April Tara » Social media

Where in the world is April Tara?

April — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:53:38 +0000

AprilTara.com will be undergoing some changes very soon. In order to maximize effectiveness and narrow my focus, I’m going to consolidate three sites – AprilTara.com, CherryBombPromo.com and RockStarBlogDesign.com – which means that the focus here will continue to be about social media marketing and online resources but geared mainly towards indie musicians and unsigned bands. That’s where I’ve been putting all my energy for the past year, that’s where my passion lies, and that’s where I feel I can be the most helpful.

There will still be some general info that applies to anyone interested in social media – like the recent hoopla over Facebook privacy issues – so stay tuned and keep watching for posts!

Your band is your brand

April — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:51:15 +0000

We all know what brands are, right? Coca-Cola. Disney. McDonald’s. Those are all brands. Even people can become a brand. Need an example? Oprah.

With the way the music industry is changing, you have to think beyond promoting your band and look at the bigger picture: building your brand.

Ever heard the saying “Even bad publicity is better than NO publicity”? So not true. Not anymore. Not with the way images and video and audio clips are now living on forever in website archives and cached pages. Look at all of those sex tapes (ok, you don’t have to literally look at them…just think about them) that have come back to haunt celebrities who probably weren’t quite so famous back when they made them. Granted, they might make a few bucks off of it and stretch out their 15 minutes of fame a bit but the chances of them ever being taken seriously are almost nil.

When you’re in a business – and, yes, this is a business – that relies so heavily on image, you have to start thinking about what you’re putting out there to the public (aside from just your music) even in the early stages of your career. The interviews you’re doing today for those free local weekly papers or Internet radio shows, those will be the foundation upon which you start building your brand. So do you want to build it on solid concrete bricks or cheap flimsy wood?

Here are a few quick tips for you to keep in mind when opportunities for some publicity come along…

Quality over quantity – Don’t assume that getting your band mentioned on as many blogs or podcasts or radio shows as possible is the best way to get the word out. Let’s look at some simple math. Say you have a goal of earning 300 more listeners – people who are hearing your band for the first time – within the next month. Do you want to spend your time going on 30 different Internet radio shows with about 10 listeners each or 2 shows with 150 listeners? If we’re talking about one-hour shows….well, you can figure that one out. And, no, you don’t want to use all of those bad interviews as “practice” for when the good ones come along. There won’t be any good ones if you develop a reputation for giving bad interviews.

Do your research – Don’t just jump at every chance to do some PR. It’s okay to say no to that friend of a friend whose roommate has a friend on MySpace that does a live Internet radio show. Of course, you can definitely say yes BUT make sure you get some more information first. What kind of experience do they have? How long have they been doing this? What’s their audience like? Are they knowledgeable? Prepared? Trust me, you don’t want to find yourself spending two hours struggling to fill dead air on a live radio show, begging friends to call in with questions, with an inexperienced and unprepared host.

Be prepared – When you do decide to accept a PR opportunity, get as many details as possible and get them as far in advance as possible, especially if it’s going to be something that’s recorded live. Find out what kind of questions the host will ask. Have your answers ready - not scripted, just a general idea – and decide who will handle the responses, whether you have one band member acting as spokesperson or all of the members taking turns (except maybe the bass player because they’re always the quiet ones.)

Have fun – Once you’ve found the right opportunity, you’re prepared, you’ve promoted it and the time finally arrives, relax and enjoy it! Let your band’s natural charisma and chemistry come through. Act like you like each other! People want to hear that you guys (or girls!) enjoy creating music and that you all get along because that means there’s a better chance of longevity. There’s also bound to be some humor involved, so follow the host’s lead to see if they prefer to keep it light or if they’re all about debauchery. Just don’t go too far. Remember…you are PROFESSIONAL musicians. Act like it.

Oh, and by that I don’t mean throw a television out of a window. You’re building a brand here…you don’t want to be known as those guys.

Be open to opportunities

April — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:03:21 +0000

As I write this, I’m sitting here listening to my boyfriend play his guitar which would normally be a pretty unremarkable event. (Not that he’s an unremarkable guitar player, it’s just that he plays guitar all the time so it’s nothing out of the ordinary for him to be doing it now.)

What’s remarkable about it is that he’s doing as part of a project that’s a perfect example of the way social media and the potential for businesses – whether it’s a band, a bookstore, a yoga class – to reach a global audience because of the interactivity involved.

Here’s a brief description of the project:

Download music tracks
Record your own ideas
Upload for worldwide release

The tagline of The Public Record site says it’s “the first large-scale, truly interactive recording process”. and at the wheel of it is Tommy Lee – yes, the guy with the sex tape but more importantly the drummer for Mötley Crüe. Tommy is giving musicians across the world an opportunity to record the next CD, “Public Mayhem”, by Methods of Mayhem.

As some of you know, I combined my love of both music and social media to form Cherry Bomb Promo and help bands use the Internet to their advantage when it comes to promoting their music. So The Public Record just totally excites me. There are so many bands out there that still have no clue how social media can work for them. In fact, a lot of them don’t even know what social media is. They don’t have Twitter accounts or Facebook fan pages and that’s why they come to me.

So how does this apply to us non-musicians?

Thanks to social media, we all have access to some amazing opportunities – everything from Black Friday deals last week to job opportunities with major corporations or, as in this case, recording with a major rock star. Some you have to look for, some just kind of fall into your lap.

When you do run across these opportunities, be open to them! We all have our obstacles – a fear of failure, a fear of success, anxiety over not being good enough. Face those fears and do it anyway.

Think back to some opportunities you’ve had in your own business. Did you pass any of them by out of fear? Did you grab onto them? What happened as a result? Did it improve your business or did you learn from something that didn’t work out?

I’d love to hear about your own experiences with opportunities. To get the conversation, I’ll share two important results I’ve had.

After one opportunity, one of those that seemed like fate, I learned not to settle for less than I deserve based on promises for something better in the future. I lost a lot of money and my kids and I suffered for it because I was foolish enough to put someone else’s needs before my own when the situation didn’t justify doing so.

After another opportunity, I learned that I was better than I thought at doing something I was afraid I was clueless about and I’m quickly realizing that I’m not only better than I thought, I’m actually pretty damn good at it!

Measuring success

April — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:08:13 +0000

Oh what an exciting life I lead! I spent my Friday night reading the latest issue of Inc. magazine. An interview with Stan Lee (yes, the Spiderman guy), another interview with someone who wrote a biography on Ayn Rand, and then a piece on Jason Fried of 37 Signals and what a typical day looks like for him.

With all due respect to Jason and to Inc. it was a pretty boring piece. You know how people complain about those mundane Twitter updates about what someone had for breakfast? That’s kinda what this article is like.

Except for this quote from Jason:

It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to followers, friends, and feed count. This crap doesn’t mean anything.

Thank you!! That’s got to be the most intelligent tidbit of common sense I’ve heard in a long time. Since when did success depend on how many Twitter followers or Facebook fans you have? Unless you’re actually having some kind of influence on all of those fans and followers, Jason is right…this crap doesn’t mean anything.

Quantity versus Quality

Take someone like Lynn Terry, for example. At the time of this post, Lynn has over 9,000 followers on Twitter. Sure, that’s impressive although when you look at someone like Darren Rowse a/k/a ProBlogger, it may not seem like a lot. But when you look at WHY Lynn Terry has that many then you can start translating those numbers into how successful she is. She doesn’t have that many followers because she spends all day on Twitter trying to pump up those numbers. Most of her followers are people who read her blog or have a membership at her Self Starters forum. She is successful because she provides value to her readers, subscribers, members and followers. She is successful because she learned the hard way what it takes to make money online and she continues to learn and share what she’s learned with those 9,000+ people. Lynn is successful because she is working.

On the other hand, I’ve seen people with just as many followers, if not more, who really don’t seem to be doing anything. I check my list of followers regularly and, before I decide to follow someone back, I check their Twitter updates. I don’t look at their numbers and think “Wow, they’ve got 13,000 followers, they must really be Someone Important!” I look at what they’re actually doing on Twitter. Are they interacting with followers and giving suggestions or advice? Or are they just spewing out their affiliate links for the Next Big Thing or sharing links to their own blog posts hoping that at least a handful of those 13,000 people will read it?

Having a ton of followers or fans is another one of those “quality vs. quantity” arguments. It’s about the message, not how many people you can shout it out to.

It’s NOT a Numbers Game

Don’t get all caught up in the numbers. Don’t compare yourself to other people and think they’re doing better than you because they have more followers. Look at it this way… if they’ve got all of that free time on their hands to spend on Twitter then they must not have very much work keeping them busy. Unless someone is paying them based on how many followers they have – and I know some of these ads or sponsors or PR people do take things like that into consideration but they’ll learn – then it just doesn’t equal success.

The next time you’re checking your own Twitter profile and you find yourself obsessing over how many followers you’ve gained or lost, ask yourself: Would I rather have 500 people who actually care about what I have to say or 5,000 people who don’t even listen to me?

Do you need to blog regularly if you have a service-based business?

April — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:56:37 +0000

Earlier this week, I had a nice long chat with a friend and colleague of mine who started her business around the same time I started mine. We were discussing some of the things we’ve learned over the past year and one of the topics was something along the lines of advice we’d been given and how much of that advice we now agreed or disagreed with.

One particular piece of advice I remember getting that went against everything else I’d been learning was that, if you’re running a service-based business, you shouldn’t be worrying about blogging. The advice-giver said it was just one more thing you’d have to fit into your schedule and gave an example of one particular service-provider who had plenty of business yet they don’t even have a blog.

This didn’t really sit well with me but every time I’ve started to feel guilty for letting my blog go stale, that little piece of advice would pop into my head and I would wonder “do I really need to be blogging regularly anyway?”

Since I don’t have an answer to this question, I decided to ask people I trust and admire: Michael Martine, Grant Griffiths, John Haydon, and Danny Brown.

When I say “ask”, what I really mean is that I fired off an email at 1:30 a.m. sucking up to them and telling them how awesome I think they are (I do!) and by the time I woke up and checked my email this morning, they had all taken the time to respond which really says a lot about what kind of people they are to take time out of their late-Friday/early-Saturday to share their thoughts with me. Great guys, I tell ya.

Ok, enough of my rambling….here’s what they had to say:

From Michael Martine

You need to be blogging regularly if the date of post publication shows, because people have a bias against what they perceive as “old” information on the web. If you’re not displaying dates, then it doesn’t matter as much, but it still matters. The reason why it still matters is that regularly updated sites get crawled and indexed more frequently by Google, and this is generally better for your search rank position (provided you’re doing other necessary search optimization tasks). If you’re using WordPress self-hosted and you have the Google XML Sitemap plugin (which you should), then you can alter its settings to tell Google to crawl your content according to the frequency with which you publish.

People crave consistency, so establishing a rhythm is key, regardless of how many times a week you post. Posting frequently means you’ll generate more content at a faster pace, and the more relevant content found via search, the better for a site’s search ranking.

Your readers will respond favorably or unfavorably to changes in posting. Pay attention to their reactions, and adjust accordingly. On Remarkablogger, the majority of my readers indicated in a poll they’d rather receive larger doses of content less frequently. When I delivered, my numbers shot through the roof. You’d think posting less frequently would mean less traffic, but that has not been case. I now receive more traffic.

From Grant Griffiths

Short answer, yes. And to even be more knee jerky, why wouldn’t you want to post regularly if you have a service-based business?

A service business is just that, it is a business. And like any business, you want to market and promote your business. You want to be found and you also want to be known as the place to go for information about your particular type of service-based business.

In fact, it has been shown that in today’s business world, 75% of those looking for a service-based business are going to the internet to find what they need. And if you have a presence online, you are going to be found. But, more than that, you need to make sure you can be found and blogging will accomplish this.

Blogging as a service-based business on a regular basis also positions you as a thought leader or opinion shaper in your particular area of service. There is no reason that a service-based business should not be blogging on a regular basis.

From John Haydon

Yes, yes yes! In order to create trust with folks, you need to give them value first – then they buy. Blog posts (to me) are ways to give away free stuff to thousands of people at a low cost (you write the post only once, but it gets read a thousand times). You’ll notice that all of the successful real estate agents teach people how to buy a home or select a mortgage.

The second reason is SEO. I rank #1 on Google for “how to make a Facebook Page”. Part of that result is due to the sheer amount of posts I have on Facebook. I’m no expert, but I think Google also looks at how current an article is.

Note: John also followed up his email with a link to this post about relationship management.

From Danny Brown

I’d say you need to be blogging as regularly as you have something worthwhile to share to your readers (whether they’re potential clients or not). It doesn’t even have to be about your particular service, but an off-shoot of it that’s still relevant. It’s a great way of showing your skill sets, knowledge and passion all under one cool roof. But… if it’s just filler for filler’s sake, this will come across and put you back a bit.

So… yes, but only if it’s “worth it”.

Now watch the other guys completely contradict me

Nope, Danny, they didn’t! In fact, all four of you gave some great advice! And it confirms some of my own thoughts, especially when it comes to two of the main reasons I think blogging is a great “tool” for marketing your business – you’re providing fresh content for the purpose of search engine ranking and you’re providing value to your clients and readers who may become clients.

Thanks again to Michael, Grant, John and Danny!

To anyone else who may be reading, what do you think? Do you have a service-based business? If so, how has blogging (or not blogging) affected your business? If you don’t have a service-based business but you’re a consumer, would it influence your selection of a provider if they were blogging regularly?

Stop listening to Twitter “experts”

April — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:58:49 +0000

Just because someone takes a word and throws a “tw” in front of it does NOT make them a Twitter expert. Seriously. There are only two things that you need to get the most out of Twitter: common sense and a personality.

Twitter is basically just a simple form of communication, much like the telephone. Do you need anyone to tell you how to use the phone? Didn’t think so. So why do you need someone to tell you how to use Twitter? You don’t.

Just use some common sense.

Remember that Twitter is a public place. Anyone can see it once you’ve posted it, even if you delete it later. “Anyone” includes your boss, your ex-spouse, your babysitter, your neighbor, your son’s soccer coach, your mother-in-law, your daughter’s boyfriend…not just now but in the future too. So don’t say anything that you don’t want to become public knowledge.

Have a personality.

When I gain a new follower, I do a quick scan of their latest tweets. There are a few things I look for:

Are they updating often, or do their last tweets say things like “Happy Thanksgiving” or “Merry Christmas”?
Are they carrying on conversations, or are their tweets just about the mundane details of their own life?
Are they just here to spam everyone by posting nothing but links to a sales page or blog post?

If you’re not interacting on a consistent basis and contributing to conversations, then your Twitter account is just going to be very dull. Even if your tweets contain inspirational quotes and similar Deep Thoughts, its still just lifeless. When you log in to your Twitter account, think of it as walking into an informal dinner party or some kind of social gathering. You wouldn’t stand there talking to the wall about what you made for dinner every night last week, and you wouldn’t stand on a chair in the middle of the room spouting off scripture or random quotes from the latest Oprah book club selection.

I’m not saying that every tweet has to be an @ reply and that you shouldn’t share an inspiring thought or two. Conversations have to start somewhere, right?

So as long as you’re not totally blowing it like this chick who cost herself a job offer with just one Twitter post, don’t keep wasting your time reading every new blog post or e-book about “How To Use Twitter.” Just be yourself and you’ll be fine.

P.S. There are always exceptions, of course. Those blog posts that tell you how to use new Twitter tools or those Twitter accounts that post things like limited time kickass deals or breaking news can be a good thing.

My guest post on WAHM 2.0

April — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:20:02 +0000

I wrote a guest post for Sparkplugging’s WAHM 2.0 about Social Media Overkill.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’re using social media effectively without it monopolizing your time online. And while you’re visiting Sparkplugging, be sure to read some of the great posts there.

Here are some of my recent favorites:

From ‘Freelance Parent’ – What’s an acceptable freelance turnaround time?

From ‘Marketing Eggspert’ – If you can’t do good marketing, get out of the kitchen

From ‘WAHM 2.0′ – How Kelly McCausey sorts her PLR

Custom Twitter Backgrounds

April — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:58:19 +0000

I’ve added something new to my design services – custom Twitter backgrounds!

I’ve had so much fun making them for my own Twitter profile that I decided it was time to help others personalize their Twitter space.

Order your custom Twitter background today!