This is dedicated to broke rappers everywhere. This is a detailed, step-by-step tutorial on setting up your online operation right. It involves spending no money whatsoever, and you could easily sit down and get it all done tonight. If you find this useful, please pass it on.
1. Get a Gmail Account.
Sign up here. This doesn’t mean you need to get rid of your existing email—you can easily set up gmail to forward your messages to your current account. Even if you’ve already got a personal gmail account, get a professional one, too: just plain looks better when you’re handing out contact info.
This isn’t about looking good, though, this is about the tools that a google account will give you access to: blogger, analytics and alerts.
For more on optimizing gmail to make your life easier, check out this LifeHacker tutorial.
2. Get a Flickr Account.
For free image hosting, nothing beats Flickr. Photobucket is an unreliable and bloated piece of shit, Flickr is a truly dope free service. There is no competition. Once you’ve got your account set up, you can customize it and search to see if any of your friends and contacts are using Flickr and get in touch with them. The main workhorse function of Flickr, though, is hosting your images so that you can use them on your website. This brings us to the real meat of this article: getting your free website on Blogger.
3. Get a Blogger Account.
For those of you who can’t afford website registration and hosting, here’s a simple, reliable and free solution. I’ve talked to a number of rappers (without websites) who acknowledged they knew about the Blogger option but never signed up because it looks like shit. They’re right about that, but it’s not an excuse, just ignorance. You don’t need to use default Blogger templates, you can customize as much as you want. Take a look at the DJ Multiple Sex Partners blog: you won’t recognize anything from a cookie-cutter template:
So first things first: go to blogger and sign up right now. I generally start with one of the Minima themes—they’re the easiest to customize after the fact. Once you get the account, take these immediate steps:
Remove the two “gadgets” that come pre-loaded in the sidebar: About Me and Archive. Both of them are useless and ugly. There’s two types of gadget to add: Link Lists and HTML/Javascript. Link lists are, of course, your personal network—give some shine to artists you’re connected with, recommend websites that have been useful to you, and direct readers to your other online presences. HTML/Javascript gadgets are just a block of whatever code you want to add, such as clickable image links to download your music, or a more customized “About Me” if you want to give people a summary of what you’re about.
Here’s an example from the Algorhythms blog: we’re pushing the first EP right now, so the blog design is deliberately minimal so that the album icon will jump off the screen:
For those readers unfamiliar with basic HTML, here’s the code you’ll need to set that up for yourself:
<center><a href="insert your link url here"><img src="insert your image url here"></a><br>insert your text here</center>
Now change the actual look of your blog: go to “Fonts and Colors,” which provides you with a preview of what your site will look like. This might look overwhelming but it couldn’t be simpler: just click shit and see what happens when you change it. In the space of 3-5 minutes, you’ll be able to make your blog look pretty damn slick—or at least suit your own horrible taste.
Finally, here’s the trick for removing the Blogger-branded “navigation” bar at the top of every Blogger page: go to “Edit HTML” in your Layout panel and scroll down to the Header section:
That first line of code in the image is what you drop in, and it goes like this:
3a. Simple SEO for your Blogger Site.
I won’t get into details at all. In fact, I’ll just give you a template. What Blogger sites don’t have is metadata, and this is a huge problem. You really need the metadata in order to get ranked higher on search engines—the automated “bots” that do the indexing love metadata, and without it, they’re not interested in your little site.
First of all, put in a custom title. To do that, you’re going back to the “Layout” part of your dashboard, then clicking on “Edit HTML.” The title is up at the top, and the default code looks like this:
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
Delete the crap in between the two <title> tags—and put something more descriptive. For instance, on the DJ MSP Blog, I’ve got “DJ Multiple Sex Partners | World-Around Records” which covers all the major keywords I want to be known by.
Now, directly below the <title> section, make some space and insert the following code:
<meta content=’list, around, 20, keywords, separated, by, commas’ name=’keywords’/>
<meta content=’Give a short, concise description of exactly what your site is’ name=’description’/>
<meta content=’public’ http-equiv=’cache-control’/>
<meta content=’never’ http-equiv=’expires’/>
<meta content=’index, follow’ name=’robots’/>
<meta content=’7 days’ name=’revisit-after’/>
To give you an idea of how to fill those gaps in, here’s the metadata from the DJ Multiple Sex Partners blog:
<meta content=’dj, multiple, sex, partners, world, around, records, hip, hop, producer, wombaticus, rex, humpasaur, jones’ name=’keywords’/>
<meta content=’Music and .wav samples from Russian hip hop producer DJ Multiple Sex Partners’ name=’description’/>
Of course, you can get way deeper into Search Engine Optimization, but this is really all you need to start getting listed high on Google.
4. Set up Google Alerts.
Click here to get started. This is one of the single most valuable tools google has to offer—and yet I’m amazed how few people have heard of it. Here’s the deal: google will send you daily updates every time they index a page with your name on it. Every time someone mentions Algorhythms, for instance, I read about it within a day or two.
Your basic google alert regimen should be: your name, the name of every album you’ve done, and the name of your label if you have one. Personally, I have alerts set up for every artist on the World-Around roster, so some days I’ll have almost 20 alerts. Often times they’re nothing special, or material that I’ve done myself, but I find new outlets and connections multiple times a week. Knowing what people are saying about you is kinda important. Alerts save you the wasted time (and nagging shame & humiliation) of repeatedly googling yourself.
5. Set up Google Analytics.
Out here on Teh Internets, the most valuable form of information is metrics—hard data about the traffic your websites are getting. Google Analytics is powerful and free. You can get geographical breakdowns and insanely detailed reports. Here’s a sample screen—as you can see, Audible Hype really doesn’t get shit for traffic, but I’ll be honest about it:
Here’s a few of the most valuable features for the DIY hip hop entrepreneur: Keywords, which shows you what people are searching for that leads them to you, and the absurdly powerful Map Overlay, which shows you geographic breakdowns of where your visitors live. Audible Hype gets most of its traffic via Illinois (where I currently live), California and New York State:
Obviously, once you get your blog/site up and running, you want to be seeing a response in your local area. The Map Overlay will even break it down to individual cities on the state level, so you’ll be getting a detailed sense of who your site is reaching. If you find out you’re getting a ton of traffic in City X, it’s probably time to use that information and try to get some gigs in City X.
6. Get a Mediafire Account.
Mediafire is an amazing service: you can upload files up to 100mb and they’ll host it for free. They also have a great control panel where you can keep tabs on how many times your files have been downloaded. This is a valuable source of feedback: if you’re giving away a mixtape and it gets over 100 downloads, that means you definitely shouldn’t be pressing 500 copies of your next album. If you’re giving away an EP and you’re getting close to a thousand downloads, it’s probably a safe and profitable bet to press 500 copies of your next album.
This is also a great way to test your promotion. Keep track of your numbers in a notebook. Start looking for connections between your online promotion and your downloads. For instance, when you put up a myspace bulletin, what kind of impact does that actually have? Believe me, 99% of the people who click through your link and check your music out will never write to you and let you know they did.
7. Your Digital Footprint.
There’s no shortage of social networks to choose from, but there’s two that are essential for independent artists:
Last.fm. Now that myspace plays and friends can be completely fabricated, everyone’s looking for more meaningful metrics—and Last.fm provides it. Rather than restate the case for Last.fm here, let me just refer you to Andrew Dubber’s excellent summary.
Facebook. Now that Facebook has broken 100 million users, it’s probably about time for you to get yourself on Facebook Music. It’s a more complicated process than signing up for MySpace, but it’s also very much worth it. For a shining example of using Facebook right, check out the QN5 page.
Right now, I’m running a World-Around Twitter account—you can check it out here—but it’s very much an experiment. I am assuming that by providing a steady stream of useful information, I can make it into a valued resource for people. So rather than updating about what I’m eating for dinner, the WAR Twitter will be focused on good information and links to quality articles. If you’ve got experience using Twitter as a promotional platform, I would love to hear from you.
Of course, I’m assuming you already have a Myspace account—if you’re looking for advice on how to run that more efficiently, I’ve already covered that topic: How to Defeat and Kill the Devil MySpace.
Finally, don’t build your own social network. Your fans, and potential future fans, are already on multiple social networks your requests will only be an annoyance for them. Besides, every major hip hop label is trying to do the same thing, and you’re not going to beat out Rawkus or Loud anytime soon. Use existing social networks—it’s a bigger audience and you don’t have to do as much work. This seems obvious enough, yet I’m constantly getting requests from chump rappers to join Ning sites with less than 20 users. We are all idiots at times, and we are all assholes at times, but avoid doing both at once.
Last Word
Once you’ve completed this, you’ve got the platform. Your online presence looks professional and you have all the tools you need to push your music on the internets, and get valuable feedback about how your efforts are going.
As I wrote this, I was trying to “un-know” all of the technical crap that I take for granted. If you have questions, or suggestions for improvement, please pass those along. I want to make this the best resource possible. Also, check out the Audible Hype forums, which I’ve been loading up with useful content for a couple months now.
Thanks, and good luck.
25 responses to "The Audible Hype $0 Music Promotion Plan"
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Sep 07, 2008 at 2:47 AM
Quiet Entertainer
Do you mean flickr.com ? flikr.com didn’t work for me
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Sep 07, 2008 at 7:46 PM
The Rhymeweaver
I recommend drop.io for file hosting. It has no ads, non-indexed (means you cant google it for files), and has a customizable download link, among its features. Nevertheless this is a great article.
Cheers
The Rhymeweaver -
Sep 08, 2008 at 4:07 AM
Justin Boland
^^^As long as you’re getting download stats that sounds just as good.
As for the Flickr typo, hot damn that was up way too long. All the RSS readers just got a version of this with the typo...a cautionary tale about partying on Sundays, I guess.
Thanks for catching that.
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Sep 08, 2008 at 3:38 PM
Quiet Entertainer
By the way; this article is WONDERFUL. Thanks for this. I’m an email subscriber but I had to come by and give props.
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Sep 08, 2008 at 5:28 PM
Captain Marginal
Thanks for the tips on modifying blogger pages, they were very helpful. The implications of being able to edit the HTML of blogger templates never hit home for me before.
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Sep 08, 2008 at 11:17 PM
Chris Vandeviver
All great information, definitely. However, after a long battle with trying to figure out internet presence, I’ve come to decide that the artist blog/site route is simply not the appropriate one.
Let’s be really honest here: people do not hang out on artist websites at great lengths (I’m talking the average independent artist. Not Radiohead). I am the one obsessed with my music, not everyone else. Sure they like it, may even be fanatical about it, but they don’t have a lot of desire to hang out talking about my music 24 hours a day.
Sites that aggregate a range of stuff though, do receive the attention. Punknews.org receives a ton of hits because people can get all the news updates going on in punk rock across the board. Lifehacker is for a variety of people who have the same general interest in productivity. Myspace aggregates people to one social point.
Which brings up my other point. Trying to pull people to your lone/niche/singular focus artist website is attempting to pull them from their online routine. It’s too difficult to make them pay attention to you everyday. Especially if they’re getting nothing much back in the interaction besides “Record’s Out!” news posts. People are always on MySpace and Facebook though. It’s built into their lives, and it should be the artist goal to embed themselves into that routine. Via bulletins, blogs, comments, messages. That’s where the most interaction is going on.
In closing, having your own website is indeed necessary. The internet is trend driven, and putting all your stock into MySpace is very dangerous. However, I think the website should simply be the hub to all the various spokes of your online presence. It’s the anchor that provides all the info about you, and leads people to your profiles on myspace/facebook/last.fm; performances; discography; etc. But post your blog posts on these sites, where your fans typically are. The friend feeds on those sites update them as to when you update your activity also. You can even program your facebook to RSS your myspace blog so it updates with the exact same material.
Those are my thoughts, and I plan on implementing immediately.
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Sep 09, 2008 at 6:47 AM
Jonathan Storvick
What up, J…
for some good data mining info for your own sites, you might want to check out StatCounter - even the free version works well, though it only saves up to 500 logs at a time. Basically, you put their little javascript thingie in your blogger layout, and it keeps track of visitor info to your blogger page - IP addresses and locations of visitors, pages visited, pages they came from to your site (which can tell you how many people came in from a myspace bulletin, or a digg link, or whatever) and a whole bunch of other useful info. When I was running the New Illuminati blog it gave me a great picture of who was visiting my site.
Jon
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Sep 09, 2008 at 8:30 AM
Justin Boland
@Chris Vandeviver—you start off saying that the artist/blog website is “not appropriate”, then finish off by saying that it “should simply be the hub to all the various spokes of your online presence.”
Sounds to me like you changed your mind in 5 paragraphs.
It also sounds like I need to do the next article about my templating processes to create interesting content, because you’re right—few musicians can keep anyone’s attention.
Just the same - USE RSS TO INTEGRATE YOUR SITE INTO OTHER AGGREGATORS, right?
@Jon
Have you really checked out Google Analytics? There isn’t a single feature of Sitecounter that GA doesn’t do better, near as I can tell. And there’s at least 20-30 features that GA offers which Sitecounter doesn’t have at all. Again, perhaps it’s changed and I’m more than willing to be proven wrong and expand this piece with more options.
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Sep 09, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Chris Vandeviver
@Justin
Maybe I didn’t really articulate myself well (long work day). I think an artist should have a site, yes. However, this idea that you need to set up a blog page like an island in the middle of the internet ocean, and then try to drag and pull people to come visit your island is gonna cost you a whole lot of time and effort with little result.
If you click on the Algorhythms page, they have not one comment in the 6-8 posts on their blogger’s front page.
Instead, I find the artist website should be an information hub. It should have your performance listing. It should have your discography (releases, lyrics, technical info), and stuff of that sort, and it should give easy and direct links to your social networks, and a mailing list.
If you want to develop audience/artist interaction though, you have to embed yourself into their turf. My artist website is not that important to them. If they want to know something specifically, they’ll google me and find it. But they do visit their Facebook page numerous times a day.
I apologize for the confusion of my earlier post, and the length.
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Sep 09, 2008 at 12:26 PM
Chris Vandeviver
I do want to say though since you pointed it out, that I do look forward to your post about creating interesting content. Thanks as always.
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Sep 09, 2008 at 5:38 PM
Justin Boland
If you want to develop audience/artist interaction though, you have to embed yourself into their turf. My artist website is not that important to them. If they want to know something specifically, they’ll google me and find it.
Precisely—they’ll google you and find....what?
The Algoblog is about SEO and SERPs, not fan interaction. We get fanmail on myspace, not blogger. Ideally, fans will google you and find your site, your blog, your myspace page, your facebook music page, your flickr or picassa account, your whole digital footprint.
This article about how to set up that footprint right, without spending money on hosting and software.
You only stand to benefit from dominating this:
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Sep 09, 2008 at 5:44 PM
Justin Boland
You definitely got one of the best bios I’ve read in 2008, though:
You know no small band is affording any copywriter to piece together the “perfect” bio to send off to press and media. So therefore, most bands look like pretentious and/or self-absorbed jerk-offs for writing their own.
Now that that’s off our chests:
Sakes Alive!! is a band of pretentious and/or self-absorbed jerk-offs that think they’re contributing something new to the ever expanding void that once was punk rock. Think about it! Bored, restless suburban teens who actually lived the filth and angst when hardcore/punk first came to be. Now? - privileged nancies who suffer through societal disaffection with iPods and blogging software. Damn.
So Sakes Alive!! doesn’t claim to be any different (haha), but we do claim to regurgitate noise with the most feigned enthusiasm we could muster.
I also stand 100% corrected on the digital footprint, you’ve got youtube, flickr, iLike, and twitter down. Had any luck with Twitter?
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Sep 09, 2008 at 10:35 PM
Chris Vandeviver
Haha, thank you. I think self-deprecation is tasteful device to use to disarm folks and open up.
I did get thinking about SEO after my last post, and you’re certainly right. It’s the only the key path to high SEO rankings. My struggles have probably been from a misconstrued sense of the artist website. For a while I was trying to pull fan eyes to it. Not with much success (or rather mildly).
Twitter is actually pretty fantastic. People are generally open and accepting on there, and we’ve garnered a decent little following without any attempt to bring it to our fans attention. And it’s another place that people are pretty invested in. It hasn’t been completed tainted either.
Essentially, I think I’ve come full circle with this. Wasn’t trying to antagonize. Simply thought I had maybe a commendable point of view to offer. Audible Hype still is the best DIY musician blog.
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Sep 09, 2008 at 10:43 PM
Chris Vandeviver
I do have a question for you though: do you know of any way to get an RSS feed from your blog to sync up to a myspace blog? That is the one part of the chain I can’t seem to find.
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Sep 10, 2008 at 3:00 AM
Weapon X
So far so good, I love these audible hype articles they are so helpful.
Just a minor detail on this one, you have two steps labeled as 6 and no 7th step. I’m sure that was just a typo but I thought I would point it out.
Keep them coming.
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Sep 10, 2008 at 10:54 AM
Justin Boland
@Weapon X, great catch—this article has been a goldmine of bone-head typos so far...eventually I’ll swallow my idiot pride and get an editor...like my friend, the editor, who’s been offering to edit my work free for about 2 years now.
@Chris, I’ve been frustrated on MySpace RSS feeds myself. I can get an outgoing feed but I’ve never found anything in the settings/preferences that would allow us to feed external RSS into new myspace blog posts.
If I do, I’ll get in touch.
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Sep 10, 2008 at 8:16 PM
MalaKai
this is super weird (haven’t read the article yet). i have just completed my own list of notes outlining an online presence strategy when i came across this. gotta read this..
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Sep 10, 2008 at 8:29 PM
MalaKai
very good info about the practical importance of metadata and analytics. here were some of my notes:
reverbnation
ilike
wikipedia
last.fm
youtubeeven though some of those sites are lame it helps in expanding your parameters to reach people, which if after all what it’s all about. having a good youtube presence (see hip-hop producer boondoc @ http://www.youtube.com/blacktuezday for an axample) is sometimes a hit and a miss, but it’s a good way to get multimedia out there. the mere fact of that is good enough for anyone to give it a go, all you need is a webcam and a little know-how/bit of imagination. i read a new music strategies article (http://newmusicstrategies.com/2008/06/04/what-websites-should-i-be-on-part-1/) about the power of wiki and it makes good sense to establish yourself this way as well.
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Sep 10, 2008 at 8:32 PM
Justin Boland
Well, as Dubber acknowledges, you can’t just set yourself up a Wiki page. I mean...I wish you could. But they’re policed by a community that really uphold the standards—acts I know who have tried to set themselves up on Wiki inevitably get banned.
Honestly, I thought that was one of dubber’s all-time weakest articles, since it basically amounted to obvious observations, culminating in a plea for someone to set him up a wiki page.
Personally, I don’t expect to show up on Wikipedia until I’ve moved at least 10-20k albums...and that’s how it should be. Makes it meaningful, just like Last.fm metrics are meaningful.
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Sep 11, 2008 at 6:50 AM
Jonathan Storvick
Dude, thanks for reminding me about Google Analytics… I had filed that in the back of my mental “to check out at some point” filing cabinet, but apparently that cabinet is covered with some pretty heavy cobwebs. I’ll be looking at that. I’ve really liked what StatCounter offers, if GA surpasses that I’ll be really impressed.
Jon
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Sep 11, 2008 at 8:41 PM
Chris Vandeviver
@ Justin
Found it: http://ping.fm
It’s a service that updates all your blogs on the net at the same time. Blogger, MySpace, Facebook—you name it.
A few key sites are missing that would be useful to artists. But they’re updating it with time.
Automation is key for conquering SEO and time-saving for things like writing music.
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Sep 12, 2008 at 2:48 PM
tekstTHC
all very good stuff. i think Vandeviver touched on something which is providing more than just a general band to fan relationship. My group THC, is currently trying to figure out how to effectively use the blog thing by coming up with content that is relevant to people that are or arent fans of our music, but rather the genre or culture we represent. Everyone like hearing intersting info, or when other similar popular bands are doing cool shit. Our group is beginningt to take the time to add news and updates about the rest of the hiphop community which seems attractive to people that might not neceassirly be interested in the music.
Its hard come up with content, but ingeneral creating more posts than jsut “Album Out” or “Tomorrow’s SHow” will provide a much wider interest in to come back and check out site.
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Sep 12, 2008 at 2:52 PM
tekstTHC
i think all this is leading up to the idea of incorporating the RSS feed. When is that post coming Justin? the technoligacally impaired need an intro to course to concept of PULL marketing instead of PUSH marketing.
Its all about creating content or an image or experience that people desire to come back to ON THEIR OWN, not after seeing constant reminders everywhere to check your site out. If you do a good enough job at making things seem interesting, they will want to subscribe to you site via RSS and learn about updates on their own, not just when you tell them to pay attention.
But this has to be consistent. Also a problem with this in America is the lack of use of RSS. its slowly catching on, and even I do not use it, despite reading more and more about its usefulness in webbrowsing as both viewer and provider. So yeah, lets get your thoughts on that post homey
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Sep 12, 2008 at 3:25 PM
Justin Boland
Anything I write will be a restatement/update of Bruce Warila’s outstanding articles:
Grab your avatar at Gravatar.
My name is Justin Boland and I'm a rapper, writer and hippie entrepreneur. I work for Back Brain Media and I run Brainsturbator, Hump Jones, Audible Hype and Skilluminati Research.
Sep 06, 2008 at 11:57 PM
Metajake