As someone who spent decades in the old and dying music business, I can attest to the soul-destroying horrors that most artists experience there. Only a tiny percentage of those signed actually make any money and they subsidize the thousands who only end up owing the record company money and selling their souls in the process.

If the record company spends a couple of million dollars recording and promoting you and you only get paid a few percent of record sales royalties, how many records do you think you have to sell before you see a dime? With less and less people buying CDs these days, it’s a lot! And when was the last time you saw a record store?

But the worst thing as far as I am concerned is that so often corporate committees who only care about money decide what you should record, who you should work with, how you should look etc. In other words, you’re forced to violate your integrity as an artist daily. No fun!

How is the music business dying? Well record industry veterans are getting laid off left and right and CD sales continue to drop. And most music industry people are at a loss when it comes to knowing how to use the Internet to properly promote a band.

A friend of mine had 5 number one records in England and made a total of $5,000. When he left his label and promoted his album on the Internet he sold 4,000 copies (which would have made him zero if he’d sold that few with a record label), but he pocketed $60,000 from those 4,000 sales by being his own label.

As Paul Phillips from Puddle of Mudd put it,

“Getting signed? Number one in the charts? *

What good are charts and record labels when people are barely even buying records anymore! Charts and labels represent only the record industry, which is a very small (and shrinking) tangent of the music industry.”

This may sound like a bunch of bad news but it’s really not. The new music business where musicians and bands take control of their own careers and their own income actually opens up very exciting opportunities for musicians everywhere. My upcoming articles are going to go in depth into how to do this. Stay tuned.

1) MAILING LIST MISUSE

Sending emails to their mailing list only or mainly when they want to sell something or get people to a gig or other event.

Here’s the bottom line on this – and I can’t stress this enough – your email list is your most valuable asset. It’s long been observed that the size of your mailing list and the number of mailings to it majorly determines your income.

What too many don’t know is that in the current marketplace the nurturing of the list is now the key factor that realizes that income. And that doing 1) above badly misuses and dramatically weakens the potential value of that list.

Nurturing the list means using the list to freely and continuously give valuable and useful information to build trust, respect and affinity.

People on a list that is well-cared for and backed by an honest intention to help the survival of those on it will be much more responsive to what you have to offer, when you do on occasion also offer something for sale.

A list that is misused and the trust violated by only asking people to buy something or go to an event will dry up and eventually your emails won’t even be opened.

2) NO REWARD-DRIVEN OPT-IN BOX

On many sites you’ll see a box that says something like, “Join Our Mailing List”. The immediate question asked by visitors is, “Why?”

One of the most important things that your web site should do is get more people to opt-in to your emailing list – but you have to give them a truly compelling reason to do so!

This could be a free MP3 or video of an unreleased track, an eBook of extremely useful information or anything that you feel would be considered really valuable by your public. If you don’t know what that would be – ask them.

Give them a really good reason to give you their email address and they will gladly do so. And you’ll grow your future potential income.

3) WRONG WEBSITE STRUCTURE

When a new person comes to a musician’s web site, do they want to read all the bio info or news or gig info for this band that they’ve never heard? No! They actually – and those with egos will need to forgive me – don’t give a darn about any of that.

What they’re looking for is that desirable emotional reaction that they get when they listen to music that they like.

But what do most bands do? They have a vanity home page saying, “Look at us, we’re the greatest (fill in the blank)”. And where do they have their music? Buried on the 4th or 5th tab over almost as an afterthought – exactly where the bios should be!

If you can win them over with your music, then they may begin to develop an interest in you personally, but until that moment, you need to focus on providing them with the emotional experience that they’re looking for.

A good musician’s or band’s site should have a strong compelling headline and a short, also compelling, introduction designed to get them to listen immediately to your music which should be available right there at the top of the home page – ideally in “sampler” format (30 seconds each of your best 6 songs one blending into the next).

Right next to your music player should be your opt-in email box with your irresistible reward for them giving you their email address.

4) NOT USING KEYWORDS CORRECTLY

I covered this one extensively in my last few articles at my blog so won’t repeat the info here. There are more mistakes that people make online, but those above are some major ones. In the next article I will cover insider ways to use Twitter and Facebook successfully.

What about you? What mistakes have you seen being made on-line?

What this means is that for any particular keyword, the top 10 sites in the search engine result pages will have varying degrees of competitive strength and very often by analyzing them against the SEO parameters that I will cover, you can get a good idea of whether you could take their place in the top 10 or not.

It is always smart to have enough data to wisely pick your battles. That way you can avoid wasting a huge amount of time fighting the wrong ones (as many do) and trying to compete for keywords that simply have no chance of getting you traffic.

So, what are the main competitive strength factors and how can you find out which ones a competing site is strong or weak in?

A) WHAT THE MAIN COMPETITIVE STRENGTH FACTORS IN SEO ARE

1. Google Page Rank – this is how high Google ranks a site (authority) based on many of the factors below and others and it rises over time and with good SEO. As the numbers get higher, the jump from one to the next becomes much harder – i.e. the jump from PR 1 to PR 2 is much easier than PR 7 to PR 8 etc. (Page rank goes from 0-10)
2. Domain age – this is how long the site has been on the web – the longer the better
3. # of pages indexed by Google – how many pages the site has that Google has been able to index
4. Links to the home page – inbound links from other sites especially authority sites and how many of those links have keywords in them
5. Links to all the pages of the site
6. High Authority links – especially government and educational sites
7. Directories – # of online directories – especially authority directories – the site is listed in
8. Having a sitemap (sitemaps help Google to index your site)
9. On-page SEO factors such as keywords in the web address, the title, description and headers etc.

B) HOW TO FIND THE SEO STRENGTH OF THE COMPETITION

There are a number of ways to assess the competition’s SEO strength but the most-used one is to look at the sites that are on the 1st page of Google for your keyword and to evaluate them against the list above

So how do you do this? One way is to use various free tools to examine each of the competing factors one at a time, but that could take you a very, very long time indeed, especially when doing it for multiple keywords.

Fortunately there are tools (also free) that give you most of the info in one go. One of my favorites is the SEO for Firefox plug-in.

When it’s activated, when you look up a keyword in Google and go to the search engine results page, it shows you the status of each site with regard to the 9 SEO factors listed above, as well as a lot of other useful information.

You can install the SEO for Firefox plug-in (and other cool free SEO tools) here: http://www.seobook.com/7599-16-3-37.html

(once installed, make sure that you set the options to Automatic Mode – right-click on the icon at the bottom of the Firefox browser).

As you can see, it really is possible to do all this research yourself for free and to find your own relevant, high-traffic, low-competition keywords.

There are also tools for less than $100 that automate the whole procedure and save a huge amount of more time.

My favorite of these, and the one I use myself, is Market Samurai. Market Samurai does the keyword research and the competitive analysis for you plus it finds you affiliate programs relating to your keywords that can make you money as well as a great deal more. You can try Market Samurai for free at the link below. If you like it after you try it, you can  get a 35% discount and get it for only $97 (instead of $149).

http://myfavoritedeals.org/samurai

If you’ve managed to read this far (I salute you!), I wanted to briefly mention the next generation of SEO – SMO (Social Media Optimization). In the first article I mentioned that correct SEO should underpin and inform all your Internet activities – your web site, blog posts, your Facebook and Twitter posts and everything else.

This is where SMO comes in as it ensures that all your online social activity is correctly keyworded for maximum exposure and spreadability.

I will be writing in detail about SMO in future articles. Did you find this article useful? Let me know and let me know what else you’d like to know about SEO.

If you’ve ever looked into getting some SEO done you may have been startled by how much it can cost.

But what if you could do a lot of it yourself for free? Well, you actually can.

In this article I’m going to show you how to do keyword research yourself using a very useful free tool that you can use online.

SEO step-by-step

A) Keyword research

1) The first step is to brainstorm and come up with 3-5 words or phrases that you feel people would enter into a search engine when looking for what you have to offer. It’s also a good idea to ask your fans or customers too.

2) Take the one that seems most true or relevant to you and go to

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
and enter the word or phrase, and then type in the characters that you’re asked to type to prove that you’re a real person, and press the “Get keyword ideas” button.

What’s great about this tool is that it shows what keyword phrases people are ACTUALLY searching on, and how many per month, rather what you might be guessing they are searching on.

Without this tool you could easily pick a “great” keyword that nobody is searching with and end up with no web traffic from the search engines.

3) On the list of related keyword suggestions that comes up, click on “Local Search Volume:” to sort by most searches per month.

If you mouse over the ? symbols you get an explanation of each column.

The Advertiser Competition column shows the percentage of people paying for online advertisements for this keyword, which gives you an idea of its relative potential commercial value.

You can narrow down your search by changing the Match Type (last column on the right). The ? symbol explains the different types.

4) Repeat the process for the main keywords that you came up with in step A) 1) and write down the traffic estimates. Look for at least 300 searches a day (that means 9,000 and more in the Global Monthly Search Volume column).

B) Competition analysis

After you’ve found a keyword that is getting good monthly traffic and that is relevant to what you offer, you need to find out how much competition there is for that keyword – i.e. how many other web sites are using it who could thus theoretically rank higher in the search engines than you and get all your traffic instead of you getting it.

For each good-traffic keyword phrase, enter it into a Google search and look at the top right where it says: Results 1 – 10 of about 2,070,000 for “red cabbage” (if red cabbage was what you searched on).

That 2,070,000 is the number you’re interested in. What you’re looking for ideally is a number below 100,000. This might seem like a lot of sites to compete against but a great many of them won’t have optimized their web sites for their keywords and may be weak in other SEO factors so it’s not as big a number as it seems as many of them will not really be competitive at all.

What if you could tell exactly how competitive the other sites are and thus get a better idea of how well you could compete for your chosen keywords? Well, you can and I’ll show you how in the next article that’s coming soon. In the meantime the above will get you started and in the process I think you’ll also learn a lot about your market. 

Why is this? Well, the basis of any Internet Marketing campaign is to get more traffic to your web site so that you can then build your emailing list, which is itself a major key to converting your fanbase to happily buying customers of your music and merchandise, and having the correct keywords can give you a very major advantage in this.

Many people don’t realize that keywords should be used not only at your web site but in your blog posts, your on-line articles, videos, links from other sites and yes, even your tweets and Facebook posts, as well as anywhere you appear on-line.

On top of that, many musicians make the mistake of building their web site first and then end up having to rebuild it after they’ve done their keyword research because they didn’t realize how important the content layout and keyword placement is.

Once you have your correct keywords, and you have correctly optimized your web site for those keywords (NOT in the keyword meta tag in your web page code, since that is completely ignored by Google), over time your site will rise in the rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages.

The more you have correctly identified the good-traffic, low-competition keyword phrases, the more chances you have of being on the top Google results pages for those keywords, and thus the more chances of your web site being found by people searching for your exact kind of music.

What is described above and in the other SEO blog post is what’s called “On-Page SEO”. Equally important in rising your web page in the ranks is “Off-Page SEO”. This is the number of links to your site occurring across the web.

There are many ways to get these links, which will be covered in other posts, and they include blogging, writing articles and press releases, YouTube videos, and your interactions on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, ReverbNation etc.

If your link-building activities all include use of your correctly-target keywords, the sooner you will rise in the rankings and start being found by your targeted publics.

Doing your Internet Marketing without having correctly identifed and using your keywords is like trying to run a marathon with both legs strapped together. You won’t get nearly as far nearly as quickly!

Let me know if you found this information useful. What other things about SEO or Internet Marketing would you like to know?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves discovering the key search terms (keywords) that people actually enter into search engines when looking for your kind of music. Many musicians figure out likely keywords but then completely miss the vital step of analyzing those keywords in terms of the competition.

1) is to record the vocal track(s) and then go back and have the snger punch in to try and fix any areas where the pitch or the feeling or the timing is off.

2) called comping, is to have the singer record half a dozen takes, one after the other, and then listen to each track and choose the great sections from each track and combine them into the final composited master vocal track.

There are pluses and minuses to both approaches:

With 1) it can be hard on the singer because he/she has to have more attention on getting it perfect plus when punching in it’s sometimes hard to get a good continuity of feeling.

With 2) there’s more work involved with comping, especially for the producer and engineer but usually a more relaxed (in a good way) vocal with more continuity of feeling.

I personally often like the comping approach but different producers, singers and engineers have varying views on this. What about you – which do you prefer?

As Paul White from Sound on Sound magazine put it, “What many people don’t realize is just how great a difference is made to commercial records at the mastering stage. Prior to mastering, you might be surprised at just how ordinary some mixes sound. “

The main mastering tools are compression, EQ and limiting and because of this there is something that you need to be very aware of when mastering and that is that these tools will raise the overall apparent volume of the mix and this alone can make the mix suddenly “sound better”.  It is important to be able to switch effects in and out in such a way that you don’t get fooled by this artificial improvement caused just by raising the volume.

Obviously it is very important to have an accurate monitoring environment for mastering but also important is the quality of the equipment, whether hardware or software, that you put your mix through when mastering. Many people route their mixes through analog tube hardware to get that added warmth and richness.

Other tools that get used in mastering include exciters, stereo image wideners,  software that can increase or decrease the volumes of the center instruments (such as vocals),  software to emphasize the transients (great for bringing the drums out in a mix), software to add tube warmth or to simulate tape saturation, sub-bass boosters and even reverbs.

Another very useful mastering tool is the multiband compressor which splits the mix into 4 or more frequency bands from low, via the mids to the highs, and enables you to compress each band separately so that you can tighten up the bass, for instance, without effecting the other elements in the mix. There are also a number of  all-in-one mastering software tools that combine many of the above effects into one plugin. I will be reviewing some of these soon.

If you are sending your mix to a mastering engineer make sure that you keep any compression, limiting and EQ of the overall mix to an absolute minimum so that you leave room for the mastering engineer to work his magic. There are often confusions between what exactly is the difference between a compressor and a limiter and I will be clarifying this in another upcoming post.

Also done at the mastering stage are setting the optimum volume levels between tracks as well as the gaps between the tracks.

This post has only scratched the surface of some of the technical aspects of mastering. I plan to expand upon these with more specific uses of mastering tools as well as getting more into the artistic side of mastering in a future post. What have been your experiences with mastering, were you happy with the results?

While you’re here, click the Community tab at the top of the page and get a sneak peek at the free beta community of musicians helping musicians where you can now create a profile page, make friends, upload your music, videos & photos, have your own blog, create groups, chat, create and be involved in discussion forums, post events and classifieds, network with other musicians, and much more!

You can download Virtual Drums PC version here and the Mac version here.  Enjoy your new kit!