Now I’m not saying that those shady ways to get fans are gone. But the social web is a time bomb making spammy tactics easier to expose. As soon as you are labeled a spammer, you can kiss goodbye to your fans.
Spamming is kind of like being racist, people will not accept it and they will do EVERYTHING they can to bring your ass down!
This brings me to a little test you can use when you hear about a new music marketing tactic, and are trying to decide if it’s ethical. Ask yourself one simple question.
If my grandmother was Google, would this please her?
Impress Google and You Impress Your Fans
If you don’t know what search optimization is then let me explain.
Basically it’s the process of getting your page to the top of Google by making sure that your page is optimized for a search term. Then getting a bunch of links back to that page that have the search term in the link text.
So for instance if you were trying to rank on page 1 for “best band on the planet” you would want a lot of blue links coming into your page, saying stuff like “they are the best band on the planet”.
Simple!
Obviously if a lot of people search that term each day, it would be a great source of new fans for your music, without the hassle of having to travel around the country touring, or begging a label to sign you.
But because a few shady music marketers have found out about this process, a lot of people have been trying to game the Google system with crappy content, and to be honest Google are getting sick of it.
They are in a constant battle against the spammers, and this week they announced new measures to track down these slugs and cut their Internet balls off.
The other day I found a great article and posted it to twitter, only to get a tweet from the real author a few hours later letting me know that the spam site in question had STOLEN his work!
…anger Building. ARRRRRGH!!!
So music marketing in the next five years will be about giving Google (and the Internet as a whole) what it wants.
If you want to know how to please “Grandma Google” you need to think about what they want to give their searchers…and that’s simply a good experience of Google so that you come back day after day and don’t hop over to Bing or Yahoo.
These days it’s all about great content and even the number of “likes” and “re-tweets” you get on your stuff plays a part in your Google love. So try and make daily progress toward better and better content. Be that your own music or articles about other music in your niche.
Final thoughts
The basic idea behind this post is to help shift your mindset from horrible myspace “freinding” to writing great work that get spread all over the web automatically.
Most people can’t be bothered to write something cool because they think it is too much effort.
But this is an illusion…the better your work the better your results. PERIOD!
Remember that I’m here if you need help with anything that we discussed in this post, or anything else you read from me on the blog.
My personal email address is: contact [at] promoteyourmusic [dot] net
See you in the inbox!
- Chris
Tags: Grandma Google, music marketing
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