have not got a real website (but that isn’t stopping them) - they have only got profile pages: MySpace, Radfax Blog, UnsignedChart, PeacefestUK/Ning, Twitter and YouTube. Wow, They could’ve bought radfax.co.uk <joke>like I just did</joke> which was about £22 for 2 years, and could have been a focal point for all their efforts!?

Radfax are a Psychedelic Rock band from London and they Busked for Cancer in September 2009. Their music is influenced by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, early Clapton, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Black Sabbath and many more I’m sure.
The band members are: - Skullyman: rhythm guitar, lead and backing vocals. Speed: vocals, rhythm guitar. Tony: bass. Flud: drums.
Go and see them play live at Lock 17 Camden Lock, London - they post their gig dates on their blog and Twitter.

How To Promote Your Website While Busking: hand out business cards or flyers (Include: band name, website URL, email address) to everyone who donates, offering them a free mp3. Put the freebie on your website and Make It Very Easy To Find And Download. Ask them to join your mailing list to get another freebie from the same web page.

Always wear T-shirts with a readable Web Address on - if you send me a T-shirt (I’m XXL and my favourite colour is black. Email for my postal address UK), I’ll use a photograph of it for my avatar.

Visit Busking Cancer on Twitter and get a little local promotion for yourselves and your bands’ websites.

Twitter and band promotion eh! Big Tip, don’t do it like me - I think I do just about everything wrong, anyway, I’m only there to find out what others are saying and doing, and I really don’t use it to promote UnsignedBandPromotion, and that sounds like a big fat lie because I mainly just post links to my blog! - and I don’t have that much to say either, but hey, I’ve been a member of a webmaster forum since 2001 and I’ve only made 30 posts! …I’m trying to improve my tweets.

Twitter is, billed as a micro-blog, but I think it falls somewhere between a Blog and a Meta Tag. It often has a ‘one side of the conversation’ feel about it, and everyone seems to be talking at you in proverbs, straplines, recommendations and disjointed waffle because of Twitter’s input limitations, so just like blogging or forum posting the true promotional value of tweeting is in what you actually have to say, your contribution, which will have a much bigger bearing on your success than anything else. If your forte is egotism, then Twitter may not be the best place for you to promote yourself or your band, bands who are so far up their own arses that they’re coming out the other side, are instantly boring and would get anyone with half a brain frenziedly scrambling to unfollow rather than RT.

Basically what you need to do is, write short, conversational sentences with minimal punctuation, of about 20 words (140 characters including spaces) that have a special magnetic appeal, charm or power that inspires loyalty and enthusiasm from your audience - not difficult then!

Following others is easy. Search out and follow - @BandPromotion (I usually retweet gig dates if I’m aware of them), @Band promoters, @Venues, @Record Labels, @Music News, @Online Radio and @DJs.

Ask your - @e-team, @fans, @friends and @family to join Twitter, then ask them to retweet your important posts i.e., Gig/Tour/Recording dates/diary.