April Tara » WordPress

Beyond MySpace – Promoting Your Band Online – Part 1: Your Website

April — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:08:57 +0000

What would you do if MySpace shut down tomorrow? Would your fans know where to find you online?

“Yeah, we’ve got a website” you’re probably thinking. But is it enough?

Other than your MySpace profile, your website is one of the many pieces of your online presence. We’ll go into more of the other pieces in future posts as part of a series entitled “Beyond MySpace” but for now let’s just talk about your website.

Keep it current

Assuming you have a website, when is the last time it was updated? If your front page still shows a flyer from your CD release party and your CD has been out for over a year now, that’s a good sign that your site has been poorly neglected.

Ideally, you should keep a current calendar featuring all of your upcoming shows and appearances on your website. Hopefully you’re already doing this with your MySpace calendar so just take the few extra minutes after you’ve updated MySpace to add those to your website too.

*WordPress Tip: If you’re using WordPress for your band’s website, you can add a plug-in called GigPress to easily manage your calendar. If you’re interested in converting your current HTML-based site to WordPress or adding a WP blog to your site, contact us via Rock Star Blog Design or the Cherry Bomb Promo contact page for assistance.

Pages

In addition to your main page, you should have at the very least a biography page – containing info about each member as well as info on how the band came together – and a multimedia page with photos, videos and your music.

If you’ve got merch available, add an online store to your site too. Of course, you’ll also include links to purchase your CDs on places like Amazon, iTunes and CD Baby.

Links and banners

Another feature you may want to add to your site are links and banners. Whether you’re promoting other bands, venues or sponsors, displaying their logos and linking to their websites or MySpace profiles is a great way to show your appreciation and support.

And you will definitely want to add links to other places your band can be found online, like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Don’t forget your newsletter sign up form too!

Beyond the basics

Obviously there’s so much more you can do to your website to make it stand out but these are just some of the bare minimum basics. Your website is just the beginning.

Coming up…

In our next post, we’ll talk about some social media standards like Facebook and Twitter and how to use them to maximize your exposure online. After that, we’ll discuss other sites specifically for the music industry as well as setting up and managing a newsletter and mailing list.

Stay tuned!

P.S. If you DON’T have a website set up yet and you don’t have the skills or the time to do it yourself, contact us before you spend a ton of money hiring a web designer. We offer an extremely reasonable rate just for bands and musician. We’re also developing a how-to manual that will show you how you can set it up on your own in just a few hours.

Headway theme rocks my world…and my blog

April — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:12:12 +0000

Have you seen my new blog design? I am absolutely in love with it! And Clay Griffiths is my new hero because he’s the designer behind the new Headway theme (as well as the son of my friend Grant Griffiths) which is the theme I’m now using.

Now on the surface, it may not be obvious why I’m just so tickled with Headway because you’re just seeing the standard stuff – header, sidebar, posts, footer. The beauty of it is under the hood. Kinda like seeing a beat up rusty old Camaro then popping the hood and seeing an absolutely immaculate 502 big block engine! (Ladies, keep reading, I’ll have an analogy that makes more sense in a minute.)

But you can’t make a car look pretty just by throwing a kickass engine in it. So just imagine if, by turning the key in the ignition, the exterior magically transformed and you were left with a shiny custom paint job. That’s how easy Headway is! Well, not literally…but close.

From the minute I installed the Headway theme, it took me all of about 30 minutes to get it looking the way I wanted. Thanks to a “drag and drop” layout editor and theme options that allow you to choose font styles, size and colors right from the menu, what usually takes me a couple of hours was done in a fraction of the time.

I didn’t have to tinker around the CSS at all. In fact, I only added one single line of code and that was to use a tiled background image instead of a solid color. One. Freaking. Line. You can also edit each page’s layout so that, for example, your ‘About‘ page doesn’t have a sidebar but your ‘Blog’ page does.

Now, with all of that time I saved, I spent some time playing around with different layouts, widths, colors and other style changes. Changes are easily made, whether its the location of your navigation bar or whether the ‘Comments’ link on each post goes under the post title or to the right of it. No minor detail overlooked! Even adding a favicon (that little image that shows up in your browser’s menu bar when you visit a webpage) was as easy as just pasting the link to the location of your icon file.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to it that I haven’t discovered yet and I had to force myself to move away from the laptop because anyone who knows me knows how much I love customizing WordPress blogs. I can totally see myself changing my blog design like I change purses. (See, ladies? You know what I mean, right?)

Don’t just take my word for it. I want you to see what others have said about Headway and how they’ve customized their own blogs using it.

Here’s my good friend John Haydon’s post about why he switched to Headway. He’s got some great videos that will let you take a peek under the hood. (See the differences in how his blog looks compared to mine? Headway works great for both business and personal blogs…not that mine’s “personal” but it certainly doesn’t look as ‘professional’ as John’s.)
Danny Brown is also using Headway but not just as a blog theme. He’s donating 50% of any profits he makes from affiliate links to the 12for12k.org charity.
And another post from another friend, Michael Martine a/k/a Remarkablogger who, even though he’s a devoted Thesis user and has not switched, is still very impressed with Headway and has a better detailed explanation of why than I do.
Of course, you can always get more details and take a tour at the Headway Theme website.

P.S. Just a quick disclaimer…yes, those are affiliate links and I would earn a small commission if you were to purchase Headway through those links. My opinion of Headway, however, would be just as high even if I never made a single penny from singing its praises.

Update on WordPress SEO Secrets

April — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:09:15 +0000

I’ve got good news! Remember how I posted this morning that I would have more info for you tomorrow about the launch of “WordPress SEO Secrets”? Well I have a sneak peek for you so you can get a better idea of the kind of info available to you as part of the course.

Now this is just the text stuff. Don’t forget about the audio and video that will be included. I’m tellin’ ya, this is good stuff being released. Only 24 hours left!

Word Press SEO Secrets Sample

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Do-it-yourself Tutorial seo blogging

Secrets of WordPress and SEO

April — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:29:39 +0000

Using WordPress may be one of the easiest and most effective ways to maximize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. Let’s take a look at some of these WP-specific SEO tricks.

Anatomy of a Post

Here’s what the search engines are looking for when they’re crawling through your site and determining rankings:

Titles: Keywords, the terms people are using when they perform a search, are very important in titles. Titles appear at the top of a browser window or in a browser window tab. The problem with blogs is that your headline automatically becomes the title unless you have a plugin that allows them to differ.
Post slug names: The post slug is the virtual file name of a blog post. For example, the link to this post is http://www.apriltara.com/2009/01/secrets-of-wordpress-and-seo. The slug section of that link is “secrets-of-wordpress-and-seo”. That’s the info search engines are interested in. If I’d named this post “You’ve gotta read this!” or just used the post ID number, the search engines would have no idea what the post is about. Be sure to use “pretty permalinks” so that you have more control over the slug because you’ll need to edit the slug for SEO purposes. You want to use important keywords in the slug, just as you do for the title.
Headings: In your WordPress blog, you can use various heading levels when writing posts to break up the content into sections. Search engines pay attention to keywords in headings. Many people don’t know how to see the controls for headings in WordPress. You have to click on the “Kitchen Sink” button on your WordPress toolbar which looks like a small box with a bunch of small boxes inside of it. Many people have seen it but never clicked on it, mistaking it for some kind of color palette. Unless you have some WordPress plugins that add extra buttons to your post toolbar, the “Kitchen Sink” should be the last button on the right, just above the text area where you enter your post content. Once the second row of toolbar buttons is revealed, use the “Format” drop-down to set headings.
Text content: Of course the content of the post must be relevant to a searcher’s needs. Use the same words in the post the searcher would use in a search (keywords). Use them as frequently as you can while still sounding natural. It may help to read your post out loud to yourself to make sure it doesn’t sound awkward. Think of it this way: if your searcher has a question, you want your post to be the answer.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much to learn about about optimizing your WordPress-based site to achieve excellent search engine rankings.

Tomorrow, January 7th, a study course covering SEO for WordPress will be available. WordPress SEO Secrets: Search Engine Optimization Magic for WordPress Blogs will walk you through all of this, step by step, using text materials as well as audio and video recordings. Stay tuned and I’ll have more info for you at launch time! I’ll be sharing the details on my blog and in my newsletter so be sure to subscribe to my blog via RSS or email and subscribe to my newsletter using the sign up box to the right.

The Power of Plugins

April — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:08:41 +0000

Andy Beal recently posted his own list of 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins which includes some of my own personal favorites and some that I’m definitely going to try out.

Whatever your blog may need, whether its SEO, advertising, or some technical tweaks, there’s probably a WP plugin out there somewhere that can do it. When I install a new WP blog for a client, I include 3 plugins as part of the installation because without plugins, your WP site isn’t going to function at the level to which it has the potential.

At the very minimum, the 3 plugins I recommend for every blog are these:

Akismet – Without spam protection, you’ll find yourself wasting a lot of time moderating and deleting comments. As a little experiment, I set up one of my WP sites without activating Akismet to see how bad the spam issue really is. I was getting slammed with like 40 comments at a time with nothing but junk and gibberish in them and I was getting them on multiple posts. Total pain in the rear and a waste of my time.

All in One SEO Pack – You don’t need to be an SEO expert and you probably have no desire to even mess with all of that technical algorithm stuff and spending hours reading reports and guides about how to climb up the search engine ladder. Using the All in One SEO Pack makes it a little bit easier. It’s not going to do it all for you but it will at least cover the basics.

cforms II – Every blog should have a contact form. You want your readers to be able to reach you, right? Well I prefer using contact forms over just posting your email address on the sidebar somewhere. And for your readers, its more private than leaving a comment. I know there are a lot of contact form plugins or templates out there but I’ve been using this one for a while without any issues.

So there you have it. Not as comprehensive as Andy Beal’s list but its a good start. And if you need any help finding or installing WP plugins, just let me know.